How to Migrate Microsoft Planner to Onplana (and Keep It in Live Sync)

How to Migrate Microsoft Planner to Onplana

If your team uses Microsoft Planner today and you're evaluating whether to move work somewhere with more PM depth: Gantt, dependencies, governance, AI risk detection, there's a friction tax: getting your existing plans across without retyping them.

Onplana's Planner integration removes that tax. One click reads your plan tree from Microsoft Graph and produces a fully populated Onplana project. Optionally, a second click keeps it mirrored, so any change in Planner replicates in Onplana within seconds.

This post walks the import flow end to end, lists what does and doesn't carry across, and covers the operational details, permissions, live sync, idempotency, so you know what you're signing up for before you click.

When to migrate, when to sync, when to do both

Three meaningful patterns. Pick by what your team is doing today, not by what feels safest.

• One-shot import, use when you're done with Planner and moving everything to Onplana. Run the import once, archive the Planner plan, never look back. Five minutes.
• Live sync mirror, use when part of your org is staying on Planner (e.g. a Teams-heavy department) but you want execs/PMs working in Onplana with the richer surface. Onplana stays read-mirror; edits happen in Planner.
• Hybrid, use when you're piloting Onplana on one project before committing the full team. Import the plan, work in Onplana for a sprint, decide. The Disable button on the sync banner ends the experiment without losing data.

The same UI handles all three. The only difference is whether you tick Enable live sync on the import screen.

Step 1, connect Microsoft (one-time)

Open Settings → Integrations in Onplana, click Connect Microsoft, and pick the Tasks and Groups scopes. Microsoft's consent screen will ask for Tasks.ReadWrite (read your tasks) and Group.Read.All (enumerate plans across your Teams groups). Both are delegated permissions, Onplana never sees other users' data.

If your AAD admin has restricted user consent for third-party apps, the consent will redirect to a "needs admin approval" screen. Send your admin the URL; one approval covers everyone in the tenant.

Step 2, pick a plan

Open Migrate → Microsoft Planner. Onplana enumerates every plan in every Microsoft 365 group you have read access to. The picker shows:

• Plan title and group name (e.g. "Q3 Marketing Campaign · Acme Marketing Group")
• Created-on date
• Task count
• Tier badge, basic for a free Planner plan, premium if Onplana detects Project Service signals (richer fields, dependencies). Premium plans go through a separate, richer importer covered in our Project for the Web Premium guide.

Search by plan title or group name. Click a plan to advance to preview.

Step 3, preview before committing

The preview screen surfaces:

• Bucket count, Planner buckets become epics by default (use the buckets as sprints toggle to convert them to time-boxed sprints instead)
• Task count, total tasks across the plan, including subtasks
• Tag count, unique applied categories across all tasks
• Sample task titles, the first 5 task titles, so you can verify you've picked the right plan

You'll also see options for the destination project:

• Project name, defaults to the plan title; editable
• Buckets as Sprints, off by default (most basic Planner buckets are phases / categories); flip on if your team uses Planner buckets for sprint planning
• Enable live sync, off by default; the next section covers when to flip it

Step 4, what gets imported

The import maps Microsoft Graph fields to Onplana fields like this:

The translations worth flagging:

• Priority numbering is inverted. Planner uses 1=Urgent, 9=Low. Onplana uses LOW/MEDIUM/HIGH/CRITICAL. The mapping table inside the importer handles the inversion so a Planner Urgent task lands as CRITICAL, not LOW.
• Assignees resolve by Microsoft user oid. Onplana stores the oid (Microsoft's stable user identifier) on every member who's signed in via Microsoft. The importer matches Planner assignments against that table. Unmatched assignees are listed in result.warnings, typical pattern is to invite them to Onplana, then re-run the import (it's idempotent).
• Categories become org-scoped tags. Planner's 25 named categories per plan map to Onplana tags. Already have a tag named urgent? The category named urgent reuses it instead of creating a duplicate.
• Checklist items become subtasks. Each checklist item on a Planner task becomes a child Onplana task with the parent linkage set.
• Task descriptions come from taskDetails.description (a separate Graph endpoint), not the task itself, Planner stores them separately. The importer batches the detail fetches via Graph $batch so a 200-task plan completes in one extra round-trip, not 200.

Step 5, live sync (optional)

Tick Enable live sync on the import screen and Onplana registers a Microsoft Graph subscription on the source plan as soon as the import succeeds. The webhook URL points at Onplana's public ingress; a 32-byte clientState secret authenticates every notification.

After that:

• Any change in Planner, task created, edited, completed, deleted, assignee added, due date changed, fires a webhook
• Onplana receives the notification, verifies clientState, and acks within 30 seconds (Graph's hard timeout)
• The actual reconciliation runs as a fire-and-forget re-import, idempotent on the plan id, so the project ends up reflecting the current state of Planner without duplicating work

A purple banner sits at the top of the project page once sync is active:

The banner shows the last successful sync (refreshed every 60 seconds in the UI) and the subscription expiry. Microsoft caps Graph subscriptions at ~3 days; Onplana's renewal worker patches the expiry every 6 hours, well before the cap, so notifications keep flowing without interruption.

