Best for: planners and site managers who need proper scheduling software once, rather than a monthly Project Plan subscription.
What you actually get.
Project Professional is the desktop scheduling tool: Gantt charts, task dependencies, automatic critical path calculation, resource levelling to resolve over-allocation, baselines for tracking slippage, and the reporting views that turn all of it into something a client will read.
Professional versus Standard.
Professional adds resource management across projects, the Team Planner view and the ability to connect to Project Server or Project Online. If you only schedule single, self-contained projects, Standard would do — but Professional is what is stocked here and is the one most people want.
Before you buy: Microsoft support for the 2021 perpetual releases ends in October 2026. The software keeps working; it simply stops being updated. Activation is by phone and takes about two minutes through our Get CID page.














