Microsoft Planner vs To Do: Which One Should You Use?
Microsoft ships two task products and the names don’t help. Planner and To Do both hold tasks, both live in Microsoft 365, and both show up in Teams. People pick one, hit a wall, and assume they chose wrong.
They’re not competitors. The dividing line is ownership: To Do is what you owe, Planner is what the team owes.
The one-line difference
Microsoft To Do is a personal task list. Tasks belong to you, you decide what to do today, and nobody is tracking the list’s completion rate.
Microsoft Planner is team task management. Tasks belong to a plan, they’re assigned to people, and the point is visibility across the group.
If a task disappearing would only affect you, it’s a To Do task. If someone would ask about it in a status meeting, it’s a Planner task.
Where they differ in practice
Structure. To Do gives you lists, optionally grouped, and steps inside a task. Planner gives you plans containing buckets on a board, so you can model stages such as Not Started, In Progress, and Blocked, and drag cards between them.
Assignment. To Do can share a list and assign a task to a member, and that’s the extent of it. Planner treats assignment as a first-class concept, with per-person filtering, multiple assignees, and views built around who owns what.
Views. To Do has lists and smart lists. Planner has board, chart, grid, and schedule views, including a burn-down style chart of plan progress. That reporting layer is a large part of why Planner exists.
Licensing. To Do is free with any Microsoft account, personal or work. Planner’s meaningful functionality is tied to a Microsoft 365 subscription, and the fuller Planner experience in Teams sits with the paid plans. This alone decides it for a lot of individuals and very small teams.
Where they live. To Do has dedicated apps on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and web, plus the My Day panel inside Outlook. Planner is used mostly inside Teams and on the web, and it’s the app you open when a project needs a status, not when you need to know what to do next.
How tasks flow between them
The two are connected, and the direction is the thing to remember.
Planner tasks assigned to you appear in To Do’s Assigned to me smart list. You can see them, add them to My Day, and complete them from To Do, and the completion registers back in Planner.
The reverse does not happen. Creating a task in To Do never puts it on a Planner board. There is no promoting a personal task into a team plan.
That asymmetry is deliberate and it gives you the intended workflow: the team plans in Planner, and each person’s slice of it lands in the personal list they actually look at every morning, alongside their own private tasks and their flagged emails.
Which to use
Use To Do if the tasks are yours, if you live in Outlook and want flagged emails to become tasks, if you want a daily plan that resets, or if you have no Microsoft 365 subscription.
Use Planner if several people share the work, if you need to see who’s doing what without asking, if the work moves through stages, or if someone needs a progress view.
Use both, which is what Microsoft intends. Plan the team’s work in Planner, then work your day out of To Do, where your assigned Planner tasks show up next to everything else you owe.
Look past both when the work is really a project with dependencies and a critical path. Planner deliberately stops short of that, and pushing it there is how plans turn into unmaintained boards.
The gap neither one fills
Both products are stores. They hold tasks well and they do nothing until a human opens them.
The recurring failure is capture and follow-through: the task mentioned mid-email that nobody types in, and the completed task that should have triggered an update to someone else. Outlook’s flag covers the narrow case where an entire email is the task, and Planner has no equivalent at all.
Carly works on that layer. Its event-triggered workflows fire when something happens, such as an email arriving or a meeting ending, and an AI agent can read the content and work out what the task is rather than matching a keyword. Workflow steps are free, and AI agents start at $35/month.
On connectivity, be aware of what’s true today: Carly has no native Microsoft To Do or Planner connector. Both are reachable through the Microsoft Graph API using your own credentials, pasted on the integrations page, and Composio is a third route. If a first-class connector would change your decision, raise it on a call with the team.
FAQ
Is Microsoft Planner replacing Microsoft To Do?
No. They target different jobs, and the integration between them assumes both exist. Planner tasks assigned to you flow into To Do, which only makes sense if To Do remains the personal layer.
Do Microsoft To Do tasks appear in Planner?
No. The flow is one directional. Planner tasks assigned to you appear in To Do’s “Assigned to me” list, but tasks created in To Do never appear on a Planner board.
Is Microsoft Planner free?
Its useful functionality depends on a Microsoft 365 subscription, and the fuller experience sits with paid plans. Microsoft To Do, by contrast, is free with any Microsoft account.
Can I use Planner for personal tasks?
You can, but the structure fights you. Boards, buckets, and assignment views are built for shared visibility, and none of that helps a list only you read. To Do is lighter for the same job.
Which one shows up in Microsoft Teams?
Both, in different places. Planner is the task board app inside a team, while To Do surfaces your personal tasks. The Teams tasks experience pulls from both.
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