Microsoft Project vs Plane
Microsoft Project and Plane are both project management software. Microsoft Project is a commercial product from Microsoft. Plane is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 62k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Microsoft Project when
- Professional project managers in construction, engineering or government need formal schedules and critical-path planning.
- Pick Plane when
- A product or engineering team wants a modern Jira alternative it can self-host.
Side by side
Microsoft's scheduling software for detailed project plans with tasks, dependencies, critical path, resources and baselines.
A project management tool for issues, cycles, modules, roadmaps, docs and intake, positioned against Jira and Linear.
Microsoft is moving web features into Planner, and the desktop app is costly and Windows-only.
Several features are reserved for paid editions, and self-hosting runs Postgres, Valkey, RabbitMQ and object storage.
Production-ready (both)
Desktop app and cloud service
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Not published
TypeScript, React, Python, Django, PostgreSQL and RabbitMQ
Closed source, sold by Microsoft
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
1.2k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
62k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 4 years ago, latest release v1.4.3.
Other comparisons
More project management tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.