The 10 Best Flowchart Software Solutions in 2023 Compared

Ensuring your business has the best flowchart software can help you create useful diagrams to map and simplify your processes. Many companies use these diagramming tools to improve team collaboration while working on complex projects or onboarding new members. For example, they can help you create floor plans, organizational charts, or even evacuation maps for your company.

Although most flowchart software applications share similar core features that allow you to produce well-designed diagrams without expertise, each tool has its own unique pros and cons. In this article, we’ll review the best flowchart software solutions available to help you find the right one for your needs. Read on to find out why Monday, Wrike, and Smartsheet are the best choices this year and who their top competition is.

The Top 10 Best Flowchart Tools Ranked

After thoroughly testing over a dozen chart software solutions, we’re confident the following tools offer the best value for money:

1. Monday — Overall, the best flowchart software in 2023, which uses a drag-and-drop builder to simplify workflow creation.
2. Wrike — Superb Gantt charts that help you visualize progress and dependencies and plan multiple projects from one platform.
3. Smartsheet — Ideal tool for building Agile project workflows with its numerous pre-built templates.
4. ClickUp — User-friendly solution that offers the best free flowchart software plan and supports almost every diagram type you can imagine.
5. Teamwork — Powerful project planning software to help you visualize project baselines, milestones, and goals.
6. Awork — Exceptional Kanban board functionality to help you manage tasks as they progress through the stages of your flowcharts.
7. Zoho Projects — All-in-one platform for various business processes, including CRM, project management, accounting, and more.
8. ProWorkflow — Excellent organizational charts and project management features combined with quoting and invoicing.
9. Quire — Great team collaboration features revolving around an infinite nested task list to centralize communication.
10. BQE CORE — Reliable accounting and project budgeting tool with easy-to-use Gantt charts and CRM campaign management.

What Can I Use a Flowchart For?

Flowcharts are a versatile solution that can be used in various fields. They help provide a visual representation of processes and simplify complex relationships, so they’re helpful for business, personal, and educational use.

For example, a flow chart app can help a medical student illustrate how the human body works. A software developer might use one when designing algorithms to visualize control flow, while managers could create network diagrams for quality control or sales and marketing planning.

Since creating a flowchart diagram doesn’t require technical expertise, these tools are equally suited to freelancers, SMBs, and large enterprises.

During our hands-on testing with the best flowcharting software tools, we focused on their utility in business environments, such as for project planning and process optimization. Besides their uses in planning, we found them to be great for troubleshooting, as you can take a structured approach to problem-solving from the get-go.

What Kinds of Flowcharts Can You Get?

Flow diagram makers offer various ways to represent processes, workflows, and decision trees. While these chart and diagram types serve similar purposes, some may be better suited for particular use cases.

• Process Flow — The most common workflow chart, which provides team members with a visual representation of a sequence of steps in a process.
• Swimlane Flowchart — This flowchart adds a dimension of responsibility to the process. It helps you visualize a process in lines, or “swimlanes,” representing different entities or departments involved.
• Cumulative Flow — This diagram shows your team’s tasks and the time it takes to complete them. It can help you understand how stable their workflow is, making processes more predictable and anticipating bottlenecks.
• Gantt Charts — Although they aren’t traditional flowcharts, these charts are ideal for project management, as they allow you to visualize dependencies between tasks.
• PERT Charts — Program Evaluation and Review Technique charts allow you to estimate the total duration of a project and each of its parts. Like the Critical Path Method (CPM), PERT offers numerous advantages for planning projects with many moving parts and dependencies.
• Decision Trees — This consists of nodes representing a decision or a chance event and branches showing possible outcomes. They make it easy to identify relationships between decisions and patterns.

Top 10 Flowchart Diagram Solutions Compared

This master table provides a head-to-head comparison between our selected flowchart providers based on their top features, pricing, use cases, and free plan options.

