On September 5, 2025, Microsoft officially announced what many of us in the PPM world had feared: Project Online will be permanently retired on September 30, 2026. No safety net. No read-only mode. Your projects, your data, your portfolio governance — gone.
After that date, you will no longer be able to access your projects or any associated data within the service. For organizations with hundreds of active projects, years of historical data, and deeply embedded workflows, this isn't just an IT housekeeping task — it's a high-stakes strategic decision with six- and seven-figure implications.
I've been working in the Microsoft Project Online and Project Server space for 15 years. I founded two companies in this ecosystem — FluentPro and PPM Express. I've helped hundreds of organizations navigate migrations, upgrades, and platform decisions. And what I'm seeing right now concerns me deeply.
The Critical Timeline You Cannot Ignore
Microsoft has laid out a firm sequence of deadlines, and each one reduces your options further:
October 1, 2025 (Already Passed) — End of sale for Project Online-only SKUs to new customers. No new licenses available.
April 2, 2026 (Imminent) — SharePoint 2013 workflows fully retired. Approvals, change controls, and onboarding automations built on these workflows will stop working — potentially breaking your project governance six months before the final cutoff.
April 1, 2026 — Existing customers can no longer create new Project Online tenants.
September 30, 2026 (Hard Deadline) — Project Online goes permanently dark. All data, projects, workflows, and access become inaccessible. No extensions. No recovery.
The Three Paths Microsoft Gives You (and What They Don't Tell You)
Microsoft's official guidance pushes you toward three options. Let's be honest about what each one actually entails — not the marketing version, but the reality your PMO will face on Monday morning.
Path 1: Microsoft Planner (with Premium Licenses)
Microsoft is heavily promoting Planner as the modern, AI-powered successor to Project Online. And for lightweight task management and team collaboration, it's a fine tool. But here's the uncomfortable truth: Planner Premium is not a full Project Online replacement.
If your organization relies on fixed-units scheduling, complex dependency types (start-to-start, finish-to-finish, start-to-finish), critical path analysis, earned value management, detailed resource capacity planning, or portfolio-level governance, Planner Premium will feel like a significant step backward. It has hard limits — 3,000 tasks per project, 10 custom fields, 20 dependencies per project. For mid-to-large organizations, those limits are deal-breakers.
And then there's the cost. Planner Plan 3 (which most project managers need) runs $30/user/month. Plan 5 for portfolio management is $55/user/month. For an organization with 100 users, that's $36,000–$66,000 per year in licensing alone — before you spend a dollar on migration, consulting, or the Power Apps customizations you'll inevitably need to fill the feature gaps.
Path 2: Project Server Subscription Edition (PSSE)
PSSE is the on-premises continuation of the Project Server line. It runs on SharePoint Server Subscription Edition and offers the most feature parity with Project Online. For Fortune 500 companies with thousands of users and dedicated IT teams, PSSE can make sense.
But for everyone else? You're buying back into on-premises infrastructure: Windows Server licenses, SQL Server licenses, SharePoint Enterprise CALs, Project Server CALs, plus the hardware, maintenance, and IT staff to keep it running. Microsoft doesn't even publish public pricing — you have to go through a licensing partner, and real-world costs typically run into the hundreds of thousands for medium-sized deployments.
Plus, you're betting on a platform whose underlying architecture (SharePoint Server) is itself aging. Microsoft's innovation energy is clearly directed at cloud-first services, not on-premises SharePoint. You may be buying yourself another migration problem in 5–7 years.
Path 3: Planner + Power Apps (The "Build It Yourself" Approach)
This is the path many consultancies are pushing because, frankly, it generates the most billable hours. The idea is to use Planner as the task engine, then build all the portfolio management, governance, and reporting capabilities you need using Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dataverse.
In theory, it's flexible. In practice, it's a custom development project masquerading as a platform migration. Organizations routinely spend $100K–$200K+ on consulting fees, plus ongoing maintenance costs for a bespoke system that only your developers understand.
The Real Cost Comparison: 3-Year Total Cost of Ownership
Let's stop talking in abstractions and put real numbers on the table for a typical mid-market organization with 100 users over three years:
Planner + Power Apps: $243K–$538K (licensing $36K–$66K/yr + migration $50K–$150K + custom dev $40K–$100K + maintenance $15K–$30K/yr)
Project Server SE: $235K–$570K (licensing $40K–$80K/yr + migration $30K–$100K + infrastructure $15K–$30K/yr + maintenance $20K–$40K/yr)
PPM Express: $72K ($24K/yr flat + $0 migration + $0 infrastructure + $0 maintenance)
Read that bottom line again. The cost difference isn't marginal — it's an order of magnitude.
