On 30 September 2026, Microsoft switches Project Online off. Access to the service goes with it, and so does the project data that has been living inside it.
That is the whole fact, and it does not need decoration. The date is fixed, it is public, and it is close. Whatever is sitting in Project Online today, schedules, task lists, project history, is only reachable through a service Microsoft has already scheduled to disappear. If your organisation still runs projects there, this is not a warning about something that might happen.
It is a countdown to something that will.
Where Microsoft points you next
Microsoft's own answer for what comes after Project Online is not a straight swap. Project for the Web, the product Microsoft built as the next generation of Project, retired in August 2025. What Microsoft offers today in its place, and what the premium tier is now branded, is Planner Premium.
That is worth sitting with before you assume it covers the same ground. A tool built for managing projects is being followed by the premium tier of a task app. Whether that is enough depends entirely on what you actually used Project Online for, and the honest answer for most PMOs is that it does not cover the same ground. More on why below.
The honest limit, said here and not on a call
There is no tool we have found, ours or anyone else's, that lifts a Project Online project's full history out of the service and lands it somewhere new intact. If a vendor tells you they can move your Project Online data out, ask them to show you the tool actually doing it, against real data, before you take the claim on faith. We do not have that tool. We are not going to imply we do to make this an easier conversation, and a workspace built on that implication would not be worth much anyway. This is the part of the post that does not help us, and it is why the rest of it is worth reading.
Two different problems
Once the history question is out of the way, it is worth separating what is actually being compared. Scheduling and workspace are two different problems, and Planner Premium only answers one of them.
Planner Premium answers what tasks exist, in what order, and by when. It does not answer where the project's documents live, who has access to them, what the risks are, who the stakeholders are, or what was decided along the way and why. Those are workspace questions, not scheduling questions, and a scheduling tool getting better at scheduling does not make them go away.
Why that will not change on its own
That gap is not a missing feature waiting on a future update. It is structural. Planner Premium stores its data in Dataverse, not SharePoint, and a Dataverse record is not a SharePoint site. There is no project site attached to a Planner Premium plan, no document library, no content
types, no site columns, no navigation, and no permissions model built around the project. Those are the pieces that would need to exist for Planner Premium to answer the workspace questions above, and none of them are part of what it is.
That means the gap does not close by waiting. Planner Premium can get a better Gantt-style view, a faster board, more fields, and it will still have no project site behind it, because that was never what it was built to be.
What a project workspace looks like instead
A SharePoint project workspace is a different kind of thing entirely: a site built for one project, with its own document library, its own content types and site columns already set up for what that project needs, its own navigation, and default folders already in place. A Planner board
sits inside it, seeded with the site's own starting tasks, and the site links back to a central project registry so the record of what projects exist stays accurate instead of becoming a list nobody trusts.
This does not replace the Planner entitlement already included with most Microsoft 365 licences. It rides on it. The board is still a Planner board, opened the way your team already opens one. What changes is everything around it: the site the board lives inside, the documents that sit next to it, and the record that ties the two together.
None of this reaches back into Project Online. It is not a migration, and it does not claim to be one. It is where your next project lives, built correctly from the start, inside the Microsoft 365 you already have.
If Project Online is still where your projects live, get in touch!
