Project Plan vs EKIALIS Pilot Comparison: Everything You Need to Know Before Choosing

Project Plan is a project management application built specifically for Microsoft Teams, enabling teams to manage and visualise projects without leaving their collaboration environment. The app responds to a common challenge in organisations standardised on Microsoft 365: project plans often live in separate desktop tools or files that are difficult to share, while day-to-day communication happens in Teams. This separation leads to outdated schedules, version conflicts and limited visibility for stakeholders. Project Plan’s approach is to embed scheduling and task management directly within Teams channels and tabs, making plans accessible to everyone involved and allowing updates to be made collaboratively in the same place where discussions take place. Key features include Gantt charts, task lists, task dependencies, milestones, resource assignments and progress tracking, along with board and calendar views for teams that prefer more visual or agile-style management. Users can open and edit Microsoft Project files, supporting organisations that have existing plans in MPP format and want to collaborate without requiring every participant to hold a Microsoft Project licence. Plans can be shared within Teams tabs, and notifications and chat integration keep team members informed of changes. Reporting options provide overviews of progress, workload and upcoming deadlines. The application runs within the Microsoft Teams client on desktop, web and mobile, inheriting Microsoft 365 identity and security, which simplifies deployment and administration for IT departments. Its target users are project managers, team leads and business users in small, mid-sized and large organisations that rely heavily on Microsoft Teams, including professional services, construction, engineering, IT and public sector teams. Its tight alignment with Microsoft 365 means organisations can adopt structured project planning without introducing an entirely separate platform. Users familiar with Microsoft Project generally find the interface easy to learn. A free version is available, paid plans start from around USD 99, and a free trial is offered.