Feature Timeline is dead. How to get epic roadmaps back in Azure DevOps (2026)
Microsoft unpublished the Feature Timeline & Epic Roadmap extension at the end of 2022 and never shipped a replacement. Roughly 52,000 installs were left with a view that still works if you already have it and is impossible to obtain if you don't. This is what was actually lost, what Delivery Plans does and doesn't cover, and every option worth knowing about in 2026.
What died, precisely
The extension was published by Microsoft DevLabs as Feature timeline and Epic Roadmap and contained two related views. Its last real release was version 0.0.357 in October 2019. It was unpublished in December 2022. At that point it had 41,674 cloud installs and 10,832 on-premises installs — 52,506 in total, with a 3.67 average rating across 137 reviews. Both numbers matter: the demand was enormous and people were not especially happy with the thing they were depending on.
The listing is still reachable but shows an "unpublished" banner suggesting you uninstall it. Existing installs kept working, which is why you will still find people discussing it in the present tense.
The source lives on as microsoft/featuretimeline, archived and MIT-licensed. Its README is candid:
code quality is of Hackathon :)
It targets the 2018-era extension SDK, so it isn't practically forkable without a rewrite. Someone tried anyway — a community fork appeared on the Marketplace in September 2025, reached 3 installs, and was unpublished again. The 52,000-install base has nowhere to migrate to.
The one idea worth preserving
The valuable part of Feature Timeline was not the rendering. It was the data model. A parent's position on the timeline was derived from its children's iterations rather than stored on the parent. An Epic started when its earliest Feature started and ended when its latest Feature ended.
That sounds like a detail; in practice it is the whole difference between a roadmap that stays true and one that rots. Nobody maintains Start Date and Target Date on epics. Teams re-plan constantly, and every re-plan silently invalidates hand-entered parent dates. Derived dates cannot go stale, because there is nothing to forget to update.
What Microsoft says to use instead
The official position, repeated in the archived documentation, is unambiguous: the extension is deprecated and "we recommend that you use Delivery Plans instead."
Delivery Plans is free, built in, and genuinely good at what it does. If you need per-team sprint planning with drag-and-drop rescheduling and inline editing, it is the correct tool and nothing here should talk you out of it. It is also the only option in this article that can write to your work items.
But it is a different shape of thing, and four gaps come up over and over in community threads:
| Capability | Delivery Plans 2.0 | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Epic → Feature nesting | No | A row is a team's backlog, not a parent work item. An Epic and its Feature render as unrelated bars with no expand/collapse. |
| Items with no dates | Vanish | A work item with no iteration or dates is simply not drawn. Feature Timeline computed a position from children instead. |
| Cross-project rollup | Partial | A plan can span projects, but progress rollup does not compute correctly across the project boundary. |
| Export | No | The documentation suggests taking a screenshot. Three separate Developer Community tickets requesting PDF/image export remain open: 1406827, 11004602, 1424277. |
| Zoom presets | No | Continuous zoom only. There is a long-standing request for quarter/year horizons for executive roadmaps. |
| Dependency links | Yes | Predecessor/successor with violation highlighting. |
| Editing work items | Yes | Drag dates and iterations, edit inline. No extension on this list matches this. |
Whether these are dealbreakers depends entirely on who is looking at the picture. For a team planning next sprint, none of them matter. For someone presenting a twelve-month portfolio view to a steering committee, all of them do.
Is Delivery Plans going to close these gaps?
There is no sign of it. The 2.0 rewrite landed in 2021 and the public Azure DevOps roadmap, as of its 6 July 2026 update, contains no planning or visualization work at all — Boards items are GitHub and Copilot plumbing plus minor UX. Azure Boards itself is not going anywhere (Microsoft's 2026 messaging moves repositories to GitHub and explicitly keeps Boards, Pipelines and Test Plans), but Delivery Plans appears to be finished software.
Your actual options in 2026
1. Live with Delivery Plans
Free, built in, nothing to install or approve, and it handles the team-planning case well. If your need is "which sprint is this story in", stop reading. The screenshot-into-PowerPoint ritual is the tax you pay, and for many teams it is genuinely cheaper than procurement.
