Microsoft Project Online retires September 30, 2026, migrate to a modern platform before it's too late.Start migration
For PMO-led program organizations

The PMO platform for regulated programs

Demand intake, stage-gate governance, resource capacity, earned value and an audit trail, built for the aerospace, government, financial services, energy and pharma PMOs that ran Project Online. Assess your estate for free before you commit to anything.

Assess your estate free Book a governance walkthrough

39 days until Project Online retires on September 30, 2026.

Proposals move through staged gates with multi-reviewer approvals and weighted scoring, then become projects on approval.

Built for PMOs that answer to someone

Six kinds of organization run the practice on this page. If yours reports to an auditor, a regulator, a board or a minister, it belongs here.

Aerospace & defense

Multi-year programs with contractual milestones, earned value reporting to the customer and formal change control on every baseline.

In Onplana: Baselines and variance, EVM (CPI, SPI, S-curve), Change Control Board, audit trail on every transition.

Government & public sector

Capital and IT programs under public accountability: procurement rules, freedom-of-information exposure, audit obligations.

In Onplana: Stage gates with reviewer quorum, audit export, purchase through the Microsoft commercial marketplace, SSO and SCIM from Entra ID.

Banking, financial services & insurance

Change portfolios under SOX-style control: segregation of duties, evidence behind every decision, retention measured in years.

In Onplana: Multi-reviewer gates, designated reviewers who never need admin rights, retention presets for FINRA and SOC 2.

Energy & utilities

Owner-side capital programs: long schedules, contractor dependencies, regulator and board reporting on a fixed cadence.

In Onplana: Critical path with an AI narrative, resource capacity by week, portfolio RAG health, cross-project reports.

Pharma & med-tech

Phase-gated development programs where every transition needs a named reviewer, a score and a record that survives inspection.

In Onplana: Weighted evaluation criteria per gate, on-hold preservation, HIPAA retention preset, evidence export.

Healthcare & telecom IT PMOs

Large IT change portfolios: many small projects, shared specialists, and a Microsoft 365 estate everything has to fit into.

In Onplana: Intake forms, the Teams app, Outlook and To Do sync, custom dashboards per steering group.

The practice, end to end

Four things every PMO does every quarter, and what each one looks like when the platform was built around it.

Demand to decision

Intake PRO, gates ENTERPRISE

Intake forms feed proposals. Proposals move through staged gates with designated reviewer panels and quorum logic, scored against weighted criteria you configure per gate. An approved proposal becomes the project automatically, business case attached, sponsor notified.

Capacity and commitments

PRO

Capacity per person, working calendars with holidays and exceptions, utilization by week and by month, a four-week forecast. Over-allocation shows before a commitment is made, with the heatmap the steering committee can read without a walkthrough.

Control in flight

Baselines and EVM on every plan, CCB ENTERPRISE

Capture a baseline, read variance and the critical path, and route scope, schedule and budget changes through the Change Control Board with its own reviewer panel and status trail. Earned value (CPI, SPI, S-curve) comes from imported costs or rate cards, whichever your estate carries.

Report upward

Portfolios BUSINESS, scenarios ENTERPRISE

Portfolio RAG health rolled up from the projects, cross-project reports that normalize mixed currencies, scenario what-ifs before the steering committee meets, and dashboards assembled from 22 widget types for each audience that asks.

Plan tiers, plainly

  • Every plan, including Free: Estate Assessment, the import, baselines and variance, earned value, cross-project reports, milestones, working calendars, the AI assistant.
  • PRO: Intake forms, Gantt with critical path, resource capacity and timesheets, custom dashboards, workflow automation.
  • BUSINESS: Portfolios with RAG rollup, goals and OKRs, advanced AI (risk detection, portfolio insights), webhooks and integrations.
  • ENTERPRISE: The 12-stage proposal pipeline, gate reviewers and criteria, the Change Control Board, scenario planning, project classification, audit logs and evidence export, SSO and SCIM, IP allowlisting.
  • ENTERPRISE_PLUS: Customer-managed encryption keys and self-hosted deployment.

Per-seat prices and the full matrix are on the pricing page.

Leaving Project Online in three steps

The first step costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Most PMOs learn more from it than from a month of inventory spreadsheets.

1

Assess, read-only, free

Connect the Project Web App reporting feed and get a portfolio compatibility report: worst-first per project, structured findings, effort in batches of ten, and the retirement countdown. Nothing is written to Project Online and nothing is created in Onplana.

How the Estate Assessment works
2

Import what you decide to keep

.MPP files, MSPDI XML and the live OData feed import with typed dependencies and lag, custom fields, baselines, planned and fixed costs, the project currency, and resources matched to your people by email. Anything unmatched is a warning on the report, never a phantom account.

The complete migration guide
3

Cut over on a plan, not a hope

The Migration from MS Project template ships in the product: inventory and audit, data prep and field mapping, staging import, reconciliation of counts and totals, UAT with pilot project managers, production cutover, read-only decommission.

See the cutover template
The Estate Assessment: every project ranked worst-first, findings grouped, effort estimated, nothing written anywhere.

