Microsoft PPM today means the premium Planner plans, Project desktop and Power BI, now that Project Online has retired. Planner Plan 1 costs $10 per user a month, Planner and Project Plan 3 costs $30, and Plan 5 costs $55, all on annual terms. That covers schedules and portfolio visibility well. Resource pools, financial planning and portfolio selection usually need a layer on top, bought from a Microsoft partner or a separate vendor.
The useful question for a PMO is not which plan is best, but which jobs your old Project Web App was doing and which of them Microsoft still sells. This guide prices the options for a typical US IT portfolio and shows where the second bill starts.
Key takeaways
- Project Online retired on September 30, 2026. Microsoft's successor for scheduling is Planner with the premium plans, plus Project desktop for heavy schedules.
- Plan 3 is where most project managers land. Partner licensing guides place demand management and enterprise resource features in Plan 5.
- Mixing licenses is normal: a few planners on Plan 3 or Plan 5, everyone else on Plan 1 or the basic Planner included with Microsoft 365.
- Portfolio add-ons such as OnePlan and PPM Express sell the governance layer Microsoft no longer ships, and they are a second contract on top of the Microsoft licenses.
What is Microsoft PPM?
Microsoft PPM is the set of Microsoft products used for project and portfolio management: Planner with its premium plans for work and schedules, Project desktop for complex schedules, Teams for collaboration, Dataverse for the data, and Power BI for portfolio reporting. Until 2026 it also meant Project Online and Project Server, the enterprise PPM products built on Project Web App.
The change matters because Project Online was a portfolio system of record. It held the enterprise resource pool, timesheets, enterprise project types with workflows, and the portfolio analysis module that ranked projects against budget and resource constraints. The premium Planner plans are a strong work management product, but they were not designed to carry all of that. Microsoft's answer for the rest is the partner ecosystem and the Power Platform, which is why "Microsoft PPM" now usually means Microsoft licenses plus something else.
How much does Microsoft PPM cost?
Microsoft PPM costs $10 per user a month for Planner Plan 1, $30 for Planner and Project Plan 3 and $55 for Plan 5, billed annually in the US. Basic Planner is included with most Microsoft 365 business and enterprise suites. A portfolio add-on, where you need one, is priced separately by its vendor, per user or as a flat fee.
| License | US price, annual terms | What a PMO gets | Who in the PMO usually needs it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Planner in Microsoft 365 | Included with the suite | Task boards, buckets, checklists, Teams integration | Team members who only update their own tasks |
| Planner Plan 1 | $10 per user a month | Timeline view, dependencies, sprints, premium templates | Contributors on plans that use the premium features |
| Planner and Project Plan 3 | $30 per user a month | Baselines, critical path, assignments view, portfolios, Project desktop | Project managers and schedulers |
| Planner and Project Plan 5 | $55 per user a month | Everything in Plan 3 plus the enterprise portfolio, demand and resource features Microsoft and its partners place at the top tier | PMO leads, resource managers and portfolio analysts |
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Licensing details shift, so confirm the feature list for each plan with your Microsoft reseller before you buy, and test the specific portfolio feature you rely on in a trial tenant. The prices above are list prices; enterprise agreements are often discounted.
A worked cost example for a 200-person IT portfolio
License totals only make sense against a real headcount, so here is one. Take an IT portfolio with 200 people: 4 in the PMO, 36 project managers and schedulers, and 160 team members who update tasks. The figures are list prices for twelve months, before any discount.
| Setup | How it is licensed | Yearly list cost | What it still lacks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft only, lean | 40 on Plan 3, 160 on the Planner included in Microsoft 365 | $14,400 | Resource pool, portfolio selection, financial planning |
| Microsoft only, full | 4 on Plan 5, 36 on Plan 3, 160 on Plan 1 | $34,800 | Portfolio scoring and funding decisions, cross-tool roll-up |
| Microsoft plus a per user portfolio layer | The lean setup plus a portfolio add-on at $10 per user for 200 people | $38,400 before Enterprise features | Usually nothing, once the vendor's Enterprise edition is priced in |
| Microsoft plus a decision workspace | The lean setup plus a per workspace portfolio tool | $14,400 plus a few thousand dollars a year | Timesheets and live roll-up from Planner |
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The math is simple: 40 times $30 times 12 is $14,400; 4 times $55, plus 36 times $30, plus 160 times $10, times 12, is $34,800. The third row uses OnePlan's published Basic price of $10 per user a month, which carries portfolio and work plans but not the resource plans, financial plans and portfolio modeler that come with its quoted Enterprise edition. Price the edition your PMO will actually run before comparing totals.
Is Microsoft Planner good for portfolio management?
