Teamhood vs Microsoft Planner: Full Comparison

There are always many opinions regarding picking the best of anything. A car, smartphone, or restaurant is subjective to what each person values and wants. When it comes to work management tools, the situation is no different. However, there are two clear things to consider—functionality and value. The tool you pick in the end has to have both, as there would be no use of a variety of features if they bring no end value to your work.

Comparing the value of two tools you haven’t tried before might be challenging. Teams often go the simple way—pick what is available. COVID-19 has pushed many teams worldwide to find a solution quickly: “Where do we move all the planning and performance boards from our meeting rooms so we can efficiently continue online?” Many teams have considered Microsoft Planner a simple solution.

Does it cover the need to manage professional teams and deliver projects on time? It depends on teams and goals, of course. We can only compare tools and look into how they are built to serve teams and deliver value. The following is a value comparison between Microsoft Planner and Teamhood. It is aimed at helping you understand and distinguish the main aspects each of these tools brings to the table.

Read on and decide based on features and what you want to achieve.

Quick Feature Comparison: Teamhood vs Microsoft Planner

The Concept

Both Teamhood and Microsoft Planner are defined as team collaboration and work management tools. They offer various features to assist teams striving for higher productivity. The basis for both tools is a structured task board to track and review progress.

Microsoft Planner can be used as a separate tool, but the big idea here is to integrate it with the Microsoft 365 suite. Planner is mainly advertised as an additional tab in MS Teams to add some level of work management. This is convenient if you have the Microsoft suite, but lacks as a work management solution and only works for small teams tracking simple daily tasks.  

Teamhood, on the other hand, is a standalone solution created specifically for work management purposes. This means it offers a variety of features to choose from, making work management easy and flexible. Teamhood is great at visualizing, representing, and clarifying all the steps in your workflow and handling various levels of tasks and subtasks.  

It is ready to adopt Kanban and other Agile practices, match, grow, and change alongside your company. 

Here is a deeper look into the features of the two tools. 

Microsoft Planner 

Microsoft Planner is a tool built for basic and simple task tracking and thus lacks features regarding work management needs. The task board may look nice at first glance, but it quickly becomes confusing when you start using it as a Kanban board. Typically, the process in Kanban is visualized horizontally, and teams move the cards from left (backlog) to right (done) according to the agreed process. Horizontal swimlanes represent topics. 

Microsoft Planner, by default, suggests a “bucket” view and uses the “progress” field to select the progress status within an item card. Users can switch to the “Progress” view to get closer to the Kanban concept. But the view does not reflect buckets, a.k.a. swimlanes. So, instead of having a clear singular task board view, team members are always switching and choosing what they see. This delivers poor visualization and makes it difficult for teams to collaborate.  

Moreover, it is not up to the team to choose the “progress” attributes. For example, if a team has to deliver each task for “Review,” they cannot create such a step in the process. Sure, you can go around the system and manipulate the tool to be better, but is it worth the extra time and trouble? That is for you to decide. 

Task cards  

Like most work management solutions on the market, Microsoft Planner uses task cards to define and track tasks. Tasks are defined by a name, due date, and assignee and can be supplemented with additional information such as description, files, and comments. Tasks can also have subtasks; however, there is no way of adding additional information to them. They are simply a list of items that can be marked as done. 

Schedule and Charts  

To help plan and monitor work, Microsoft Planner is also equipped with a Schedule and Charts. The schedule provides a calendar-like view where tasks are visualized based on their start and due dates. However, no subtasks or task dependencies are visible in this calendar. 

Lastly, Charts show the number of planned started and finished tasks in a few graphs and provide the number of planned and started tasks assigned to each team member.  

Teamhood 

Teamhood offers its users quite a different and arguably more enjoyable experience. With the key focus on a clearly visualized process, the task board is comprised of columns, sub-columns, and rows. Columns identify process steps, rows represent different teams, departments, or work periods, and sub-columns track subtask progress. This allows teams to create a board that fully represents all processes and accurately tracks tasks as they move from one step to another. 

