ShipSprint vs Microsoft Planner
Microsoft Planner comes free with the Microsoft 365 subscription most companies already have. ShipSprint is a separate purchase built to do more with the same board-and-card idea.
Choose ShipSprint if
You want time logging, delivery forecasts and a triage inbox built in, and you're willing to pay for a dedicated tool to get them.
Choose Microsoft Planner if
Your team already lives inside Microsoft 365 and Teams, your task tracking needs are genuinely lightweight, and free, bundled and already-installed beats a separate purchase.
The honest overlap
Both are board-and-card tools at the core. The difference shows up in what surrounds the board: capacity enforcement, time tracking, forecasting, and how many departments the same tool is built to serve.
What Microsoft Planner actually is
Microsoft Planner is a lightweight, Kanban-style task management app included at no extra cost in Microsoft 365 commercial plans, which is a large part of its appeal: if your company already pays for Microsoft 365, Planner Basic is already there, already integrated with Teams, and already familiar to anyone who's used a board tool before. It handles buckets, task assignment, due dates and labels well, and it sits naturally inside a Teams channel rather than requiring a separate login.
In 2024, Microsoft rebuilt Planner into a unified app that folded in what used to be three separate products, the original Planner, Microsoft To Do, and Project for the web. The free Basic tier still covers boards, lists, and Teams integration. A paid Premium tier, licensed under the same "Plan 1 / Plan 3 / Plan 5" naming Microsoft uses for Project, adds a timeline view with real Gantt-style scheduling, goals, sprints, task dependencies, and, at the higher tiers, Copilot. It's worth knowing this naming overlaps with Microsoft Project's own plan names, because "Planner and Project Plan 3," for instance, is a real, if confusing, license bundle Microsoft sells.
ShipSprint isn't bundled with anything you already own; it's a separate subscription built around a specific idea of how delivery should work. Boards carry per-column WIP limits by default, new requests land in a shared triage inbox rather than someone's Teams messages, time logging takes about five seconds next to the task just closed, and delivery forecasts are calculated from the team's own measured velocity as sprints complete. Planner Basic has none of that. Even Planner Premium's added scheduling features are closer to lightweight Gantt planning than to velocity-based forecasting built from actual throughput.
Where the two tools genuinely differ
Planner's biggest advantage isn't a feature. It's already installed.
Planner Basic costs nothing extra if your organization already has Microsoft 365, and it's already integrated into Teams. ShipSprint is a separate subscription, starting free for up to 5 users and 2 projects, then paid from there.
ShipSprint's columns carry WIP limits that stop a column from overfilling, and new work lands in a shared triage inbox before anyone owns it. Planner's board is a straightforward list of buckets and cards with assignment, without a built-in capacity constraint or an intake queue.
Neither is a native Planner Basic feature. Planner Premium adds a timeline view with dependencies, which is real scheduling, but ShipSprint's forecast is calculated from the team's own measured velocity as sprints close, a different kind of prediction than a Gantt chart's plotted dates.
Planner's deepest integration is with the Microsoft 365 and Teams ecosystem it was built inside of. ShipSprint's comparable depth is on the engineering side: a branch tied to a card starts it, a merged pull request closes it, and burndown and cycle-time analytics build from that same activity, on Team and Business plans, see product for how it works.
Planner is used the same lightweight way regardless of department, which is fine for simple task lists but doesn't offer HR, marketing or operations anything tailored to how they actually work. ShipSprint ships templates for Engineering, HR, Marketing and Operations on one subscription with a shared vocabulary between them.
Microsoft's plan-naming, Basic, Premium, Plan 1/3/5 shared with Project, priced in dollars, takes some work to untangle. ShipSprint's pricing is three plans, in rupees, with GST-compliant invoices: Free, Team at ₹299 per user per month, and Business at ₹599.
Where Microsoft Planner is genuinely the better choice
If your team's task tracking needs are genuinely simple, a shared checklist with due dates and owners, and your company already runs on Microsoft 365 and Teams, Planner Basic is very hard to beat on pure cost and friction. It's free, it's already there, nobody has to learn a new login, and for a team that just needs to see who's doing what this week, that's often more than enough. Paying for a separate, more structured tool when a bundled board already does the job is a real, defensible choice, not a compromise, and plenty of small teams and departments run perfectly well on Planner without ever feeling the gap.
Common questions
Planner Basic is genuinely free if you already have Microsoft 365, and for simple task lists that's often enough. Teams move to a dedicated tool like ShipSprint when they need things Planner doesn't natively enforce: WIP limits, a triage inbox, built-in time logging, and forecasts calculated from measured velocity rather than a plotted timeline.
Premium is sold under the same Plan 1, Plan 3 and Plan 5 naming Microsoft uses for Project licensing, directionally around $10, $30 and $55 per user per month respectively, in dollars. It's worth confirming the current numbers and exact feature split on Microsoft's own licensing pages, since the naming has changed more than once.
ShipSprint doesn't run as a Teams tab the way Planner does; it's a separate product with its own workspace. For a team whose main reason to use Planner is that it's already inside Teams, that's a real reason to stay, not a gap ShipSprint is trying to close.
Planner Basic adds no cost if you're already paying for Microsoft 365. ShipSprint's Free plan covers up to 5 users and 2 projects forever; Team is ₹299 per user per month (₹2,899 per year) for up to 40 users; Business is ₹599 per user per month (₹6,499 per year) with forecasts, scorecards and GitHub sync included. Full detail is on the pricing page. The comparison really depends on whether you'd otherwise buy Planner Premium too.
That's a common middle ground. Microsoft Project is built for formal, enterprise-grade portfolio and resource management, which is more than most teams that outgrow Planner actually need. A structured but lighter tool like ShipSprint often sits in that gap: more process than a plain board, without the full weight of enterprise portfolio software.
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