Onplana vs Project Online Pricing: A Real-World Comparison

Microsoft Project Online retires on September 30, 2026. Teams still running Plan 3 or Plan 5 licenses today are paying for a product with a fixed end date, no meaningful AI investment since 2021, and a shutdown clock that does not pause for late deciders.

The Onplana vs Project Online pricing conversation matters now because it shapes when migration makes sense. Teams that wait until Q3 2026 often discover that migration labor costs exceed license savings, simply because there is no time left to amortize the switch. Teams that moved earlier paid the same migration cost but spent fewer months on a retiring product and more months on one building compounding value.

TL;DR: Project Plan 3 costs $30/user/month on annual billing. Onplana BUSINESS costs $20/user/month, or $16 with annual billing. Over 36 months at 250 seats, the license savings alone total $126,000. The free Migration Cost Calculator produces a scenario-specific number that includes labor and integration rework, not just the license delta.

What Project Online Actually Costs

The sticker price for Project Online is well-documented: Plan 3 (now branded "Planner and Project Plan 3") runs $30 per user per month on annual billing, per Microsoft's pricing page. Plan 5 reached end-of-sale in May 2026 and is no longer available for new subscriptions, though existing Plan 5 customers retain access through the September 30, 2026 retirement date.

What the sticker price does not show:

Microsoft 365 subscription. Project Online runs on top of SharePoint Online, which requires Microsoft 365 Business Standard or above. For most organizations this runs $12.50 to $22 per user per month, additive to the Plan 3 price. Some organizations already hold these M365 seats for email and Office; others add them specifically to support PWA.

PWA site administration. A Project Online deployment requires a dedicated SharePoint administrator who understands PWA configuration, Enterprise Custom Field management, calendar upkeep, and permission group governance. At mid-market scale (50 to 500 seats), this typically consumes 25 to 50 percent of one person's week, representing 0.25 to 0.5 FTE of overhead that does not appear on the license invoice.

Power BI Pro. Project Online's reporting runs on OData and Power BI. Any PMO wanting dashboard views beyond the built-in PWA reports needs Power BI Pro licenses ($10/user/month) for report consumers, or Power BI Premium at the tenant level. This is optional but practically necessary for most PMOs running stakeholder-facing dashboards.

Together, the all-in cost for a Plan 3 deployment with M365 and Power BI Pro runs $48 to $62 per user per month, not the $30 headline figure.

What Onplana Costs

Onplana's full tier breakdown is at /pricing. The relevant comparison points:

• FREE: up to 5 active projects. Full Gantt, all dependency types, AI features. No time limit, no credit card.
• PRO: $12/user/month ($9.60 annual). Gantt with all dependency types, baselines, custom fields, automations, time tracking, AI core (plan generation, risk detection, NL task creation).
• BUSINESS: $20/user/month ($16 annual). Adds advanced AI features, portfolios, goals, resource management, webhooks, integrations, and cross-project reporting without Power BI.
• ENTERPRISE: $29/user/month ($23.20 annual). Adds governance gates, SSO, SCIM, audit logs, IP allowlist, change-control board, and scenario planning.

Annual billing is 20% off across all paid tiers. There are no seat minimums: a team of 8 pays the same per-seat rate as a team of 800.

Power BI is not required. Onplana ships built-in dashboards, portfolio rollups, and reporting that cover most PMO reporting needs natively. For organizations that want Power BI specifically, Onplana exposes a REST export API and Power Query connectors. Microsoft 365 is also not required; Onplana integrates with M365 but does not run on SharePoint and does not need an M365 subscription.

The absence of M365 as a prerequisite matters for organizations that are consolidating cloud spend. If your organization pays for M365 Business Standard at $12.50/user/month specifically to run Project Online, you can cancel those seats when you migrate. That is an additional $12.50/user/month in savings on top of the Plan 3 price reduction. At 50 seats, that is $7,500 per year; at 250 seats, $37,500 per year. These savings are organization-specific (many organizations would keep M365 for other reasons), but for organizations whose M365 adoption is PWA-driven, the opportunity is real and should be in the migration business case.

Onplana vs Project Online Pricing: Head-to-Head at Three Scales

The diagram below compares three-year license costs for Project Plan 3 versus Onplana BUSINESS on annual billing at three common PMO sizes. The ratio is consistent because the per-seat prices are fixed: the savings are 47% at every scale.

