Few Microsoft product lines have been renamed as often as the project and task management family. "To Do" became part of Planner, the old "Tasks by Planner" app got folded into a single Planner experience, "Project for the web" was rebranded as Planner Premium, and the desktop-grade Project plans were renumbered into Plan 3 and Plan 5. The result is a genuinely confusing shelf, and most of the questions we field from Australian teams boil down to one thing: which of these do we actually have to pay for, and which one do we need?
This guide untangles the four things people mean when they say "Microsoft Project" in 2026 — basic Planner, Planner Premium, Project Plan 3 and Project Plan 5 — with indicative Australian pricing and a practical view of who each one suits. All prices below are AUD ex GST and per user per month unless stated.
The basic Planner you already pay for
If your organisation has Microsoft 365 (Business Standard, Business Premium, or an E1/E3/E5 enterprise plan), you already have the rebranded Planner at no extra cost. This is the everyday task app that lives inside Teams and on the web. It gives you boards, buckets, simple task assignment, due dates, basic charts and a personal "My Tasks" view that pulls together To Do items, flagged Outlook email and tasks assigned to you across plans.
For the vast majority of teams running stand-ups, marketing calendars, onboarding checklists and light operational work, this is enough. It is not a scheduling engine — there are no dependencies, no critical path, no resource levelling — but it is a perfectly good shared to-do list with a Kanban view. The mistake we see most often is teams paying for a premium tier to get features they would never use, when free Planner already covers the work.
Planner Premium — the old "Project for the web"
Planner Premium is the tier that used to be sold as Project Plan 1 and, before that, "Project for the web". It is a cloud-only, browser-based project tool that sits a clear step above basic Planner. You get proper project schedules with task dependencies, a timeline (Gantt-style) view, grid and board views, goals, and — increasingly the headline reason people buy it — Copilot in Planner for drafting plans and summarising status.
Indicative pricing is around AUD $16 per user per month, billed annually (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase; this is converted from the long-standing USD $10 list price and the official AUD figure can differ). You licence only the people who build and manage plans, not everyone who simply views or updates tasks, which keeps the cost contained.
Project Plan 3 — the desktop client returns
Project Plan 3 (formerly Project Online Professional) is where you cross from "web app" into "professional project management tool". It includes everything in Planner Premium plus the installed Project desktop client for Windows — the full-fat application that long-time project managers know, with detailed scheduling, baselines, resource management, custom reporting and the ability to publish to Project Online and SharePoint.
Indicative pricing is around AUD $47 per user per month (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase; converted from the USD $30 list price). The question we are most often asked here is simply "do I need Project Plan 3?" The honest answer for most people is no. You need Plan 3 if you have one or more dedicated project managers who genuinely live in Gantt charts, manage resource allocation across complex schedules, or have to interoperate with the desktop .mpp file format that contractors and government tenders still expect. If your "project management" is a board of tasks with due dates, Plan 3 is overkill.
Project Plan 5 — portfolio and PMO territory
Project Plan 5 (formerly Project Online Premium) is the enterprise portfolio tier. It adds portfolio selection and optimisation, demand management, enterprise resource management and the full Project Online service on top of everything in Plan 3. Indicative pricing is around AUD $87 per user per month (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase; converted from the USD $55 list price).
Plan 5 is for organisations running a formal PMO that needs to weigh competing project proposals, model resource capacity across a whole portfolio, and report on it centrally. If you are not doing portfolio-level optimisation, you are paying for governance machinery you will not switch on. In practice we see Plan 5 in larger enterprises and a handful of construction, engineering and government-adjacent organisations — rarely in the small-to-mid business space.
What we'd actually do
Start from the work, not the licence. Map who in your organisation does what: most people only need to see and update tasks, a smaller group builds and manages plans, and a very small group (often zero in an SMB) runs formal scheduled projects. That shape tells you almost everything.
- Everyone gets basic Planner free with your existing Microsoft 365 — no action, no spend.
- Give Planner Premium to the handful of people who build project schedules and want Copilot drafting and dependencies in the browser. This covers a surprising share of "we need Project" requests.
- Reserve Project Plan 3 for genuine, named project managers who need the desktop client, baselines and .mpp interoperability — licence them individually, not the whole team.
- Only consider Project Plan 5 if you run a real PMO doing portfolio optimisation and enterprise resource management.
A note on the Copilot factor
A lot of the 2026 interest in Planner Premium is driven by Copilot in Planner rather than by the scheduling features themselves. Copilot can draft a plan from a goal, generate tasks, and summarise where a project is up to. That can be worth the Premium step on its own for a planning lead — but it is a different question from "do we need the Project desktop client". Be clear about which capability you are actually buying, because the two get conflated constantly and lead to over-licensing.
Watch the moving prices
Microsoft has been adjusting Australian list prices and packaging across the 365 stack, and partners price the same SKUs differently depending on commitment term (monthly vs annual) and channel (NCE through a partner vs buying direct). Treat every figure here as a planning estimate, confirm the exact AUD number on your quote or in the admin centre before you commit, and check whether annual billing changes the effective per-user cost. The naming may settle eventually; the pricing rarely sits still for long.