Planner has five kinds of plans, SharePoint Maven says

Key insights

• The video describes five kinds of plans inside Microsoft Planner.
• The five labels are personal, group-connected, Loop, To Do and Premium.
• Microsoft’s documentation distinguishes Basic and Premium plans, while subscription levels are separate.
• The video does not explain how its five categories differ or how to choose among them.

SharePoint Maven Inc recently published a short video saying Microsoft Planner contains five kinds of plans. Its central point is that Planner may look like one app while containing personal, group-connected, Loop, To Do and Premium plans. The video names these categories but does not explain their features, setup or licensing.

What's new

The video frames Planner as a single app with five different kinds of plans inside it. It names personal plans, group-connected plans, Loop plans, To Do plans and Premium plans. That list is the full explanation provided in the video’s published description and transcript.

There is a useful distinction between the video's five labels and the broader Planner terminology summarized in the accompanying research notes. Those notes say Microsoft documentation describes Basic and Premium plans, while commercial offerings are divided into subscription levels. The five labels in the video should therefore not automatically be read as five equivalent subscription types.

The research notes list Microsoft 365 Planner, Planner Plan 1, Planner and Project Plan 3, and Planner and Project Plan 5 as subscription options. They also describe Copilot as an additional capability rather than a conventional standalone Planner plan. This context helps explain why a simple count of “kinds” may combine unlike categories, but the short video itself does not make that distinction.

Why it matters

For people who use Planner, the distinction is potentially useful because it cautions against assuming that every plan in the app works the same way. A user trying to understand where a task or plan belongs may want to know which category they are working with. The video’s five labels offer a starting vocabulary, not a guide to selecting or administering a plan.

The research notes describe Basic plans as suited to lightweight team collaboration and Premium plans as supporting more structured project work. In that broader context, selecting the right arrangement can affect whether a team is organizing everyday tasks or working with more formal project controls. The video, however, does not explain which of its five named categories correspond to Basic or Premium.

For admins and consultants, the topic could matter when helping colleagues understand Planner’s different plan experiences. The research notes name several subscription levels, but the video does not state licensing requirements, tenant settings or rollout status. Those details should not be inferred from the five labels alone.

Makers and end users should also treat the categories as a high-level classification rather than a feature comparison. No specific change to day-to-day task management is demonstrated in the supplied video material. It does not show a workflow, interface steps, or an example of moving work between the named kinds.

How it works

The video does not provide a process or feature walkthrough. Instead, SharePoint Maven Inc presents five labels for the kinds of plans it says are found inside Planner: personal, group-connected, Loop, To Do and Premium. There are no demonstrated steps for creating, finding, configuring or switching among them.

The accompanying research notes provide broader context for understanding the product. They describe Planner as combining everyday task tracking, collaborative team planning, structured project execution and portfolio-management scenarios in a unified work-management experience. They also say that Planner is available in Microsoft Teams and on the web, but this context does not establish a specific workflow for any of the five labels in the video.

For orientation, the research notes characterize Basic plans as lightweight team task management and identify task assignment, files, checklists, labels, comments, and Grid, Board, Schedule and Charts views as capabilities. For Premium plans, they list features such as subtasks, dependencies, milestones and Timeline/Gantt views among the structured planning options. Those descriptions come from the supplied research notes, not from a demonstration in this short video.

Readers should not infer technical relationships from the labels alone. The video does not say whether a Loop plan has a distinct creation process, how a To Do plan is represented, or what “group-connected” means in terms of membership or storage. Nor does it specify exactly which capabilities are included in Premium.

Limitations and open questions

The video is a brief statement, not a detailed explanation. It does not define the five categories or show how they appear in the product. It also provides no licensing details, availability information, version context or guidance for administrators.

The research notes add information about Basic and Premium plans, commercial subscription levels and Copilot, but do not map all of those concepts directly to the five categories named in the video. They describe Copilot in Planner as a preview capability for users with Planner and Project Plan 3 or Plan 5 licenses. That is separate context; the video does not mention Copilot or connect it to one of its five plan kinds.

As a result, this video is most useful as a prompt to ask what kind of plan you are viewing, rather than as a standalone reference for Planner configuration. We could not verify from the video how the categories map to subscription offerings or which capabilities distinguish each one. Readers who need to make a licensing or deployment decision need more detailed documentation than this short clip supplies.

Sources

• SharePoint Maven Inc video on five kinds of Planner plans
• SharePoint Maven Inc website

Frequently asked questions

Which five kinds of Planner plans does the video name?

Personal, group-connected, Loop, To Do and Premium.

Does the video explain the features of each kind?

No. The supplied description and transcript name the five categories but do not compare their features or explain how they work.

Does it say which licenses are needed?

No licensing information is included in the supplied video material. The accompanying research notes discuss subscription options but do not map them to all five video categories.