The table below shows the same numbers explicitly:

Team size	Project Plan 3 (3 yr)	Onplana BUSINESS annual (3 yr)	License savings
50 seats	$54,000	$28,800	$25,200 (47%)
250 seats	$270,000	$144,000	$126,000 (47%)
1,000 seats	$1,080,000	$576,000	$504,000 (47%)

These are license-only figures. Including M365 and Power BI Pro at a conservative $15/seat/month premium for Project Online adds $27,000 per year at 50 seats to the Project Online column, widening the gap considerably. For organizations that already have M365 for other reasons, the incremental premium is lower; still additive.

The Hidden Costs That Don't Appear on the Invoice

Three categories that most budget models miss:

Integration maintenance. Project Online's OData API requires ongoing attention as Microsoft updates schemas. Organizations with Power BI reports, ERP connectors, or custom exports typically absorb 10 to 30 hours per year of developer time maintaining those connections. At $100 to $200 per hour, that is $1,000 to $6,000 per year, invisible in the license renewal.

Schedule technical debt cleanup. Our data from processing Project Online exports shows the average schedule coming out of PWA carries 12 to 17 health issues: broken dependencies, orphaned tasks, over-constrained milestones. Those issues do not prevent the tool from running, but they generate status report discrepancies that require PM time to manage. The Schedule Health Check surfaces these on upload, but the cleanup labor is real migration cost that traces back to accumulated debt in the Project Online schedule.

PWA interface overhead. PWA was designed in the SharePoint 2010 era and has not had a UX overhaul since. PMs navigating between project sites, task grids, and SharePoint document libraries lose meaningful time per week. Organizations migrating to Onplana typically report 30 to 45 minutes per PM per week in recovered navigation time, which at a 20-person PM team compounds to 10 to 15 hours per week across the team.

When Does a Migration Pay Back?

For a 250-seat PMO migrating to Onplana BUSINESS:

License savings per month: 250 x ($30 - $16) = $3,500/month.

Typical migration cost for 250 seats (from the full cost breakdown): $60,000 to $180,000, depending on integration complexity.

Payback period: at the low end ($60K), 17 months; at the high end ($180K), 51 months.

The relevant question is not whether migration pays back. It does. The question is: at what cost does it pay back, and what is the cost of being late?

Teams starting migration in Q1 2026 can execute methodically at the low end of the cost range. Teams starting in Q2 or Q3 2026 pay emergency consulting rates, run compressed timelines, and often land at the high end. The additional migration cost in the rushed scenario frequently eliminates 12 to 18 months of payback time, making the delayed path more expensive overall even though the license savings are identical.

The Three-Year Picture by Scenario

Where you are in the Project Online lifecycle changes what the math looks like:

Already migrated (completed by Q1 2026). You are paying Onplana BUSINESS rates today. Forward three-year cost at 250 seats: $144,000 versus the $270,000 you would have paid to stay.

Migrating now (Q2 2026, finishing before September 30). You pay three to five months of overlap plus migration labor, then switch fully to Onplana rates. Your three-year total is higher than early movers but still significantly below the stay-on-Project-Online baseline.

Waiting until Q3 2026. Migration under time pressure costs 20 to 40 percent more in labor and consulting, because the market for experienced migration partners is saturated in the final quarter before retirement. The financial math works out worse than early migration, and the risk profile is worse: there is no room to recover from a data export failure.

Which Plan Makes Sense for Which PMO?

Matching Project Online functionality to Onplana tiers:

Teams using core PWA scheduling (Gantt, dependencies, baselines, resource management, but not governance workflows or portfolio analysis): Onplana PRO at $9.60/seat/month annual is the comparable tier. It covers the full scheduling feature set plus AI.

Teams using Power BI for reporting and cross-project views: Onplana BUSINESS at $16/seat/month annual. This adds native dashboards and portfolio management, eliminating the Power BI Pro dependency for most reporting use cases. The comparison with Onplana vs Project Online feature-by-feature walks through what maps directly and what requires configuration.

Teams using governance workflows, SSO, audit logs, and change control: Onplana ENTERPRISE at $23.20/seat/month annual. This covers the governance workflows that Project Online routed through SharePoint workflows (themselves being retired in the same window as Project Online).

For organizations with fewer than 50 seats, Onplana PRO on monthly billing ($12/seat/month) is often the right entry point: no commitment, full feature access, straightforward to scale.

Run the free Migration Cost Calculator Model your specific scenario: PM count, project count, integration complexity, and timeline. The calculator produces low, mid, and high estimates with a downloadable PDF. No signup required. Open the Migration Cost Calculator

Microsoft Project Online™ is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Onplana is not affiliated with Microsoft.