Microsoft Planner is a software program integrated into the Microsoft Suite and costs no additional funds to use. Once logged into our Okta instance, we have access to MS Planner. Recently, we were mandated to move away from Monday.com for project management software, and our Corporate IT team suggested we replace it with MS Planner. After extensive research and experimentation, we quickly found that MS Planner is an inferior planning tool and is certainly not a project management tool. It is a very elementary task list... and I mean *really* elementary. I prefer to use sticky notes at my desk rather than MS Planner. In short, there are very few use cases for a sophisticated SaaS business to use MS Planner.
Pros
Friendly UI.
Integration with Outlook.
Simple to-do list.
Cons
Customizations of any kind.
Grouping of items in grid view.
Timeline column instead of start date/end date.
Savable templates.
Not a project management tool.
Likelihood to Recommend
There are a few examples where MS Planner would be suitable for employees at a mature organization. In my opinion, if you have Outlook or Teams, you already have built-in calendars and to-do lists. If you need a project management tool, you have two options: either pay for MS Project or use an alternative tool like Monday, Asana, or Jira. Regardless, their free versions are much more sophisticated than Microsoft's (MS Planner). Any team wishing to put together a halfway-decent project management board will need to look elsewhere, as MS Planner is only suitable for a personal to-do list.
We currently use it for our content assignments. A piece of content is assigned to a user to create, from there it is then assigned to another user for editing and then to another user for publishing on the website, and then finally to push to our social channels. It is great to use in conjunction with our SharePoint as you can link documents to the tasks. We have our content grouped by product type so we know how much content for each of our products we are creating.
Pros
Categorizing channels and product types
Assigning participants allowing commenting
Attaching documents and files
Cons
Would be nice to see a calendar view instead of a list view
Permissions aren't configurable, anyone can delete any task at any time and there is no recycle bin
Notifications aren't great, you have to be attached as an owner to a task to see comments and be notified of changes, and even then notifications aren't shown for a lot of things
Likelihood to Recommend
My rating is higher because as a tool that is included in our Office 365 / SharePoint account, it allows us to manage our content workflow from planning to publication without having to spend money on additional tools. With 80+ users needing to have access to this, purchasing an outside tool would be pretty costly, and this is a decent alternative. That being said, there are probably much better tools out there for content management/assignment.
