Microsoft Planner

Score7.5 out of 10

119 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

Task Management

Richard (Ric) Hazel View profile

Strategy Planning Advisor in Corporate at FedEx Customer Technologies (10,001+ employees 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

Verified User

Technician in Information Technology (201-500 employees 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

Brandon Stokes View profile

Global Revenue Enablement Manager in Sales at Proximus Global (1001-5000 employees 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

Micaella Cirilo View profile

Talent Acquisition Specialist in Human Resources at Rex Education (501-1000 employees 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

Verified User

Professional in Corporate (11-50 employees 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.