Reviews of the Best Flow Chart Makers

Here, we’ll review what each flowcharting software solution on our list excels at and how they compare. We’ll go in-depth on their top features, pricing, pros and cons, and best use cases to help you make an informed decision.

1. Monday — Overall, the Best Flowchart Software Available in 2023

Monday provides an all-in-one visual task management solution that allows you to track tasks, projects, and workflows. Its interface left the best impression on us, as we found it intuitive and clutter-free, meaning your team won’t have issues mastering it.

It offers 11 different board view types, which are rich with graphs and elements to help you visually represent business processes. Thanks to its exceptional workflow builder, which seamlessly interacts with the rest of the platform, you can use Monday to analyze and report project data with just a few clicks.

Monday offers impressive features to help you streamline business processes and manage your team. One of our favorite Monday features is the Workload View, which lets you see your team’s availability and workload.

That means you can set up a workflow and effortlessly identify bottlenecks in your business processes, allowing you to add and remove responsibilities from team members.

In addition, Monday excels at automation, an invaluable feature for businesses tackling multiple projects. It can help team members avoid repetitive tasks by triggering actions based on specific events or updates within the flowchart.

For example, you can automate notifications to other team members when a sales representative successfully signs a new contract.

Besides its flowchart capabilities, Monday offers numerous helpful features for businesses of all sizes, including project budgeting, reporting, analytics, marketing planning, and more, making it one of the best project management tools around.

However, many of its advanced features are only available with its more expensive plans, meaning it’s not the most affordable solution for businesses on a tight budget.

Pricing

Monday bases its cost on the number of seats you need and the features you choose. While a pre-defined user count won’t bother established companies, small startups may end up paying for more than they need, which is the only issue we saw with this provider.

However, Monday offers an excellent free plan for up to two users and a 14-day free trial for its other plans, allowing you to try its services risk-free.

2. Wrike — Superb Platform for Gantt Charts

Wrike can help you break complex projects into manageable phases and well-organized tasks, and its user-friendly interface makes it an excellent pick for startups and small teams. In addition, it lets you create unlimited projects, custom fields, and flowcharts, even with its cheapest plan.

While we had a positive experience creating Gantt charts with the providers on our list, Wrike stands out for its customization tools and ease of use. It lets you adjust dates and deadlines, reschedule tasks in bulk, and even print the chart out to provide a physical copy for your office.

In addition, we found it easy to import existing data to the platform, as Wrike automatically organizes dependencies, durations, and responsible parties, minimizing admin.

As one of the best task management software solutions, Wrike excels at bridging the gap between traditional office work and remote work and provides an ideal platform for hybrid business environments. Besides its excellent flowcharts, it makes it easy to follow up on your team’s progress.

You can use one of its requests and approvals templates to set up a workflow that automatically manages changes and updates for you. The template we tried allowed us to set up assignee dashboards and traffic control, which reduces the chances of errors in a company with a large number of departments.

We could then track everything we needed to with Wrike’s Gantt chart, which provides in-depth insights into project progress and what each team member is working on at any given time.

However, you might consider Monday if you need an all-in-one project management tool, as we found some of its features, like project budgeting, more intuitive.

For more information on Wrike, you can also check out our full Wrike review.

Pricing

Wrike is ideal for small teams looking to improve their team collaboration, and it costs just $9.80/user/month for up to 25 users. It can get expensive quickly if you need it for a larger team, but it justifies the price with cutting-edge artificial intelligence features that assess project risk and help you prioritize to-dos.

You can sign up for a free Wrike account or start a 14-day free trial today to test its services without risk.

3. Smartsheet — Ideal for Building Agile Project Workflows

Smartsheet is the best flowchart program for Excel experts as it’s fundamentally a more powerful version of traditional spreadsheet tools. While that’s great news for spreadsheet lovers, those who would prefer different approaches to manipulating data may be better off with one of our other flowchart tool picks.