If renewal fails (token revoked, plan deleted, network outage that exceeds the 3-failure threshold), the subscription is dropped and the banner switches to a red Sync stopped, reconnect state. The project keeps its data; only the live mirror stops.

What stays out of sync

A few things by design:

• Onplana edits don't propagate back to Planner. The mirror is one-way. If you edit an imported task in Onplana, the next Graph notification from Planner may overwrite your change. There's a warning on the project page when sync is active: "Edits to imported tasks here may be overwritten on the next sync." This is conservative and intentional, Microsoft's surface is the source of truth while sync is on.
• Comments don't sync. Planner conversations live in Exchange and aren't exposable via Graph in a useful shape. Comments you add in Onplana stay in Onplana.
• Attachments are linked, not copied. Files attached to Planner tasks point at SharePoint URLs. Onplana stores them as external links (linkedMode='LINK') in the workspace. Click-through opens the file in SharePoint, where the user's existing M365 permissions apply.

Idempotency: re-imports are safe

Every Onplana project imported from Planner carries externalSource='PLANNER' and externalId=<plan-id>. Re-running the import for the same plan id finds the existing project and reconciles in place, same project id, updated tasks. New tasks added to Planner appear; deleted tasks are removed; modified tasks update fields. Your Onplana edits to non-imported tasks (ones you added natively) stay untouched.

The same idempotency holds at the task level: each imported task carries externalSource='PLANNER' and externalId=<task-id>, so re-imports update by id rather than by title or position.

Disabling sync (without losing data)

The Disable button on the purple sync banner does two things, in order:

1. Issues a Graph DELETE on the subscription so Microsoft stops sending notifications
2. Drops the local PlannerSubscription row so the renewal worker stops trying to extend a dead subscription

Everything else stays. The project, all tasks, all assignees, all tags, fully intact. The project becomes a regular Onplana project at that point, fully editable.

If you want to re-enable sync later, run the import again, the idempotent reconciliation finds the existing project, updates from current Planner state, and re-registers the subscription.

When Planner isn't the right level

A coda worth flagging. If your team uses Microsoft Project for the Web, the Premium tier with dependencies, scheduled effort, and resource assignments backed by Dataverse, basic Planner import drops the rich schedule data. The plans look the same in Teams, but the underlying Project Service tables hold extra fields the basic Planner Graph endpoints don't expose.

Onplana ships a separate Project for the Web Premium importer that reads from Dataverse directly to bring across:

• FS/SS/FF/SF dependencies with lag in days
• Scheduled effort in hours per task
• Hierarchical summary tasks (parent/child trees beyond Planner's flat-with-buckets model)
• Resource bookings via the bookable-resource → systemuser → email chain

If your plan shows the premium tier badge in the picker, run the Project for the Web Premium importer instead of the basic Planner one, same plan, much more data carried across.

Pairing with Microsoft To Do sync

For users whose daily work happens on their phone or watch, the Planner import pairs well with Onplana's Microsoft To Do bi-directional sync. Tasks assigned to a user mirror into their personal Onplana, <org> list in To Do, with title, due date, and completion status flowing both ways. We covered the To Do side in our Microsoft To Do sync guide.

The two integrations stack: import the plan, optionally turn on live sync to keep the source mirrored, and let assignees toggle on To Do sync from Settings → Accounts to surface their personal slice in their phone. Three layers, one consent flow.

Try it on a non-critical plan first

The fastest way to evaluate the Planner integration is to run it on a real plan with low blast radius, a maintenance plan, a personal project, anything that's not your Q3 launch readiness. Onplana's free tier includes 5 projects with full Planner import, so you don't need to upgrade to test the flow end to end.

If the import looks right, repeat for production plans with the live-sync toggle on. If something's off, the What's New page has the full integration changelog and our team responds to support requests within one business day.

→ Create a free Onplana account · See all imports we support

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Related reading:

• Import Microsoft Project for the Web (Premium) into Onplana, the Dataverse importer for premium plans
• Microsoft To Do Sync With Onplana, pair Planner imports with per-user mobile mirroring
• Microsoft Project Online vs. the New Microsoft Planner, what changed across Microsoft's PM line
• Microsoft Project Online Is Retiring, September 30, 2026 timeline + impact
• Project Online Retirement Countdown: 90-Day Migration Plan, six-phase plan if you're a PMO
• Best Microsoft Project Alternatives in 2026, broader market roundup
• How AI Actually Runs Project Management Inside Onplana, what your Planner-imported project gets when it lands in Onplana