Most of the Microsoft 365 suite has made the transition to the cloud. But if you’re a project manager who actually uses the more advanced capabilities of Microsoft Project, there still isn’t a comparable cloud version of the product.

Yes, there is Microsoft Planner. And Microsoft has continued to add functionality to Planner. But let’s be realistic: Planner is not a cloud version of Microsoft Project.

Microsoft itself effectively acknowledges this. Its current Planner and Project Plan 3 offering describes Project as being for “advanced project management and execution,” distinct from Planner. Planner’s higher tiers now include features such as Gantt charts, dependencies, baselines and critical path, but there remains a significant gap between these capabilities and the sophisticated scheduling, resource and cost management available in Project desktop.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s direction of travel has become fairly clear. Project for the web has been absorbed into Planner, Project Online has been retired, and Microsoft’s recent investment in Planner has focused heavily on collaboration, Microsoft 365 integration and AI capabilities.

From the outside, this looks less like Microsoft gradually building a cloud-based successor to Project and more like a strategic decision not to compete seriously in that market.

And perhaps that makes commercial sense. By the time Microsoft showed any serious signs of moving Project to the cloud, the project-management market was already crowded with products such as Smartsheet, Monday.com, Asana and Jira. Microsoft may have decided there was simply not enough upside in rebuilding the full capabilities of Project as another competing cloud platform when so many PMs had already jumped to other platforms.

Maybe this was a strategic decision. Maybe Microsoft was so focused on the broad-based Office apps it just missed the boat with Project. Maybe this is one of those classic business school case studies where smaller start-ups had the focus and agility to capture the opportunity in the niche market of project management faster than the massive incumbent.

But for project managers like me, the outcome is much the same.

If you’ve spent years using Microsoft Project to develop complex schedules, model dependencies, identify critical paths, manage resources and understand the consequences of schedule changes, Planner isn’t really a replacement. It’s a different product designed around a different philosophy.

And I think that’s a bit of a missed opportunity.

Microsoft already had one of the most established professional project-scheduling tools in the market. A genuinely cloud-native version of Project, integrated properly with Teams, SharePoint, Power BI, Power Automate and the broader Microsoft 365 ecosystem, could have been an extraordinarily useful platform.

Instead, in 2026, professional project managers working in heavily Microsoft-based organisations are still faced with an odd choice: keep using a powerful desktop application that increasingly feels disconnected from the rest of Microsoft 365, accept the considerably lighter capabilities of Planner, or look elsewhere.

For a company that has done so much to move work into the cloud, Microsoft Project remains a surprisingly conspicuous exception.