With its flexibility, however, Smartsheet allows you to turn its spreadsheets into a powerful project management solution. It offers hundreds of pre-built templates for various flowchart types, including its advanced Agile project workflow.

Unlike most of its competition, Smartsheet lets you use advanced views, such as Gantt charts and Calendar views, even with its free plan. Although that means you can take your time to familiarize yourself and your team with its platform, there is something of a learning curve.

While its competitors, like Monday and Wrike, limit their attachment storage to 5 GB on their cheapest plans, Smartsheet lets you store up to 20 GB. In addition, that number can scale up to 1 TB or even unlimited storage, meaning you can use Smartsheet as a central location for all your business documentation.

Smartsheet offers hundreds of templates for workflows and flowcharts to quickly create new business timelines and guides. We were impressed with how it handles Agile project management workflows, which are generally more complicated with other flowchart software providers.

Besides helping you calculate the critical path of a project to ensure the shortest possible project duration, Smartsheet also lets you look at baselines to compare your estimates to actual results.

You can also check out our in-depth Smartsheet review for more details on its features.

Pricing

Smartsheet offers a feature-rich free plan that lets you access its Gantt charts, dashboards, reports, and more. However, it’s limited to one user and two editors, meaning it’s only suitable for freelancers, personal use, and microbusinesses.

Besides its free plan, it offers three pricing tiers, with its cheapest pricing plan being more affordable than most of its competition. You can try Smartsheet risk-free today, thanks to its lengthy 30-day free trial.

4. ClickUp — Powerful, User-Friendly Charting Solution

ClickUp is the best flowchart software for free you can get. It lets you draw diagrams and almost anything else using its Whiteboard feature, which is available with its free plan.

During our hands-on experience with this platform, we created flowcharts that included images, links, and even trackable tasks, and the flexibility of its features earned ClickUp its place on our list.

ClickUp excels at improving team collaboration with its diverse features that tackle everything from meeting preparation to project management. It’s also ideal for hybrid business models because it offers real-time chat, in-app comments for tasks and action items, and notifications.

That means you can tag team members directly on the Whiteboard, reducing your admin hours and the risk of miscommunication among team members. In addition, we found ClickUp to be the best flowchart app for Android, as we had no issues recreating everything we did on a desktop while using a smartphone.

Besides being invaluable for remote workers and team members on the go, ClickUp is one of the most straightforward flowchart solutions. It offers a drag-and-drop editor that allows you to duplicate existing tasks, place them in a flowchart, and sort them manually or using one of its many filters.

However, its ease of use extends only to the Whiteboard and other chart views, while its advanced features, such as automations, have a slight learning curve.

Pricing

ClickUp offers three premium plans and a comprehensive free plan that offers a huge number of features. It prices its plans competitively, and the most expensive plan requires you to contact its sales team for a quote.

We suggest opting for one of its paid plans to gain access to Gantt charts, resource management, and unlimited custom fields. You can try one of its paid plans with its 14-day free trial before you commit.

5. Teamwork — Powerful Project Planning Software

Teamwork is a budget-friendly flow chart maker that can help you meet project deadlines and budgets with careful planning. It lets you set project goals, decide milestones, and break down each part into achievable tasks.

You can then assign these tasks to team members and track their progress and billable hours. Although it has one of the best Gantt charts, we moved it down to the fifth place on our list because it reserves some Gantt chart features for its more expensive plans.

Teamwork stands out from the competition with its unlimited collaborators feature that allows you to invite your clients and investors to the platform. While some competitors offer similar features, Teamwork enables you to present your project in its planning phase and communicate with collaborators in-app.

This approach allows you to identify and respond to risks early while building stakeholder and client relationships. In addition, it integrates with some of the best email marketing tools and CRM solutions to allow you to synchronize your data and reach existing or new clients.

Although we found its interface easy to navigate, the sheer amount of its features can be overwhelming to first-time flowchart software users. However, we visited its support center and found it full of helpful video, textual, and interactive guides.

