No — Microsoft Planner Portfolios only accept Premium plans, and that isn’t a bug or an edge case. Microsoft’s own support documentation says it plainly: “basic plans aren’t currently supported.” If your organization runs some projects on Basic and some on Premium, there is no native setting that puts them in one Portfolio. That’s the honest answer before anything else. What follows is what’s actually true about converting plans, what upgrading everything to Premium costs, and where a tool built to read both tiers fits — versus where it doesn’t.

What Microsoft’s Portfolios feature actually supports

Portfolios is Microsoft’s own answer to “I have more than one plan and want to see them together.” Per Microsoft Support’s documentation:

“Portfolios give you a consolidated view of all your premium plans and tasks; basic plans aren’t currently supported.”

Two things follow from that one sentence. First, this is a blanket rule, not a licensing quirk you can pay your way around at the plan level — a Basic plan simply doesn’t appear in the Add Plan picker inside a portfolio, no matter who’s looking. Second, creating a portfolio at all requires a Planner and Project Plan 3 or Plan 5 license — so a team that’s never touched Premium plans hits two walls at once: no license to open My Portfolios, and no path to add the Basic plans they actually run even if they had one.

This shows up in practice, not just in the docs

The gap isn’t theoretical. Real users hit it and post about it. One Microsoft Q&A thread, Portfolios show no plans to add, walks through a user with an active Plan 3 license whose test plans “aren’t showing up” — the resolution, from a Microsoft moderator, is to “confirm that the plans you want to add are premium plans” and consider “upgrading or recreating them under a premium workspace.” A second thread, Unable to add group-based plan to Portfolios, runs through license checks, sync delays, and channel permissions before the actual cause surfaces in a follow-up comment: “the issue was that the plans were not premium plans. it’s working okay now.” Even in Government Community Cloud tenants, a Microsoft moderator confirms the same restriction directly: “Currently, the Portfolios feature in Planner is designed to work exclusively with premium plans” — with no timeline given for that changing.

The workaround people reach for first: converting the plan

The obvious move is converting a Basic plan into a Premium one so it becomes portfolio-eligible. That path does exist — Microsoft Learn’s Plan Conversion documentation lays it out — but it’s narrower than it sounds:

  • You still need a Premium license. The doc is explicit: “Users with a Planner premium license can convert a basic plan to a premium plan.” Conversion doesn’t get you around the licensing requirement — it just moves where you pay it.
  • Not every Basic plan qualifies. Eligible plans are Basic plans shared with a Microsoft 365 group (plus unshared ones, per the doc, “coming soon”). Published plans and Loop task list plans can’t be converted at all.
  • It’s one plan at a time. There’s no bulk-convert-all-my-basic-plans option — each conversion is a separate action, on a separate plan.
  • The rollout itself is uneven. Microsoft’s own doc calls this “beginning to roll out,” and a real Microsoft Q&A thread shows exactly that: a Plan 3 licensee following Microsoft’s documented steps — three-dot menu, “Add premium views,” convert — finds no such option anywhere in the menu. Microsoft’s own troubleshooting for that case is “the rollout is still in progress” or “the plan isn’t eligible,” which isn’t much to go on if you’re mid-project.
  • The original plan doesn’t just disappear. Post-conversion, the Basic plan is archived read-only for 90 days (so you can revert), then removed.

Net effect: conversion is real, but it doesn’t remove the licensing cost and it isn’t a bulk operation. If you’re converting a dozen small Basic plans just to satisfy Portfolios, you’re paying the same per-user Premium cost you’d pay by upgrading them outright — just one plan-by-plan click at a time, and possibly not showing up in your tenant yet.

The straightforward fix: put everything on Premium up front

Sometimes the honest answer really is the simple one. If you’re running a small number of plans, converting or recreating them as Premium from the start and paying for a Planner and Project Plan 3 or Plan 5 license per user is the least amount of new tooling you’ll touch. No export pipeline, no third-party grid, no conversion quirks to work around — every plan is portfolio-native because it was built that way. For two or three small projects and a handful of people, this is usually the right call, and there’s no reason to manufacture urgency around it.

Where it stops being the right call is scale. A dozen small Basic plans scattered across teams — the kind that exist precisely because nobody wanted to pay for Premium on a two-week project — turn into a real per-user license bill just to get them into a rollup. That’s the case where “just upgrade to Premium” quietly costs more than the visibility is worth.

Exporting and stitching it yourself

The other native route is exporting. Export a plan to Excel works on both Basic and Premium plans identically — “choose Export as Excel from the menu of the plan header,” and you get a spreadsheet you can filter, sort, and format. It’s the one Planner feature that doesn’t care which tier the plan is on.

The catch is the same one that shows up everywhere in cross-plan reporting: it’s one plan, one export, at a time. Getting a combined view means running that export across every plan you have — Basic and Premium both — and stitching the sheets together by hand, or standing up a Power BI report fed by a Power Automate flow you build and maintain. We cover that pipeline in more depth in exporting all Planner plans to Excel. It’s a real answer. It’s also a reporting project, not a view Planner hands you.

Where a tool built for both tiers actually helps

If your org is past the “just upgrade everything” size — several teams, a real mix of Basic and Premium plans that isn’t going away, and no appetite for licensing every small project into Premium just to see it in a rollup — the fix is a tool that reads both tiers on its own rather than asking Portfolios to.

That’s what OneView does differently: it connects to Microsoft Graph for Basic plans and to Dataverse for Premium plans, and unions both sets into one grid — with grouping and rollups across the combination, which is exactly the “pseudo-portfolio” shape Portfolios itself can’t produce. If your tenant has no Premium plans at all, or the Premium side is temporarily unreachable, the Basic half still loads on its own — one tier being unavailable doesn’t take down the other. That’s the actual gap this page is about: not a dashboard, not a person-level workload view, but a single view that doesn’t care which tier a plan happens to be on. See OneView.

If what you actually need is per-person allocation — how loaded one teammate is across everything they’re assigned to, rather than a plan-level rollup — that’s a different question with a different answer; see Team Workload.

A different question, answered elsewhere

This page is about which plans a Portfolio can even hold. Two related questions come up constantly and deserve their own answer rather than a workaround bolted onto this one:

  • Whose workload is on those plans? Portfolios roll up plan status, not people — see does the new Planner show workload across plans for why a plan-level rollup still can’t tell you who’s overloaded.
  • What about a Charts-style breakdown across plans — status, priority, bucket, who’s-holding-what? That’s a different native gap; see a Planner dashboard across all plans for what Charts does and doesn’t cover once you’re past one plan.

Both of those problems persist even on an all-Premium tenant. This one — Basic plans being invisible to Portfolios at all — is the one that hits you before you even get that far.