Why We Built PPM Express This Way
After 15 years watching organizations struggle with Microsoft's PPM ecosystem, I knew exactly what Project Online users actually care about — because I spent the first decade of my career building tools for them.
When we designed PPM Express, we preserved every scheduling feature that Project Online users rely on daily: fixed units schedules, all four dependency types (FS, FF, SS, SF), critical path calculation, slack analysis, baselines, cross-project links, and the ability to open projects directly in Project Desktop. These aren't checkbox features — they're the backbone of how project managers actually work.
Then we added what Project Online could never deliver because of its legacy architecture: built-in AI and Copilot capabilities, native integration with Microsoft Planner and Teams, and a modern web interface that doesn't require SharePoint.
What You Keep When You Move to PPM Express
Scheduling: Fixed units, fixed duration, fixed work task types. All four dependency types with lead and lag times. Critical path highlighting. Slack calculation. Automatic and manual scheduling modes.
Portfolio Management: Multi-project dashboards, cross-project dependencies, resource capacity planning, portfolio-level reporting and analytics.
Baselines and Tracking: Save and compare baselines. Variance analysis. Percentage complete tracking with multiple methods. 50+ built-in Power BI reports.
Integration: Native Planner integration, Teams embedding, Project Desktop compatibility (open .mpp files directly), Power BI connectivity.
AI and Copilot: AI-powered risk identification, schedule optimization suggestions, resource allocation recommendations, and natural language project queries.
Migration: One-click migration brings over your projects, risks, issues, and project site content. Free migration tools included. Migration cost: $0.
ROI Calculations: Real-World Examples
For a mid-market organization with 150 Project Online users:
Scenario 1 — Planner + Vendor Power App vs PPM Express: Year 1 cost $203K vs $29K. 3-year total $459K vs $77K. 3-year savings: $382K.
Scenario 2 — Planner Premium standalone vs PPM Express: Year 1 cost $99K vs $24K. 3-year total $247K vs $72K. 3-year savings: $175K.
Whether you compare against the full vendor Power App stack or Planner Premium alone, the math points in the same direction. PPM Express delivers more capability at a fraction of the cost — and that gap only widens as your user count grows, since PPM Express pricing stays flat regardless of headcount.
Hidden Costs Nobody Mentions
Opportunity Cost of Delayed Decisions: Every month spent evaluating, negotiating, and planning a complex migration is a month your PMO isn't improving processes or delivering value. The organizations that move decisively reclaim those months for actual project execution.
Risk of Data Loss: Complex migrations involving manual data extraction, transformation, and loading inevitably lose something — custom fields, historical baselines, risk registers, issue logs. PPM Express's automated migration preserves your complete project dataset because we built the migration engine specifically for this purpose.
Vendor Lock-In with Custom Builds: A Power Apps solution built by Consultant A can rarely be maintained by Consultant B without significant reverse-engineering. You're locked into a relationship — and the pricing power shifts to the vendor once you're live and dependent on their customizations.
Decision Framework: Is PPM Express Right for You?
PPM Express is the right choice if your organization matches most of these criteria: you currently use Project Online and need feature parity (not a downgrade), your team uses Project Desktop and needs continued .mpp compatibility, you need all dependency types, critical path, baselines, and resource management, your budget is measured in tens of thousands not hundreds of thousands, you want migration completed in days not months, you value unlimited users without per-seat scaling costs, and you want native Planner, Teams, and AI/Copilot integration.
The traditional Microsoft path may be better if you're a Fortune 500 with 5,000+ users and existing Enterprise Agreements, you need deep Dynamics 365 Project Operations integration, or you have a large internal IT team that prefers on-premises control.
Ready to See What a $0 Migration Looks Like?
Book a 30-minute demo. We'll show you the one-click migration from Project Online, walk through every scheduling feature you rely on, and provide a custom ROI calculation for your organization. Visit ppm.express/demo to get started.
Related reading: Project Online Shuts Down in 2026: Here's Your Full Migration Playbook — our comprehensive guide covering all three migration landing zones, a five-phase migration framework, and frequently asked questions.
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