No account yet? The file-based Migration Preview and Schedule Health Check analyse one exported .MPP at a time with no sign-up. Step-by-step guides live on docs.onplana.com.

Procurement, identity and evidence

The questions your IT, security and procurement teams ask before anyone looks at a Gantt chart.

Buy through Microsoft

Onplana is a transactable SaaS offer on the Microsoft commercial marketplace, so procurement runs through your Microsoft agreement, lands on the consolidated Azure invoice, and can draw down your Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC). Activation lands straight in your workspace.

Marketplace purchase

Identity your IT team already runs

SAML and OIDC single sign-on, SCIM provisioning from Entra ID, two-factor enforcement, session policies, per-device revocation, and a personal-access-token scope reserved for external auditors.

Entra SSO setup guide

Evidence on demand

Every governance transition, role change and agent action writes an audit row with the actor, the timestamp and the client it came from. Export to CSV or JSON; retention presets for GDPR, HIPAA, FINRA and SOC 2.

Security and compliance posture

Where your people already work

A Microsoft Teams app for the project tabs, Outlook mail and calendar inside the project, two-way To Do sync for every assignee, SharePoint documents attached to tasks.

The Teams app

Data processing terms are at /dpa, the subprocessor list at /subprocessors, and the SCIM setup guide at /docs/scim-entra.

5.0 / 5

“Enterprise-Grade Project Management with a Modern AI-Powered Collaborative Edge”

It combines enterprise-grade project management features like Gantt charts, dependencies, and portfolio management with a modern AI-powered and collaborative experience. It feels like a strong modern alternative for organizations moving away from Microsoft Project.

Waheed H.

Manager · Small Business (50 or fewer employees)

via G2, May 7, 2026

Map your governance model before you commit

Bring your current gate structure, reviewer roles and reporting cadence. We walk it onto the 12-stage pipeline, the Change Control Board and the portfolio views on a call, so the decision is made against your process rather than a demo script.

Book a governance walkthrough Read the governance feature page

The questions PMOs ask us

Straight answers, including the ones that name a plan tier.

Microsoft points Project Online customers at Planner Premium. Why look at Onplana instead?▾
Planner Premium is a capable task board. A PMO that runs stage gates, resource capacity, baselines and earned value needs those to be first-class, and in Onplana they are: a 12-stage proposal pipeline with reviewer quorum, a Change Control Board, capacity planning with working calendars, earned value in the Finance tab, and an audit trail behind all of it. The import also keeps what a task-board migration drops: typed dependencies with lag, custom fields, baselines and costs. The feature-by-feature comparison is at onplana.com/compare/onplana-vs-microsoft-planner.
Our advisors quoted up to 20 weeks for a migration. Is that realistic?▾
It is realistic for a migration that starts from a blank inventory. The Estate Assessment replaces that inventory phase: it reads the whole Project Web App estate in minutes and ranks every project by compatibility, so you know which projects move as they are, which need cleanup first, and which can simply be archived. From there the in-product cutover template sequences audit, staging import, reconciliation, UAT and production. Most of the calendar time in a migration is decision time, and the assessment front-loads the decisions.
What survives the import, exactly?▾
Project name and dates, the task hierarchy, milestones, durations and work, percent complete, priority, start and finish dates, typed dependencies (FS, SS, FF, SF) with lag, supported constraints and deadlines, baselines, planned and fixed costs with the project currency, task-scoped custom fields (enterprise fields become custom field definitions with their values), and resources matched to your people by email. Anything the importer cannot map is listed as a warning on the import report rather than dropped in silence.
Does the assessment change anything in Project Online?▾
No. It reads the Project Web App reporting feed, which is read-only by design. Nothing is written to Project Online and nothing is created in Onplana until you separately choose to import. Stopping at the report is a fully supported outcome, and it runs on every plan including Free.
Can we buy through our Microsoft agreement?▾
Yes. Onplana is a transactable SaaS offer on the Microsoft commercial marketplace. Your procurement team buys it the way it buys Azure services, on the consolidated Azure invoice, the spend can draw down a Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), and activation lands the subscription in your Onplana workspace. Card billing through Stripe remains available for teams that prefer it.
Which plan does a PMO need?▾
ENTERPRISE for the governance layer: the proposal pipeline, gate reviewers and criteria, the Change Control Board, scenario planning, audit logs and SSO with SCIM. Portfolios and advanced AI arrive at BUSINESS; intake forms, resource capacity, the Gantt and custom dashboards at PRO. The Estate Assessment, the import, baselines, earned value and cross-project reports run on every plan including Free, so the evaluation costs nothing. ENTERPRISE_PLUS adds customer-managed keys and self-hosting.
What happens after September 30, 2026?▾
Project Online stops serving, and the reporting feed the assessment reads goes with it, so export your projects before the date even if you have not chosen a destination. Onplana imports the .MPP and MSPDI XML files you exported at any point afterwards; only the Estate Assessment and the live OData import need the service to still be running. Project desktop files import the same way, with no deadline attached.

Assess first. Decide with the report in hand.

A free account, the Estate Assessment, and a compatibility report for every project you run. Then a walkthrough if you want one.

Assess your estate free Book a governance walkthrough

Already have an account? Open the migration wizard and choose Project Online.