Microsoft Project has one price and one job: building and maintaining a plan. Most of the people who need to see that plan never touch either. They read the schedule, check their own tasks, look at the report their manager sent, and close the file.
Buying a full Microsoft Project licence for each of them is where most of the money goes, and it is the cost this guide is about. Not the price of a seat — the number of seats you buy.
Two kinds of Microsoft Project user
Every organisation that uses Microsoft Project has both, whether or not it counts them separately.
Creators build the plan, set the dependencies, level the resources and keep the schedule current. They need Microsoft Project and nothing replaces it.
Viewers need to open the plan, read it and, in some cases, report progress back. In the guide we published on this, the viewers split into three groups:
- Team members — the people doing the day-to-day work on the project.
- Executives — the people responsible for one or more projects and their overall status.
- External users — vendors, distributors, customers and subcontractors; everyone outside the organisation who is involved in the work or watching it.
In our own analysis and the surveys behind that guide, the number of people who only need to view a plan is significantly higher than the number who create one. In the cost scenarios we ran, the split was 20% creators to 80% viewers.
Why an export does not replace a seat
The obvious answer to “most people only read plans” is to send them the plan. Organisations do this by exporting to Excel or PDF, or by printing copies, and it works right up to the moment someone needs more than one view.
A reader of a plan typically moves through it: the Gantt chart first, then the task information for a bar, then the resources assigned to that task. A PDF freezes one of those views. An Excel export freezes the tables and loses the chart. Neither lets the reader change what they are looking at, which is the whole point of a project plan being a live document rather than a report.
That is the gap a viewer fills: the same file, the same views, read-only.
How to size a mixed fleet
The exercise is smaller than it sounds.
- Count the creators. Who in the organisation actually builds and updates plans? That number is the one that needs Microsoft Project.
- Count everyone else who needs to open one. Team members, executives, and the external people you share plans with.
- Buy the rest as viewer licences. One licence per reader, not per project.
The guide’s six scenarios ran that arithmetic at 50, 125 and 250 seats against both Microsoft Project Standard and Professional, at the 20/80 split. List prices move, so put your own seat count against the current price list rather than a figure quoted in an old guide.
The same logic applies to expansion, which is where it is most often missed. If you already own 100 Microsoft Project licences and need 100 more, the question is not “can we afford another 100” but “how many of those 100 people will create a plan?”. If the existing 100 are enough for the planning work, everything you add is a reading seat.
What a viewer has to get right
A licence swap only saves money if the reader does not lose the plan in the process. These are the requirements the guide set out, and they have not changed:
- The same views. The 27+ Microsoft Project views, plus user-defined views saved in the .mpp file, displayed as the project manager built them.
- The same reports. Dashboard, Resources and Cost graphical reports, so the reader sees status, work completion, resource allocation and cost instead of a wall of rows.
- Native files, no conversion. .mpp opened directly, including plans saved by Microsoft Project 2024 and the versions before it.
- The sharing route you already use. Plans published to Project Server and files held in SharePoint, in-house or in SharePoint Online.
- No training. An interface that matches Microsoft Project is the reason a reader can be handed a licence on Monday and use it the same day. Our own analysis of the risk here is simple: every difference between the viewer and Microsoft Project is a question someone has to answer.
- The reader’s language. The viewer ships in 11 languages, which matters when the external users are outside the country the plan was written in.
The Windows and Mac pages carry the current detail on versions and editions.
Two add-ins that change who needs a licence at all
The guide treated these as extras. They are the part that reaches the people the licence argument does not: team members who need to send work back, and the plans that leave the building.
Task Update lets a team member open the published .mpp in the viewer and report work, overtime, percent complete and a comment on their own tasks. The project manager receives each update in Microsoft Project, comments on it, and accepts or rejects it — acceptance is what writes the change into the .mpp file. No Microsoft Project licence on the reporting side. See Task Update.
ProjectCleaner clears resource names, rates, cost per use and progress from a copy of the .mpp before the plan is shared, and leaves the original untouched. It is the answer to “we want to send this to a subcontractor, but not our rates”. See ProjectCleaner.
Three organisations that did the arithmetic
The guide’s case studies are still on the site in full:
- Fuji Electric PowerService needed 100 Microsoft Project licences because their clients use it as a scheduling tool, then faced paying for the upgrade. They report saving around 4,600,000 JPY.
- Soenen planned in Excel until the scope outgrew it, then bought three Microsoft Project 2013 licences — and a viewer for everyone else who needed to read the planning.
- Jungheinrich Group was distributing snapshots of each plan as a series of HTML files, which were too static to be useful, and moved the readers to the viewer instead.
The saving that is not the licence
Three costs come with a project management tool and only one of them is on the invoice: the licences, the training, and the time people lose waiting for information.
A viewer affects the other two. Readers who already know Microsoft Project do not need a course to read a plan in software that looks like it, and a plan that can be opened by anyone who needs it stops being something that has to be exported, mailed and re-exported every time it changes.
The arithmetic starts with one number: how many people create a plan, and how many only read one. The price list gives you the per-seat cost, and a 15-day trial lets you check the reading side with your own plans before you commit to anything.