Microsoft Planner as a Kanban Board: Where It Works and Where It Stops

Microsoft Planner is a kanban board if you use its Board view with buckets as the columns, and for a team that already lives in Microsoft 365 and Teams it is often the simplest one to start with: it comes with most business subscriptions, sits in a Teams channel as a tab, and needs no new account. It does less than a dedicated kanban board. Microsoft’s documentation describes no work-in-progress limits, a bucket and a task’s progress are two separate fields, task history is a premium feature, and the API that an AI assistant would use reaches basic plans only. For a small team moving a few dozen tasks, none of that may matter. For a team that manages flow, it will.

What Planner is today

Planner changed a great deal in 2024. Microsoft describes the new Planner as a single work management experience that brings together Microsoft To Do, the old Planner, Microsoft Project and Copilot. In April 2024 the Teams app called Tasks by Planner and To Do was renamed Planner, and the new Planner for the web followed later that year. Microsoft’s Planner guide for admins↗ (opens in a new tab) lists the subscriptions that include it, such as Microsoft 365 Business Basic and Business Standard and Office 365 E1, E3 and E5.

There are now two kinds of plan. Basic plans come with a Microsoft 365 licence and have four views: Grid, Board, Schedule and Charts. Premium plans need a Planner Plan 1 licence, formerly Project Plan 1, to create, and the advanced features come with Planner and Project Plan 3 or Plan 5. Premium adds a Timeline (Gantt) view, a People view, goals, dependencies, milestones, custom fields, conditional colouring, sprints with backlogs, and task history. Microsoft’s basic vs premium comparison↗ (opens in a new tab) has the full list, and it moves, so check it before you choose.

How the Board view maps to kanban

The Board view groups task cards into columns, and you choose what the columns are with Group by: bucket, progress, due date, priority, labels or assigned to. Two of those behave like kanban columns:

• Buckets are columns you name yourself. Microsoft suggests them for phases, types of work or departments; for kanban you name them after the stages your work passes through. You can drag cards between buckets and drag buckets into a new order. A basic plan can have up to 200.
• Progress has three fixed values: Not started, In progress and Completed. Grouping by progress gives you a three-column board where dragging a card changes its status.

The catch is that bucket and progress are separate fields. A card can sit in a bucket called Done while its progress still says In progress, and completed tasks are tucked away at the bottom of their bucket behind Show completed. Decide which field is your workflow. For most teams it is buckets, with progress set to Completed only when a card reaches the last bucket. Microsoft’s bucket guide↗ (opens in a new tab) shows how to add and reorder them.

Around the columns, a task has labels (up to 25 per plan, each a colour you can rename), a priority of Urgent, Important, Medium or Low, a due date, a checklist and assignees. Labels are the closest thing Planner has to kinds of work, such as bug, request or blocked.

Setting up a Planner kanban board in Teams

1. In the Teams channel for the team, select Add a tab, then Apps, then Planner, and Save. Microsoft’s Teams tab instructions↗ (opens in a new tab) also cover choosing an existing plan shared with the channel instead.
2. Create a basic plan, unless you already know you need premium features.
3. Open the Board view, set Group by to Bucket, and rename the default bucket. Add buckets for your stages: for example Backlog, Ready, Doing, Waiting and Done.
4. Rename four or five labels for the kinds of work you track, and leave the rest unused.
5. Agree a rule for Doing, such as no more than two cards per person, and write it in the channel so it is visible. Planner will not enforce it.
6. Agree that a card moved to Done is also marked Completed, so the charts and the To Do lists agree with the board.

Where Planner stops

• No WIP limits. Neither the basic nor the premium documentation describes a column or bucket limit, so the limit lives in a team agreement.
• Columns and status disagree. Buckets and progress are separate, as above; a dedicated kanban board has one field for where a card is.
• History is premium. Task history is listed among the premium plan features, so on a basic plan you have little record of who moved what, and when.
• Flow charts are basic. The Charts view counts tasks by status, priority, bucket and member; Microsoft does not describe cumulative flow or cycle-time reports for it.
• Size limits exist. A plan holds up to 9,000 tasks, 3,000 of them active, and a task can have up to 20 assignees and 20 checklist items, according to Microsoft’s published Planner limits↗ (opens in a new tab).
• Premium plans are closed to the API. The Planner API documentation↗ (opens in a new tab) says premium plans and tasks are not available through Microsoft Graph; only basic plans are.

The To Do connection, and AI assistants

Planner and Microsoft To Do share one idea of your own tasks. In To Do, turn on the Assigned to me smart list and switch Planner on under Connected apps in settings, and every Planner task assigned to you appears there, where you can rename it, tick off checklist items, change its due date or add it to My Day. It makes Planner work well as the team’s board and To Do as each person’s list.

For AI assistants the picture is thinner. An assistant that works with Planner does so through the Microsoft Graph Planner API, which covers basic plans, or through a community-built MCP server that wraps it. Microsoft To Do and MCP goes through what Microsoft ships for MCP today, which includes no Planner server, and Claude and Microsoft 365 covers what Claude’s own connector reaches. Either way, the assistant acts through a person’s or an app’s Microsoft 365 permissions, not as a board member with its own role.

When Planner fits a Microsoft 365 team

Planner fits well when the team already works in Teams, the work is mostly straightforward tasks with owners and dates, and nobody wants another login. It is especially good for work outside software: office moves, events, onboarding, a departmental to-do board. It also fits organisations that want everything inside their Microsoft 365 tenant for policy reasons.

It fits less well when the team manages flow rather than a list of tasks, when a limit on work in progress is the point of the board, when you need a record of every change on a basic plan, or when an AI assistant is doing real work and should be a named member with its own role.

Planner and fenbs, side by side

fenbs is not part of Microsoft 365 and has no Teams tab, so for a team that wants everything in Teams, Planner is the better fit. Where fenbs differs is in the board itself. It has one field for where a task is, four fixed lanes, To Do, Next Up, In Progress and Completed, so a card cannot say one thing on the board and another in its status. When a task reaches Completed, the board records how it ended: Completed, Won’t fix, Duplicate, Cannot reproduce or Obsolete. History records every change with who made it, on every board. Like Planner it has no WIP limits, and it also has no due dates, sprints or Gantt view. AI assistants such as Claude or Copilot connect over MCP as members with a role, and their changes are signed with their names. If you are moving a Planner export across, Add many takes a pasted list, one task per line.