Microsoft Planner Pricing, Features, Reviews & Comparison of Alternatives

Pros
For some time before finding Planner I had wished for a tool that allowed me to remotely monitor how my team members were progressing against their to do lists without having to nag and ask them directly. Not only does Planner allow you to do this but it can create goals and objectives for people and allow managers to monitor their productivity. Asides from this you can also create project mapping tools and upload all the relevant files for a project, assigning smaller tasks to different team members.

Cons
It took some time to convince my team of its benefits. It's probably more useful for managers than team members. It can also make an additional layer of activity for team members to regularly check which some may find overbearing and not helpful.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
I like that the system is accessible on any device. The design is straightforward to use and is moderately feature rich.

Cons
There are some core missing features. You can't see all tasks by person assigned, and you can't see all tasks assigned to a team across multiple plans. The team aspect of Planner is minimal and needs to grow. Management features need to be added.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
Mmm, easy to install? Colourful? A great application of a pivot table?

Cons
Not what I expected. Neglects their entire target market. Quite useless, in the true sense of the word. I watched a captivating presentation given by a MS employee about how Planner is going to be the 'quot;go-between'quot; with this app, that is, go between Tasks, and MS Project. My interest was immediately piqued. I have many small business clients, ran by over-stressed small business owners who only use their phones, and only have time to take in limited amounts of information. This app is useless on mobile. It has no dashboard feature, which is the second most important feature my clients need. The most important feature, and which is most irritating of all, is that there is no way to sync with Microsoft Outlook! Pardon my vulgarity, but 'quot;double you tea F'quot;?! This app is therefor useless, except for one-man-show businesses that spends most of their time at their desks...whom should be quite satisfied by using Outlook To-Do lists already. Read the rest of the Planner reviews on site again. Most refer to the Office 365 software as great, and I agree with that, but count Planner out of it.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 0/10

Pros
Microsoft Planner is a nice addition to the Microsoft Suite but as a Mac user I find the interface can be cumbersome. The cost of purchasing an additional platform outweighs any inherent benefit.

Cons
Ease of interface with Mac, constant updates, almost daily, and cost are three barriers to my continued use.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
Planner was designed to provide many of the features of Wrike that was drawing customers away from Microsoft. It's an easy to use task management system. You can collaborate with teammates and keep track of different tasks.

Cons
Unfortunately, some of the critical capabilities like setting recurring tasks, and saving dashboard views of items to be completed, have not yet made it to Planner.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 6/10