Microsoft 365 for project management: when Planner, Teams and Loop are enough, and when you need monday.com or Jira

Microsoft 365 does not have a single project program. It has several tools, each responsible for a different part of the work: tasks, conversations, documents, notes and registers. Together they offer a lot, but only if the team knows what to keep where.

The most common mistake is using all of them at once without rules. Tasks end up sometimes in Planner, sometimes in a chat message, and decisions in four different sets of notes. So treat the summary below as a division of roles, not a shopping list.

Many guides still recommend “Project for the web” as Microsoft’s advanced tool. That service no longer exists under that name. In August 2025, Microsoft moved its users to Planner, where plans from Project for the web now work as premium plans.

The licence names have changed too. Project Plan 1 is now called Planner Plan 1, and Project Plan 3 and 5 are now Planner and Project Plan 3 and 5. The two higher plans still include the Project desktop app, which is needed for complex schedules.

The second change affects companies that used Project Online. That service was retired on 30 September 2026. Microsoft points to Planner, on-premises Project Server and Dynamics 365 Project Operations as its successors.

What does this mean in practice? If someone in your company kept plans in Project for the web, they will find them in Planner. They still need a paid licence to edit them fully, so it is worth checking who has one assigned.

Microsoft 365 works well where projects are simple in structure and the biggest problem is scattered information. Take a hypothetical installation company with 60 employees. It runs several customer installations at once, and decisions get lost in emails.

A Teams channel for each customer, a plan in Planner and documents in SharePoint solve most of the problems here. There is no need to buy a new system or teach people a new program. Below are the situations in which this set-up is usually enough.

The dividing line does not depend on the size of the company, but on the way it works. The signs below show that a team needs a tool built specifically for projects.

If you recognise one of these signs, you do not have to move the whole company. Often a separate tool for one department is enough, and everyone else stays in Microsoft 365.

In many companies, a mixed set-up turns out to be best. Microsoft 365 remains the base for everyone: email, Teams, documents. Only the teams that really need it get a separate tool.

The key is a single source of truth for each type of information. Developers’ tasks are in Jira, documents in SharePoint and conversations in Teams. The problem starts when the same project status is kept in two places.

Typical combinations are described in the list below. Before you buy, check whether the chosen tool has a ready-made integration with Teams and Outlook in the edition you are buying.

Microsoft Copilot, the AI assistant built into Microsoft 365 apps, will not replace a project manager. It does, however, save time on the tasks managers like least: meeting notes, summaries of long email threads and first drafts of reports.

In Teams, Copilot summarises a meeting and lists the decisions with the people responsible. In Outlook, it summarises correspondence with a customer before a call. In Word, it prepares a draft plan or report from documents the user has access to. In Planner, Microsoft is also developing an agent that helps put a plan together; it requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence.

List prices with annual billing are USD 21 per person per month on the Microsoft 365 Copilot Business plan (companies with up to 300 users) and USD 30 on the Microsoft 365 Copilot plan. For example, 10 project managers on the Business plan cost 10 × USD 21 × 12 = USD 2,520 a year.

Do not buy licences for everyone. Start with the people who handle the most meetings and documents, and after three months check the usage report to see who is actually using Copilot.

Instead of a lengthy analysis of tools, run a short trial on one real project. Choose a project that is just starting and has at least five people on the team. The steps below will settle the question on the facts, not on suppliers’ presentations.

If, after four weeks, the missing features are only “nice to have”, stay with Microsoft 365. If things are missing without which the team cannot work, you have a ready list of requirements for talking to the supplier of another tool.