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Microsoft is ending Publisher and Project Online, and support for Office 2021 will end shortly thereafter – some alternatives cost more.
Microsoft is permanently pulling the plug on two older products in the coming weeks: The desktop publishing application Publisher will be removed from Microsoft 365, and the project management service Project Online will be discontinued. Shortly thereafter, support for purchased standalone licenses of Publisher as well as for Office 2021 will also expire. The portal The Register was the first to report on the plans.
Publisher will be removed from Microsoft 365
Publisher, which dates back to the era of Windows 3.x, had already been announced by Microsoft for retirement in 2024. On October 1, 2026, the application will disappear from Microsoft 365 subscriptions. Support for permanently licensed standalone versions will end on October 13, alongside Office LTSC 2021 and the consumer version Office 2021. According to Microsoft, it does not offer a direct successor to Publisher.
Project Online and Essentials license expiring
Project Online will be discontinued on September 30. One day later, Project Online Essentials will also end, a cheaper licensing option with restricted access to Project Online and Project Server, which has no longer been sold to new customers since October 2025 anyway. Essentials was aimed at users who only needed to update tasks, submit time tracking, and view project information without requiring the full feature set of more expensive plans. Anyone who continues to assign such licenses must, according to Microsoft, transition affected users to supported alternatives before October 1 to avoid access disruptions.
Recommended alternatives and potential additional costs
For Project Online Essentials, Microsoft recommends switching to Planner Plan 1 or a combination of Planner and Project Plan 3, depending on which features and access rights to Project Server are required. The additional functional scope may come with higher costs. As an alternative to Microsoft’s project management products, third-party software such as ProjectLibre is available, which released a new version this week with ProjectLibre Cloud AI 2.0; it costs just under 10 US dollars per user per month when billed annually.
No official support for Office 2021 anymore
For Office 2021, Microsoft will not offer official extended security updates after the end of support. According to third-party vendor 0patch, it nevertheless intends to provide unofficial security patches for critical vulnerabilities, initially for at least three additional years and potentially beyond that if there is sufficient demand. The patches cost 24.95 euros per year for private users, and 34.95 euros per PC per year for businesses.
(Editorial Team)
