Project Family Overview

Microsoft Project is the name of a family of client applications, server products, and online services for project management and project portfolio management (evaluation and tracking of sets of projects).

Client Applications

The Project product line includes the following client applications:

Project Standard is a stand-alone desktop application for project managers; it lacks the project sharing and collaboration features of the Professional client. Project Standard is not able to connect to Project Server or Project Online.

Project Professional, the most full-featured client application, is designed for managing complex projects and project portfolios, and it works with Project Server and Project Online. It can be used stand-alone for managing individual projects. The software is also available on a user-subscription basis, called Project Pro for Office 365, which can reduce costs and simplify license compliance compared to buying Project Professional. However, Project Pro for Office 365 requires customers to follow Microsoft’s upgrade schedule and commit to ongoing payments (it is not a perpetual license), which may not make sense for organizations that want to stay on the same Project version over many years to limit costs.