Trailmap vs. Delivery Plans:
when the built-in tool is enough — and when it isn't
Delivery Plans ships with Azure Boards and is free. If it does what you need, use it — seriously. Trailmap exists for the specific things Delivery Plans can't draw. Here is the honest version of that comparison.
Feature by feature
| Capability | Delivery Plans (built-in) | Trailmap |
|---|---|---|
| Epics with features nested under them on one timeline | No — a row is a team backlog, single level | Yes — collapse/expand the real Boards hierarchy |
| Items without dates | Disappear from the plan | Position computed from child items' sprints; never silently dropped — undated work sits on a visible “Not scheduled” shelf |
| Progress roll-up across projects | Roll-up exists, but not across projects | Yes — children in other projects still count, one roadmap for the whole organization |
| Export | None — docs suggest taking a screenshot | Pixel-perfect PNG, ready for the steering deck |
| Zoom | Continuous ± only | Sprint / Month / Quarter presets; Quarter guarantees a 12-month executive horizon |
| Swimlanes | Per team backlog, max 20 teams | Per team, per area path, or a flat epic-centric view |
| Dependency lines | Yes, with violation highlighting — but frequently reported as broken or cluttered | Clean curves between bars; a successor scheduled before its predecessor finishes turns red |
| Filters | Any field of the plan | Team, area, tags, type, title search, hide-done — the ones roadmap reviews actually use |
| Editing (drag to reschedule) | Yes | Read-only by design in v1 — nothing to break, nothing to audit; drag & drop is on the roadmap for v1.1 |
| Shareable views | Plans are shared objects | Personal + organization-shared saved views, and copy-a-link to the exact view (zoom, filters included) |
| Price | Free, included in Azure Boards | Paid per organization (from $19/mo), 30-day free trial |
Comparison based on Delivery Plans 2.0 documentation and public community threads as of mid-2026. Found something outdated? Tell us — we'll fix it.
Use Delivery Plans if…
…you plan sprint-by-sprint per team, need inline editing on the plan itself, and nobody asks you for an exported roadmap. It's free and it's built in. We mean it.
Use Trailmap if…
…your steering committee wants one epic-centric picture across teams and projects, your epics live or die by their child items' sprints, and every month someone says “can you send me that as a slide?”. That's the view Delivery Plans can't draw — and it's all Trailmap does, deliberately.
30-day free trial, no credit card. Read-only: it can't touch your work items.
Get Trailmap on the Marketplace