A Microsoft Project Alternative That Opens the Files You Already Have

It depends on which part of Microsoft Project you were using. If it was the scheduling — critical path, dependencies, calendars, resource leveling, baselines, cost and Earned Value tracking — then a browser-based scheduling tool that opens your existing .MPP files gets you working the same day, and Ingantt is that kind of tool. If what you relied on was the Microsoft enterprise layer around the schedule — Project Server or Project Online, timesheets, enterprise resource pools, portfolio rollups, stage gates — then you need a PPM product rather than a scheduling tool, and no browser Gantt app is going to replace it honestly.

Yes. Ingantt reads Microsoft Project's native .MPP binary directly in the browser, along with MPT, MPX, and MS Project XML. Sign in with a Google account, open the file, and the project renders as a full interactive Gantt chart with sub-tasks, dependency arrows, resource assignments, milestones, baselines, and the critical path. No Microsoft Project licence, no Windows virtual machine, and no conversion service that emails you a PDF.

All three, with the depth a switcher checks for. Critical Path Method with 4 dependency types, 8 constraint types, elapsed durations, split and recurring tasks, 9 work contour types, inactive tasks, and multiple critical paths. Resource leveling by priority, slack, or ID, leveling within available slack, rate tables A–E with date-effective rates, and time-varying availability. Tracking with 11 baselines, 10 interim plans, 55 baseline columns plus 5 variance columns, and 13 Earned Value columns including BCWS, BCWP, CPI, SPI, EAC, VAC, and TCPI.

Not as .MPP — Ingantt exports MS Project XML. The .MPP binary is proprietary, undocumented, and effectively a Microsoft-only write target; MS Project XML is Microsoft's own interchange format and Microsoft Project opens it directly. So the round trip works — open a .MPP here, edit and reschedule it, export as MS Project XML, and hand the .xml to someone still running Project. For stakeholders who do not use Project at all, PDF or PNG is the better export.

Yes, and this is the most common reason people end up here. Microsoft Project's full desktop client is Windows-only, so a Mac, a Linux machine, or a Chromebook has historically meant a virtual machine, a Windows box borrowed from someone else, or doing without. Ingantt runs in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge, so the operating system stops being part of the question. There are also native Ingantt apps for macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android, sold separately in their stores.

Ingantt for Web is $7.99 per user per month billed monthly, or $71.88 per user per year billed annually, which works out at $5.99 per user per month. Microsoft's published Project pricing starts at $10 per user per month, and the full desktop client — the one with the scheduling depth most switchers are comparing against — requires Plan 3 at $30 per user per month. A 7-day free trial with full feature access and no credit card is the honest way to check the comparison against your own files rather than taking a table's word for it.

Largely no, and that is deliberate. The vocabulary is the domain's own — predecessors, lag, slack, constraints, baselines, leveling, timephased work, earned value — and the views a Project user reaches for are here: Gantt Chart, Tracking Gantt, Network Diagram, Calendar, Timeline, Task Board, Team Planner, Resource Usage, Task Usage, and Resource Graph. Existing Microsoft Project skill transfers rather than being discarded. What is new is where the file lives: plans are stored in your own Google Drive with Drive's permissions and version history, rather than on a local disk or a project server.

The files stay in your Google Drive, because that is where they were the whole time — Ingantt stores no project data on its own servers. Plans are saved in MS Project-compatible XML, so they open in other tools, including Microsoft Project itself. That is the point of exporting to Microsoft's own interchange format rather than a proprietary one.

For scheduling, yes — and it is worth being precise about the edges. The two things Microsoft Project does that Ingantt does not are writing the .MPP binary and hosting the enterprise PPM layer: Project Server or Project Online portfolios, timesheets, enterprise resource pools and custom fields, stage-gate workflow, and OData reporting. If your work depends on either of those, say so early rather than discovering it in week three. If what you need is the plans, the scheduling engine, and the tracking fields, in a browser, reading the files you already have, that is exactly what this is.