2. A free Gantt extension
Several exist and one is properly maintained:
| Extension | Installs | Rating | State |
|---|---|---|---|
| Portfolio++ (iTrellis) | 18,446 + 4,670 | 4.30 (27) | Actively maintained, last update June 2026 |
| Delivery Gantt (EPAM) | 3,373 + 901 | 2.33 (9) | Stale for ~2 years |
| OGIT Gantt (Otto Group) | 3,360 + 80 | 4.33 (6) | Preview |
| Query Gantt (emait) | 1,459 + 420 | 3.88 (8) | Newer, May 2024 |
Portfolio++ is the one to try first. It is free, it is alive, it has the largest install base of any living extension in this category, and it costs you nothing but an admin approval to find out whether it fits. Anyone selling you something in this space who doesn't mention it is not being straight with you.
3. A paid extension
The paid corner of this category has a high churn rate, which is worth knowing before you commit a budget to any of them. In roughly eighteen months three paid extensions left the Marketplace: Solidify @Scale (1,431 installs, 4.71★ — subscriptions were not transferred to its successor), Vel Project Timeline (1,766 installs), and Next Level Gantt (259 installs, which entered in August 2024 and was gone by mid-2025).
What is currently alive and paid: GANTT chart by AgileParts (5,824 installs, 3.56★, category leader since 2019), Roadmap by QUIBIQ Berlin (2,456 installs, 4.10★, with tiers inside the paid listing), and Nooga Scale (2,103 installs, 5.0★, SAFe/PI planning, launched September 2025).
Note the ceiling: after seven years, the category leader sits at under 6,000 cloud installs. This is a small market. Judge longevity accordingly, and prefer vendors who tell you where their data lives and what happens to your view if they disappear.
4. Give up and leave Azure DevOps for the picture
Plenty of organizations export to Miro, Power BI or Jira for the roadmap and keep Boards as the system of record. Power BI in particular is an official, supported integration and can build portfolio dashboards from Analytics. It is more work to set up and it drifts from reality between refreshes, but it is free with your existing licensing and nobody has to approve an extension.
Migrating your mental model from Feature Timeline
If you are coming from the dead extension, this is the term mapping that matters, independent of which tool you land on:
| Feature Timeline concept | Where it went |
|---|---|
| Epic row with Features nested inside | Nothing built in reproduces this. Delivery Plans gives you a team row instead. |
| Parent span computed from child iterations | Not available in Delivery Plans; it plots explicit dates only. |
| Vertical ordering of epics | Followed backlog order — you reordered on the Epics backlog, not in the view. Same idea applies in most replacements. |
| "In progress" derived from children's state | Delivery Plans has progress rollup, but it breaks across projects. |
| Epic Roadmap's quarter view | Closest equivalent is Delivery Plans' continuous zoom, without presets. |
What I built and why
I work with Azure DevOps daily as an architect. When Feature Timeline went away, the thing my organization lost was not a Gantt chart — we had several of those. It was the epic-centric view where the timeline is a consequence of the sprint plan rather than a second copy of it that somebody has to maintain.
So Trailmap reproduces that specific idea and adds the things the community threads kept asking for: features nested under their epics, spans computed from child work items, undated items parked on a visible "Not scheduled" shelf instead of silently disappearing, cross-project rollup, sprint/month/quarter zoom presets, and PNG export that takes two seconds rather than a screenshot and a crop.
Two deliberate constraints. It is read-only — it cannot modify your work items, which means there is nothing for an administrator to audit and no way for it to corrupt anything. And your data never leaves your Azure DevOps tenant; the only thing my server ever sees is your organization's GUID, for licensing. The trade-off is real and you should weigh it: if you want to drag a bar and have the work item change, Delivery Plans does that and Trailmap does not.
It is paid, from $19/month for an entire organization rather than per user, with a 30-day trial that doesn't ask for a card. If you want the honest side-by-side including the cases where you should not buy it, that's on the comparison page.
You don't have to take any of that on faith, and you don't need to bother your Project Collection Administrator to find out: there's a live demo running the same build on sample data. Nothing to install, no sign-up.
The short version
- Feature Timeline is gone for good and nothing official replaced it.
- Delivery Plans is free, actively the recommended path, and covers team sprint planning well — but it has no epic nesting, no export, and drops undated items.
- Delivery Plans is not being developed further, so don't wait for it.
- Try Portfolio++ first if free is a hard requirement. It's alive and it's the largest of the free options.
- The paid corner churns. Ask any vendor what happens to your data and your subscription if they leave.