Teamhood offers a variety of templates for users to choose from and allows users to create and utilize custom templates.

Task details 

Teamhood task board is built to relay information quickly. It only has enough information to relay the progress, but to not overwhelm the team. There are task names, assignments, and due dates, as well as the possibility to filter the task view only seeing what is important to you. You know what is happening with your team just by glancing at the board. 

If you need to add more information, simply open the task details. Here, you can define a description, assign dates and team members, estimate duration, and even track time. If you work with large items, you can split them into specific subtasks. The great thing is subtasks share all the features that tasks have. They can have descriptions, due dates, be assigned and more. If you need to split the work even further – you can add subtasks to your subtasks, creating a third or even a fourth layer to your work items. 

Best engineering project management software.

Managing smaller tasks 

To help you accurately track all those Subtasks, the task board is equipped with sub-columns. This means each column can be modified to have a separate workflow represented by a set of additional columns dedicated to track the subtask process. This secondary workflow can be as simple as Doing and Done, or as elaborate as your team needs it to be. This is a great option for those needing to track the status of each subtask or working in a process with several review cycles. Thus, making sure progress tracking is accurate and visualized even on the smallest level on the project board. 

Time Tracking 

Each task and subtask in Teamhood is equipped with a time tracking feature. This means you can do both—estimate how much time each task will take and measure how long it took to be completed. This feature delivers clear business value by enabling planning capacity, managing resources, and billing clients according to the spent resources. 

Time tracking is also used to better adjust workload among team members. The dashboard has a list of employees and the number of tasks and work hours assigned and finished by them. As work items are rarely of the same size, having time estimations is a great tool to truly understand the load for everyone on the team and ensure no one is overworked. 

Timeline and task dependencies 

A traditional calendar is quite common for a quick overview but limited when you need to manage a project—work with timelines, move tasks, coordinate cross-team activities. Therefore, Teamhood suggests a “Timeline.” Here, columns represent the days of the month, and rows are the same as in your task board. 

To help you plan, tasks keep their assigned colors and display subtasks. Rows are greyed out outside of their start and end dates. You can expand or minimize each row separately to give you a more focused view.

“Timeline” also enables dependencies between tasks. Similarly to a Gantt chart, users can draw dependencies, making planning and estimating the project outcome much easier. Dependencies are only visible in “Timeline”, but active in both “Timeline” and task board views. Thus, a dependent task cannot be marked as completed before the previous one is done.

Agile application 

Lastly, it is important to note that Teamhood supports various Agile applications. While it was inspired by a Kanban board, it can be easily modified to fit Scrum, Scrumban, and other frameworks. The flexibility and multiple layers of the task board configuration in Teamhood allow for a great experience no matter your practice of choice. 

Which Should You Choose? 

As we investigate how both tools can be used, we find clear differences in the management approach and where each will work best.  

Microsoft Planner is often used by companies that are already subscribed to Office 365 business plans. Planner is a good enough tool for very light work management, sharing tasks within a small team. Some companies even used Planner to create online Kanban boards, when COVID-19 crisis forced leaving offices for remote work. However, they soon met limitations described in this article. 

Teamhood is a fully featured work management solution that allows you to track the whole work process and improve your operations for better results.  

Choose MS Planner to: 

– Use basic visualization 

– Plan simple tasks in a small team 

– Supplement MS Teams (best MS Teams integrations)

Choose Teamhood to: 

– Clearly visualize process on a task board 

– Manage full scope and detailed tasks on the same board 

– Track time, review progress and manage team workload 

– Have a tool that grows with your team 

– Easily manage timelines across teams 

– Apply Agile practices 

– Share files 

– Measure results in live reports 

You can find a full feature comparison here or continue learning about leadership with the best leadership tools.