Microsoft Planner is good for portfolio visibility: grouping plans into portfolios, seeing status and dates across projects, and reporting through Power BI. It is weaker for portfolio governance, meaning an enterprise resource pool, intake scoring, financial plans and choosing which projects to fund within a budget. PMOs that need governance add a portfolio layer on top.
The test is what happens at your annual planning cycle. If the portfolio decision is made somewhere else, in a steering group with a spreadsheet, Planner is a perfectly good place to run the approved work. If you expect the tool to produce the ranked list, the funding line and the capacity view by role, Planner on its own will send you back to that spreadsheet within a quarter.
Microsoft PPM add-ons and alternatives compared
Three kinds of product fill the governance gap for Microsoft shops: portfolio platforms built around Microsoft 365, Project Server on your own servers, and portfolio tools that sit beside Microsoft without depending on it.
| Option | What it is | How it is priced | Fits when |
|---|---|---|---|
| OnePlan | Strategic portfolio and work management built around Planner, Project, Teams, Power BI, Azure DevOps and Jira | Basic $10 per user a month annually, Enterprise quoted | You want a Microsoft-native portfolio platform with resource and financial plans |
| PPM Express | A portfolio layer over Microsoft and Jira delivery tools | Flat annual plans with unlimited users, per its site | Per user pricing is the objection and the roll-up is the main job |
| Project Server Subscription Edition | The on-premises successor to Project Server, still with Project Web App | Server and client licenses through your Microsoft agreement | Data must stay on premises, or the PWA customization is too deep to rebuild this year |
| A partner Power Platform build | Intake, workflow and reporting built on Dataverse and Power Apps by a consultancy | Services project plus Power Platform licenses | You have the partner and the budget to own a custom application |
| Planview or Broadcom Clarity | Enterprise PPM suites outside the Microsoft stack | Quoted, usually with services | Resources and financials must live in one enterprise system of record |
| Portfolio Hub | A focused workspace for scoring, ranking, the funding line, capacity by role and gate packs | Per workspace, from $24.50 a month billed yearly | Delivery stays in Planner and the gap is deciding which projects to fund |
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We sell the product in the last row, so treat that row as our view. If OnePlan is already on your shortlist, our OnePlan alternatives and pricing comparison goes through its tiers line by line and lists the competitors by the job they do.
What replaced Microsoft Project Online?
Microsoft positions Planner with the premium plans as the successor to Project Online, with Project desktop kept for complex schedules. For capabilities Planner does not carry, such as the enterprise resource pool, timesheets and portfolio analysis, organizations move to Project Server Subscription Edition, a Microsoft partner platform, or a separate PPM product.
If you are still working out what happened to the data and which of the four routes fits your estate, the full walk-through is in our guide to Project Online retirement alternatives. This page assumes you have made that call and are pricing the Microsoft side of it.
Which Microsoft PPM option fits your PMO?
Route by the most demanding job your PMO really does, not by the license you used to hold.
| If your PMO mainly | License or buy |
|---|---|
| Keeps schedules and reports status across projects | Plan 3 for project managers, included Planner or Plan 1 for everyone else |
| Approves resource assignments across a shared pool | Plan 5 for resource managers, and test the pool in a trial before relying on it, or a portfolio platform |
| Plans CapEx and OpEx by project and tracks actuals | A portfolio platform with financial plans, Microsoft-native or not |
| Ranks requests and decides what gets funded each quarter | A scoring model and funding line, in a decision workspace or a platform's portfolio modeler |
| Must keep project data on premises | Project Server Subscription Edition |
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Most PMOs land on a mixed answer: Microsoft licenses for the work and something smaller for the decision. That fourth row is where the money usually leaks, because a portfolio that funds everything ends up overbooking the same people. A project prioritization tool that scores every request on the same criteria and draws the funding line against capacity by role fixes that without replacing the delivery stack. If capacity is the sharper pain, the resource capacity planning tool shows the gap by role and month.
How to buy Microsoft PPM without overpaying
Three habits keep the bill honest. First, license by role, not by default: most team members do not need Plan 3, and paying $30 a month for someone who ticks off tasks adds up fast across a few hundred people. Second, price any portfolio add-on at the edition you will actually run, with the Microsoft licenses underneath it on the same sheet, so finance sees one total. Third, write down the renewal terms of every subscription, including the notice period and any cap on price increases, and track the renewal terms somewhere that reminds the owner before the window closes, because the cheapest year of a software contract is usually the first one.
Before signing anything, load twenty real projects and your real role list into the trial and run one decision your steering group is debating now. A setup that cannot answer that decision in a two-week pilot will not answer it after rollout. For the wider category with every vendor's owner listed, see our comparison of PPM software and project portfolio management tools, and for the platform tier above Microsoft, the guide to strategic portfolio management software.