The "what" is clear: Microsoft Project Online will sunset September 30th, 2026. Now, it's time for organizations to think about the "how." How do you evaluate your next steps when the feature gaps between Project Online and its potential replacements are unclear, significant, and vital to your daily operations?
Our comparison chart offers a look into the technical and tactical details you need to make a confident, strategic decision.
Why Feature-Level Analysis Matters
High-level comparisons offer a starting point, but they won’t cut it when you’re evaluating more complex scheduling, resource management, and portfolio management engines built to run enterprise-wide operations.
A feature-level evaluation on the other hand deepens understanding of specific capabilities. Rather than vaguely labeling a platform as ‘modern’ feature-level analysis assesses platforms on things like portfolio-wide resource forecasting, cross-project dependencies, and financial management across costs and benefits.
Here's what organizations are already missing: Today's top replacement options for Microsoft Project Online are unlikely to fill gaps left behind, if not paired with strategic portfolio management capabilities. While Project Online was never marketed as an SPM solution, it did come with portfolio related features that offer higher levels of visibility and control than your standard project execution platform.
This creates an opportunity. By understanding which SPM capabilities were essential to Project Online's effectiveness—and where you'll need to supplement your replacement—this transition is more about evolving your approach rather than just swapping tools.
Conversely, without a deep dive of these types of features and a clear understanding of how to supplement missing SPM capabilities, you risk an expensive misstep when selecting your organization’s Project Online replacement. The comparison in this article is based on comprehensive, technical feature analysis of the systems.
The Main Challenge: You Need a Portfolio Engine, Not Another Task Manager
Microsoft Planner Premium is used here as a reference point as it’s anticipated to be a popular replacement option. But understand that Planner Premium represents what you’ll find across most alternatives: strong project execution features without the SPM layer.
Tools like Microsoft Planner Premium are powerful when it comes to team-based task and work management. But technical analysis shows that they’re not exactly direct replacements for Project Online's project and portfolio management capabilities.
Advanced Scheduling: Project Online offers detailed control over your schedule, especially with Project Professional: Manual and automatic scheduling, 11 baselines across tasks and resources, elapsed durations, and full critical path analysis for your project. Planner Premium uses a more simplified model: One plan level baseline, limited constraint types and no support for elapsed duration or manual task scheduling. For complex projects, this lack of granularity introduces significant risks. Strategic Portfolio Management addresses this by working across multiple execution methods. Whether it’s traditional waterfall scheduling, agile sprints, or quick Kanban workflows, it gives you visibility into all of them so strategy and delivery stay connected.
Resource Management: This is often a major roadblock. Project Online’s enterprise resource pool drives capacity planning—you can manage calendars, define max units, detect over-allocations, track cost rates, and use timesheets. Planner Premium doesn’t currently offer these features. There is no enterprise resource pool and no native overallocation detection. You can assign people to tasks, but you cannot effectively manage their capacity and costs across the portfolio. SPM handles the resource layer by forecasting availability, balancing workload, and preventing bottlenecks based on portfolio priorities. Without it, strategic plans can break down as teams are overcommitted, or skills are misaligned with key initiatives.
Portfolio Management: Here’s where the strategic gap widens. Project Online provides portfolio views, strategic alignment scores, and scenario modeling. Planner Premium does not currently offer these capabilities. It’s designed for project execution, not for prioritizing a portfolio, allocating resources across projects, or modeling the financial impact of different investment scenarios. SPM gives you the decision framework needed for effective portfolio management. Think: stage-gate workflows, clear approval authorities, and real-time dashboards that track OKRs, benefits realization, and risks against strategic goals. Scenario planning and portfolio governance let you run “what if” analysis and adapt your portfolio when conditions change.
Marry Project Execution with Strategy
This isn’t solely about choosing between replacement options—it’s understanding that effective SPM requires two interconnected layers:
Project execution tools handle the day-to-day: task management, team collaboration, schedule tracking. Microsoft Planner Premium, Azure DevOps, and Project Server all do this well, each with different strengths depending on your team’s workflow.
Portfolio Management provides the governance layer: portfolio-wide resource management, strategic alignment, financial modeling, and visibility into which initiatives drive business value. This is what most replacement options won’t provide natively.
NH360 Portfolio Insights (PI) fills this gap and delivers the full spectrum of Strategic Portfolio Management capabilities, far beyond what Project Online ever offered. While Project Online provided a minimal set of portfolio features (roll-ups, limits scoring, etc.) NH360 PI bring comprehensive functionality, including strategic alignment, dynamic impact analysis, flexible assessments and scoring and portfolio wide resource and financial management. It integrates with your chosen project execution platform—whether that’s Planner Premium, Azure DevOps, or Project Server. NH360 Portfolio Insights delivers the "why" behind the "what" by providing visibility into feature utilization, strategic alignment, and transition readiness across your entire portfolio. That means giving flexibility in how teams work, while maintaining the strategic oversight enterprise portfolios need.
Start Planning Now
September 2026 may feel distant, but planning, testing, migration, and deployment of a new tool take time. Here’s what we recommend tackling first:
- Feature audit – Identify your must-have features and evaluate them against market reality. What can your teams not do without?
- Process assessment – Use this transition to assess, streamline, and improve your PPM processes, rather than just lift and shift to a new tool.
- Pilot test – Theory only goes so far. Test leading candidates with real, everyday use cases.
- Migration planning – Understand how you’ll extract years of project data from Project Online. This is complex and time consuming
The bottom line is this: Strategic portfolio management isn’t optional for enterprise organizations. It’s how you connect daily work to business outcomes and ensure resources flow to the highest-value initiatives. Your Project Online replacement strategy needs to account for both execution and strategic oversight, because one without the other will leave you with critical gaps.
Interested in how NH360 Portfolio Insights can integrate with your chosen project execution tool? Let’s talk.
