ShipSprint vs Microsoft Project
Microsoft Project is built for formal, scheduled portfolios with dependencies and baselines. ShipSprint is built for teams running sprints against their own measured pace. Different tools for different planning philosophies.
Choose ShipSprint if
Your team plans in sprints and wants a forecast built from measured velocity, board-based delivery, and time tracking, without buying enterprise portfolio software.
Choose Microsoft Project if
You genuinely need formal Gantt scheduling, task dependencies with lead and lag times, baselines, critical-path analysis and portfolio-level resource management across many concurrent projects.
The honest overlap
Both are trying to answer "when will this actually finish." They get there through very different mechanisms: a plotted schedule with dependencies, or a forecast recalculated from what the team has actually delivered.
What Microsoft Project actually is
Microsoft Project is Microsoft's enterprise project management tool, and it's a genuinely different category of software than a kanban board. It's timeline-first, built around Gantt charts, and it supports complex task dependencies with lead and lag times, critical-path analysis, baselines you can compare actuals against, and time-phased scheduling across medium to large teams. At its higher licensing tiers, it adds portfolio management and enterprise resource management, letting an organization see and prioritize work across many concurrent projects at once, not just one team's board.
Licensing runs across a few tiers, commonly called Plan 1, Plan 3 and Plan 5, directionally around $10, $30 and $55 per user per month respectively, in dollars, with each tier adding capability: Plan 1 covers basic online project tracking, Plan 3 adds the desktop client and more advanced planning tools, and Plan 5 adds portfolio and demand management for enterprise-scale coordination. It's worth checking Microsoft's current licensing pages directly, since these tiers and their exact contents have shifted before, and Project Online, the browser-based enterprise edition, is being retired on September 30, 2026, with Microsoft positioning its newer Planner Premium as part of the successor path.
ShipSprint doesn't try to compete on that ground. There's no Gantt chart, no baseline comparison, no critical-path analysis. Boards carry per-column WIP limits, new requests land in a shared triage inbox, 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 rather than a plotted schedule someone built and maintains. It's a fundamentally different bet on how you find out when something will actually be done: a schedule someone constructs in advance, or a number the system recalculates every sprint from what actually happened.
Where the two tools genuinely differ
This isn't a feature gap either direction. It's two different planning philosophies.
Microsoft Project's dates come from a schedule built with dependencies, durations and constraints, then adjusted by a project manager. ShipSprint's forecast is recalculated automatically from the team's own measured velocity as sprints close, no schedule to build or maintain.
Project's higher tiers are genuinely built for enterprise portfolio and resource management across many concurrent projects and departments. ShipSprint's owner command center gives a cross-team view, but it's a summary of board and delivery activity, not formal portfolio prioritization or capacity modeling across a large organization.
Project's scheduling features, dependencies, baselines, critical path, take real training to use well, and building a schedule is genuine project management work. ShipSprint's boards, WIP limits and triage inbox work with almost no configuration, which is less capability but far less setup.
Time tracking in Project is typically entered against tasks in the schedule. ShipSprint logs time in about five seconds next to a closed task, and on Team and Business plans, a branch tied to a card starts it and a merged pull request closes it, with burndown and cycle-time analytics built from that same activity.
Project's licensing runs roughly $10 to $55 per user per month in dollars depending on tier. ShipSprint bills in rupees with GST-compliant invoices, from Free up to Business at ₹599 per user per month, a materially different price band for a materially different scope of tool.
Project is built and licensed around formal project and portfolio management, typically an engineering, construction or PMO function. ShipSprint ships templates for Engineering, HR, Marketing and Operations on one subscription, departments that would rarely all be licensed for Project.
Where Microsoft Project is genuinely the better choice
If your organization runs formal, dependency-heavy schedules, construction timelines, regulated program delivery, multi-year initiatives with hard external deadlines and resource contention across dozens of concurrent projects, Microsoft Project's Gantt scheduling, critical-path analysis and portfolio management are built for exactly that, and no amount of velocity-based forecasting replaces a genuine dependency-aware schedule when the plan itself is the deliverable. A PMO that needs to model "what happens to the whole portfolio if this one project slips two weeks" needs the kind of resource and dependency modeling Project offers, not a per-team velocity forecast. That's real, specialized capability, and teams with that requirement should not expect ShipSprint, or most board-based tools, to substitute for it.
Common questions
No, and it's worth being direct about that. There's no Gantt chart, no baselines, no critical-path analysis. ShipSprint is built for sprint-based delivery with capacity limits and a velocity-derived forecast, which is a genuinely different planning approach than formal project scheduling, not a stripped-down version of it.
Microsoft has announced that Project Online, its browser-based enterprise edition, is being retired on September 30, 2026, with Planner Premium positioned as part of the successor path. If your organization runs on Project Online, that's worth confirming directly with Microsoft's current migration guidance regardless of what you evaluate alongside it.
Microsoft Project's licensing runs directionally from about $10 to $55 per user per month in dollars across its tiers. 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). Full detail is on the pricing page. These are different scopes of tool, so the comparison is really about whether you need Project's scheduling depth at all.
Some organizations do split it that way, keeping a formal schedule in Project for stakeholder reporting while a team runs its actual day-to-day sprint work through a board tool. It adds a second system to keep roughly in sync, so it's worth weighing whether the formal schedule is genuinely needed or whether it's built out of habit.
That gap is exactly where ShipSprint tends to sit: more structure than a plain kanban board, WIP limits, triage, built-in time tracking and forecasting, without the scheduling overhead and licensing cost of enterprise portfolio software. It's worth a trial before assuming you need Project's full weight.
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