But then, it started to become clear that this was becoming similar to when Microsoft made Yammer part of the Office 365 suite. But it was designed to be enough, that the average Microsoft 365 user (Office 365 back then) wouldn’t need to look for an external solution.įor a time, things were great. It was never intended to compete with Trello and its clones, never offer the same level of functionality. Microsoft unveiled Planner as an ad-hoc group-based task management tool for the new age. Agile was starting to emerge as a hero, and products such as Trello and Asana were starting to take the spotlight. The world was turning away from the “waterfall” view of managing projects. Microsoft Project was too expensive and difficult to use properly without training, Project Online was providing a cloud alternative but still provided the same challenges and lists in SharePoint had stagnated. We needed a new task management system back then. I’ve been working with Microsoft Planner for many years, since it was originally revealed to the MVP community as “Project Highlander” around 2016.

(UPDATED 4th Feb 2022 with additions to the comparison table, removal of the Power Apps line in the table, link to Gantt chart JSON sample for list view formatting, link to a follow-up post showing how to migrate from Planner to Lists)

Onenote gantt chart