Microsoft Planner vs To Do, Which One Should You Actually Use
Two task apps that look alike but do very different jobs
By Shehryar Hassan, Microsoft 365 & Azure Consultant
Someone on my team asked me last week why we had both Planner and To Do open at the same time, and whether one of them was pointless. It's a fair question. Microsoft ships both, they both show tasks with checkboxes, and nothing in the interface tells you which one you're supposed to reach for.
The short version: To Do is for you. Planner is for a team.
What To Do is actually for
To Do is a personal task list. Anything you add stays visible only to you unless you deliberately share a list. It pulls in flagged emails from Outlook and any tasks assigned to you in Planner, so it works as a single inbox for "things I need to do" even when they started somewhere else. If you're managing your own day, deadlines, or a personal project, this is the right tool. There's no reporting, no buckets, and no assigning tasks to other people.
What Planner is actually for
Planner is built around a board that a group of people can see and edit together. Tasks live in buckets, like "Backlog," "In Progress," and "Done." You can assign a task to one or more people, attach files, add a checklist inside a task, and pull a basic chart of what's done versus overdue. It's meant to sit inside a Team or a Microsoft 365 Group, so access follows whoever's in that group. If you need visibility across a project with more than one person on it, that's where it lives, not in To Do.
Where people get confused
The overlap is that tasks assigned to you in Planner show up automatically in your To Do "Assigned to me" list. That's by design, and it's genuinely useful, you get one place to see everything without leaving your personal list. But if you try to run a whole team's project inside To Do by sharing a single list, you'll hit the ceiling fast. Shared To Do lists don't have buckets, assignment history, or status charts. They're just a list everyone can tick off.
If you're deciding which to open for a new piece of work, ask one question: does anyone besides me need to see this? If yes, it's a Planner board. If no, it's a To Do list. Everything else follows from that.
Get new posts by email
One note when there is something worth reading. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Related articles
Why Your Power Automate Flow Fails Without Telling You Why
Power Automate does not email you when a flow fails by default. Here is where to actually look, and a five minute fix so you find out the same day instead of weeks later.
Shared Mailboxes vs Distribution Lists, What's Actually the Difference
People ask me all the time whether to set up a shared mailbox or a distribution list for a team inbox. They are not interchangeable, and picking the wrong one causes real headaches later.
Common Teams Problems and Quick Fixes
Most 'Teams is broken' complaints trace back to something outside Teams entirely, once you actually dig into them.