Microsoft Project Online Is Retiring: A Small Team Migration Guide

If you opened your Project Web App last month and noticed the "create new site" button was greyed out, that wasn't a bug. As of April 1, 2026, Microsoft has blocked the creation of new Project Online tenants and PWA sites. The day after — April 2 — SharePoint 2013 workflows stopped running across existing tenants, which quietly broke a lot of stage-gate approvals and status-update flows that PMs had been quietly relying on for years. The full Project Online shutdown lands September 30, 2026. There is no grace period and no read-only mode after that date.

For enterprise PMOs running fifty concurrent capital projects, this is a known migration: pay for Project Plan 5 or Project Server Subscription Edition, port your portfolios, retrain your PMs. Painful, but the path is clear. The harder question is what a Microsoft Project Online alternative small team of five to fifteen people should do — the marketing team, the ops team, the services team, the studio that only ever used Project Online as "shared task list with a Gantt view" because IT bundled it into the tenant. That's the audience this guide is written for.

Why the small-team story is different

Microsoft's own migration pages assume you have a PMO. The recommended path is Planner and Project Plan 3 at $30/user/month for structured project delivery, or Plan 5 at $55/user/month if you want full portfolio management (source: Microsoft pricing documentation). For a 10-person team, Plan 3 is $300/month or $3,600/year. Plan 5 is $550/month or $6,600/year. That's before implementation fees, training, or the Atlassian Intelligence-style AI add-ons Microsoft is layering on top of Copilot.

If you actually use portfolio baselines, demand management, and resource analytics, that's defensible spend. If you used Project Online because someone in IT clicked "yes" to PWA in 2018 and your team learned to live with it, you are about to pay enterprise pricing for "shared Gantt and a task list." That's the trap.

Step 1: Export everything before September 30 — sooner if you can

The shutdown deletes your data. Microsoft's official export path is the ExportProjectUserContent PowerShell script, which a SharePoint admin runs against each PWA site in your tenant. Plan project files, custom fields, resource calendars, and any documents living in PWA-attached SharePoint sites all need to come out separately.

A practical export checklist for a small team:

Save every active project as an .mpp file via Project Desktop. Don't trust that you'll get to it later — Save As everything you've touched in the last two years now.
Export custom fields and lookup tables to Excel. These are the bits that are easy to forget and impossible to reconstruct.
Pull resource availability and calendar data. If you've been tracking who's on PTO and who's allocated to which initiative inside PWA, that history disappears with the tenant.
Audit your SharePoint 2013 workflows separately. They're already gone as of April 2, 2026. If a stage-gate approval, document review, or status-rollup automation stopped working last month, that's why. Document the logic before you forget how it was supposed to work — you'll need to rebuild it in whatever tool you migrate to.
Export Project Web App reports and timesheet history if you've been using either.

Treat the September 30 date as a hard wall. Don't be the team trying to extract data from a service Microsoft is actively decommissioning in week one of October.

Step 2: An honest decision tree by team profile

There is no single right answer. The right answer depends on what you actually used Project Online for. Three paths:

Path A: Stay in the Microsoft stack — if you're already deep in M365

If your team lives in Teams, your documents are in SharePoint, your identity is Entra, and your IT team will not entertain anything outside the tenant: migrate to Planner Premium / Project Plan 3. You'll get a Gantt view, dependencies, and baselines, all bundled into the M365 admin experience your IT team already supports. Plan 5 is only worth the extra $25/user/month if you actually do portfolio management.

The honest tradeoff: Planner is a different product, not a Project Online clone. Custom fields don't carry over cleanly. The vocabulary is different. Your PMs will spend a quarter retraining whether you want them to or not.

Path B: Move to a mid-market PM tool — if you're enterprise-shaped but not Microsoft-shaped

Asana, ClickUp, and Monday.com all want this migration badly and have built dedicated landing pages for it. They're real options if you need their full feature set: forms, automations, reporting dashboards, dozens of view types. Be honest with yourself about whether you'll use any of that.

The honest tradeoff: per-seat pricing follows you here. ClickUp's Brain AI add-on alone is $9/user/month on top of the $7 Unlimited plan. We've covered the per-seat pricing math separately in our piece on why flat-rate project management tools scale better than per-seat, and the ClickUp billing surprises that follow when guest collaborators turn into paid seats. If your team grows from 8 to 20 over the next eighteen months, your bill grows linearly.

Path C: Move to a lighter tool — if Project Online was always overkill

If you're being honest, and Project Online was a glorified shared task list with a Gantt view that your team mostly avoided, this is the moment to right-size. Tools like Heimin, Trello, or Basecamp are designed for "small team that needs to track work" rather than "PMO managing a portfolio." Heimin specifically charges a flat $12/month for the whole team, which means a 10-person team migrating off Project Online goes from $300+/month on Plan 3 to $12/month — without seat-counting, ever.

The honest tradeoff: you're giving up portfolio-level features. There's no resource leveling across 40 projects, no enterprise reporting cube. If you actually need those, Path A or B is the right call.

Step 3: The migration cost nobody warns you about

Whichever path you pick, the real cost isn't the license — it's retraining every PM, stakeholder, and exec on a new vocabulary. "Tasks" in Project Online aren't tasks in Planner. "Resources" mean different things. "Baselines" exist or don't. The status report your CFO has read every Monday morning for four years is about to look different.

Three things help:

Pick the simplest tool that meets your real requirements. Every additional concept your team has to learn is a tax. If you can land in something with five concepts instead of fifty, do that.
Migrate one team or one project type first. Don't big-bang it. Pick the smallest, lowest-stakes group and let them be the pilot. Document what broke.
Plan for parallel running. Run the new tool alongside Project Online for at least a few weeks before September 30. The teams that miss the deadline are the ones who waited until August to start.

Where Heimin fits — and where it doesn't

Heimin is not a replacement for a portfolio manager running 50 concurrent capital projects with resource leveling, baselines, and earned value analysis. If that's your world, Path A or B is the right call.

Heimin is a soft landing for the small ops, marketing, services, and studio teams who got swept up in the Project Online shutdown and just want their basics back: a task list, owners, due dates, comments, and a Gantt view that doesn't require a certification to read. Flat $12/month for the whole team, native English / Traditional Chinese / Japanese, and an MCP integration if you want your AI assistant to read and update tasks for you. No per-seat pricing, ever.

If Project Online was overkill for what you actually did with it, the September 30 deadline is a forced moment of clarity. Use it.