Best Microsoft Planner Alternatives
Planner is free, bundled and simple, which is exactly why teams that outgrow it go looking elsewhere. Here are real alternatives worth weighing against staying put.
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Why teams look for a Microsoft Planner alternative
Microsoft Planner's biggest advantage, free with Microsoft 365 and already inside Teams, is also why so many teams start there. It's a genuinely simple, well-built board tool for straightforward task lists: buckets, assignees, due dates, labels. Teams look elsewhere once their needs grow past that: no built-in capacity limits to stop a column from overfilling, no native time tracking, no forecasting beyond what the paid Premium tier's timeline view offers, and no tailoring for departments outside general task management.
Microsoft's own answer to some of this is Planner Premium, which adds Gantt-style timelines, dependencies, goals and sprints under the same licensing as Microsoft Project. That's worth considering before looking outside Microsoft entirely, especially if staying inside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem matters. Some teams also find the 2024 consolidation of Planner, To Do and Project for the web into one app confusing to navigate, and go looking for a tool with a simpler, single purpose instead of a merged product carrying three different histories. The alternatives below are for teams that have decided a dedicated, non-Microsoft tool fits better.
Alternatives worth evaluating
Each one solves a different part of what Planner Basic leaves out.
Built for teams that hit Planner Basic's ceiling and wanted structure rather than just a bigger board: WIP-limited columns, a shared triage inbox, five-second time logging, and forecasts calculated from measured velocity. One subscription covers Engineering, HR, Marketing and Operations. Best fit for a team that outgrew a simple checklist and wants an actual delivery process without enterprise-level complexity.
One of the original kanban tools, simple boards, cards, lists, with a large library of Power-Ups for extending it. Best fit for a team that wants to stay lightweight like Planner but with more visual customization and a bigger ecosystem of add-ons.
A more structured task and project management tool with timelines, dependencies and workload views built in, sitting a step above Planner in formality. Best fit for a team ready to move past a plain board into proper project structure without going as heavy as Microsoft Project.
A visual, highly customizable work management platform used widely across marketing, sales and operations, not just engineering. Best fit for a team that wants Planner's visual simplicity but with strong automation and cross-team workflow building.
A configurable all-in-one work management tool with docs, boards, and many view types layered together. Best fit for a team that wants to consolidate several tools, tracking, light docs, goals, into one, rather than staying with Planner's narrower scope.
How to actually choose
Start with the honest question of whether Planner Premium, staying inside Microsoft's own licensing, solves your actual gap. If what you're missing is genuine Gantt scheduling and dependencies, Premium is a real option and it keeps you inside the ecosystem your team already uses. If what you're missing is enforced capacity limits, built-in time tracking, or forecasting from actual throughput rather than a plotted timeline, that's a different kind of gap, and it's the one a dedicated tool like ShipSprint, Asana or monday.com is more likely to close. Teams that just want a bit more visual polish than Planner without adding real process tend to be happiest with Trello.
It's also worth sizing the decision to the team, not the whole company. A department that's outgrown Planner doesn't need every other team to move at once; most of the tools here, including ShipSprint, let one team start on their own board while the rest of the organization keeps using Planner for simpler task lists. That staged approach tends to surface real friction, or the lack of it, before anyone commits budget to a company-wide switch.
Common questions
It's worth evaluating first if staying inside Microsoft 365 matters to your organization. Premium adds a real timeline view, dependencies, goals and sprints under the same licensing as Microsoft Project. It's a genuine option for teams whose gap is scheduling depth rather than a fundamentally different approach to capacity and forecasting.
Mainly for the things Premium's timeline view doesn't add: WIP limits enforced on every board, a shared triage inbox for new requests, five-second time logging, and forecasts built from the team's own measured velocity rather than a manually plotted schedule. It's also a single subscription covering Engineering, HR, Marketing and Operations rather than task management alone.
Planner supports exporting plans, typically to Excel, which covers tasks and basic fields reasonably well. Recreating active work directly on a new tool's board is still usually cleaner than a full import, since bucket structures and labels don't map identically between tools.
Yes, none of the alternatives here run natively as a Teams tab the way Planner does. That's a real trade-off worth naming plainly if your team relies heavily on managing tasks from inside a Teams channel rather than a separate workspace.
Planner Basic adds nothing to an existing Microsoft 365 bill. ShipSprint's Free plan covers up to 5 users and 2 projects forever; Team is ₹299 per user per month (₹2,899 per year); Business is ₹599 per user per month (₹6,499 per year) with forecasts, scorecards and GitHub sync included. Every paid plan starts with a 14-day full-access trial on Business, no card required. Full detail is on the pricing page.
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