We sell Project Professional, so you might expect us to recommend it to everyone. We do not. Plenty of teams buy it, use two features and go back to Excel. Here is the honest comparison we give customers who ask.
Excel: the tool you already own
Excel is where most plans start, and for a surprising number of teams it is where they should stay. A one-tab plan with dates, owners and a status column, plus conditional formatting for overdue items, covers a renovation, a product launch or a semester of coursework.
Excel struggles when tasks depend on each other. Move one date and you are manually shifting twenty others. There is no concept of a critical path, resources or baselines — you can build them, but every one is a formula you maintain.
Planner: light, shared, included with Microsoft 365
Planner (now merged into the Microsoft Planner app in Teams) gives a team a Kanban board, checklists, due dates and a simple chart view. It is included with business Microsoft 365 plans, works in a browser and on phones, and needs zero training.
Planner struggles when you need a schedule rather than a to-do list: dependencies, effort in hours, who is over-allocated next month, a Gantt chart for a client. The premium Planner tier adds some of this on a monthly fee.
Project Professional: the scheduling engine
Desktop Project is a scheduling engine first and a task list second. Give it tasks, durations and dependencies and it calculates the plan: start and finish dates, slack, the critical path. Assign people and it tells you who is over-allocated and can level the plan for you. Save a baseline and it shows exactly where you have slipped. Reports and Gantt charts are built in and client-ready.
Project struggles when the team wants to edit the plan collaboratively from phones. It is a desktop Windows application; sharing means saving to SharePoint/OneDrive or connecting to Project Online or Project Server (which Professional supports).
A quick decision guide
- Fewer than 30 tasks, no real dependencies → Excel.
- A team that needs a shared board and reminders → Planner.
- Dependencies, a deadline you are contractually bound to, resources to balance, or a client who expects a Gantt chart → Project Professional.
- You run many projects and need portfolio views → Project Online / Project for the web (subscription), with desktop Project as the power tool.
Which Project version?
If you are buying today, Project Professional 2024 is the default: it is supported until October 2029. Project 2021 makes sense when the rest of the office is on Office 2021 and you want matching behaviour. Project 2019 is the cheapest, but Microsoft stopped patching it in October 2025 — we keep it for customers with a specific need and say so clearly on the product page. The version comparison lays the three side by side.
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