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Microsoft Planner

Score7.6 out of 10

105 Reviews and Ratings

What is Microsoft Planner?

Microsoft Planner is presented as a solution to organize teamwork with intuitive, collaborative, visual task management. With it, users can create Kanban boards using task cards with files, checklists, and labels. Users can collaborate in Planner and Microsoft Teams and check visual status charts—all in the Microsoft cloud.

Categories & Use Cases

Product Demos

Who Buys & Uses Microsoft Planner

Microsoft Planner Reviews

What users are saying about Microsoft Planner.
View all Microsoft Planner reviews

Pros

  • Potential for improved team efficiency in some use cases
  • Integration with the Microsoft ecosystem

Cons

  • Limited functionality compared to alternative solutions
  • Reports of decreased productivity due to functional limitations
  • Inconsistent positive impact across different teams

Microsoft Planner Keeps All Your Projects Organized

Incentivized
Richard (Ric) HazelView profile
Strategy Planning Advisor in Corporate at FedEx Customer Technologies (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to keep abreast of projects that our team is working. we track progress, milestones, and communicate dependencies with one another through the tool. It has been easily customized to meet our specific needs and has useful reminder options through Outlook. We love how it is easily linked to SharePoint.

Pros

  • Customizeable
  • Organizes complex projects
  • Communicates deadlines

Cons

  • Even more customization
  • More intuitive interface
  • Link reminders into Teams

Return on Investment

  • Efficiency
  • Collaboration
  • Accountability

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Agility

Other Software Used

Agility, Microsoft Viva Engage, Google Gemini

Microsoft Planner intuitive and ready to use

Incentivized
Verified User
Technician in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Microsoft Planner is used in the company as a ticketing tool, for collecting user requests, and as an activity organizer. We are using the tool on a daily basis to assign tasks to various members of the IT department. A very useful and functional product for planning and reporting on activities requested by other company departments.

Pros

  • Ticketing tool
  • Simple and intuitive
  • Immediately ready for use

Cons

  • Customizable notifications per user
  • Advanced task scheduling
  • User response management

Return on Investment

  • 40% optimization of activities
  • Resource management
  • Team workload management

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Asana and monday.com

Other Software Used

Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft SharePoint

Not a project management tool just a simple to-do list.

Incentivized
Brandon StokesView profile
Global Revenue Enablement Manager in Sales at Proximus Global (1001-5000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Microsoft Planner is a software program integrated into the Microsoft Suite and costs no additional funds to use. Once logged into our Okta instance, we have access to MS Planner. Recently, we were mandated to move away from Monday.com for project management software, and our Corporate IT team suggested we replace it with MS Planner. After extensive research and experimentation, we quickly found that MS Planner is an inferior planning tool and is certainly not a project management tool. It is a very elementary task list... and I mean *really* elementary. I prefer to use sticky notes at my desk rather than MS Planner. In short, there are very few use cases for a sophisticated SaaS business to use MS Planner.

Pros

  • Friendly UI.
  • Integration with Outlook.
  • Simple to-do list.

Cons

  • Customizations of any kind.
  • Grouping of items in grid view.
  • Timeline column instead of start date/end date.
  • Savable templates.
  • Not a project management tool.

Return on Investment

  • Positive: a personal to-do list already incorporated in MS Suite.
  • Negative: because of poor functionality, we must invest time finding another tool.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Project, monday.com, Asana, Google Keep and Atlassian Jira

Microsoft Planner plays an essential part in our business

Incentivized
Micaella CiriloView profile
Talent Acquisition Specialist in Human Resources at Rex Education (501-1000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our organization, we use the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. It includes Microsoft Planner. It plays an essential part in our business since it aids the project management, planning, and productivity of each and every employee. As for me, I mainly use it to plan my tasks every day. It keeps me on track on my deadlines and deliverables.

Pros

  • Productivity
  • Planning
  • Project Management
  • Organization

Cons

  • The grouping of tasks could be improved. We must be able to create folders and sub folders to group the tasks.

Return on Investment

  • Better collaboration
  • Cost effective
  • Limited advanced features (negative)

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Trello, Asana and ClickUp

Other Software Used

Wrike, OneDrive, Calendar, OneNote

Microsoft Planner Review

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional in Corporate (11-50 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Planner to manage a daily stand up/check in meeting. Planner solves the simple problem of having a central online location for managing the status and progress of key activities of all of our development and operations projects. We are a small team, but it keeps us aligned and allows us to capture key information of each project/effort.

Pros

  • Managing status/progress of projects.
  • Assigning key tasks to team members.
  • Keeping everyone aligned because it is available for everyone to view and update as needed.
  • Very simple to use.
  • Integrated well with Microsoft other productivity products and solutions.

Cons

  • Planner is not very robust compared to other competitors out there.
  • The search function is not so great
  • There should be the ability to add more tasks per card if needed
  • At times it is necessary to manually refresh the page to ensure it is in synch.
  • Moving data around doesn't work so great.

Return on Investment

  • Planner just makes us more efficient. I don't have a %, but it is way better than using a white board, notes, and emails for managing project status.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

monday.com and Atlassian Confluence

Other Software Used

Microsoft 365 Business Premium, Adobe Acrobat, Google Chrome, Brightmove