We suggest opting for Monday or Wrike if you’re looking to create flowcharts, but Teamwork may be the best option if you need additional features that can assist you with planning projects.

Pricing

Teamwork offers a comprehensive free plan and four competitively priced paid plans. However, you’ll need to pay for at least three users to unlock all its features, which makes it unsuitable for personal use. You can try this flowchart app risk-free today, thanks to its generous 30-day free trial.

6. Awork — Exceptional Kanban Board Functionality

Awork lets you create process flows using its Timeline feature, which serves as a multipurpose planner for your team’s daily, weekly, and monthly activities. While it lacks other flowchart types, Awork offers some of the best team collaboration tools in the industry.

It groups all project data and to-do items in one place, combining project planning with the company calendar and giving everyone a clear overview of their responsibilities and upcoming workload.

That makes it the best software for making a flowchart that’s directly linked to other business processes, encouraging cooperation and improving workflow management.

Awork keeps you up to date with all business processes and projects via its reliable Kanban boards. We immediately noticed how well-designed its Kanban view is compared to the competition, as it contains colored task cards for different topics in three process columns.

The left column displays pending to-do items, the middle shows work in progress, and you’ll find completed tasks on the right.

Awork lets you customize the columns to add tasks, assign team members, and improve your workflow. While the Kanban board can be superior to traditional flowcharts for some processes, we suggest opting for Monday or Wrike if you require more functionality.

Besides its excellent team collaboration and workflow organization features, Awork offers built-in time tracking. This feature can help create reports for users and clients based on individual employee hours or entire projects.

Pricing

Awork prices its plans in euros, and the cheapest plan costs the equivalent of $8.50/user/month when you subscribe for two years.

It lacks a free plan, but its 14-day free trial allows you to test-drive its services. We suggest opting for an annual or biannual plan if you choose Awork, as its monthly subscription costs get expensive.

7. Zoho Projects — All-in-One Platform for Various Business Processes

Zoho Projects is part of a comprehensive suite of business tools Zoho offers, and it includes a free addition, Zoho Show, which provides the best flowchart maker online features. That means you won’t need to download a separate program to use Zoho Show, as you can use it online and sync it to your Zoho Projects account.

In essence, its flowchart solution is a presentation tool rich with pre-made shapes and an intuitive interface. That means you won’t have to bother creating flowchart shapes, such as arrows or diamonds, and you’ll have full freedom while creating the diagrams.

Zoho Projects offers unmatched value for money on its annual subscription plan, which brings the price down to almost half of what most of its competition charges on average. Don’t let its price fool you either, as it offers feature-rich plans and one of the simplest flowchart designers we’ve tested.

Besides its exceptional flowchart maker – a free add-on – Zoho Projects can help you visualize all sorts of data with a single click.

From dashboards that report which team member contributed the most to a project to resource utilization charts, Zoho Projects can help you make better business decisions by giving you in-depth insights into your business’s performance.

In addition, it integrates with other in-house Zoho solutions, including one of the best CRM tools, a powerful analytics solution, and more business-oriented programs.

The only downside to Zoho Projects we noticed is that it offers fewer templates compared to its competition, which means first-time users may prefer solutions like Monday, Wrike, or ClickUp.

Pricing

Zoho Projects offers a free plan for up to three users that lets you use most project management features, including Gantt charts and project feeds.

However, it limits the free users to two projects, which makes it less effective than some of the free solutions mentioned above. Besides the free plan, Zoho Projects offers two budget-friendly premium plans, making it ideal for SMBs, agencies, and freelancers.

8. ProWorkflow — Excellent Organizational Charts Tool

ProWorkflow is the best program to use for flowcharts regarding the structure of your business’s work organization. It offers numerous pre-built templates that allow you to pre-assign staff, allocate time, add task descriptions, and more.

In addition, you can map out project details to simplify complex processes with its well-designed workflow menus. Although we were impressed by its workflow and organizational charts, we found its task management features complicated compared to our top picks.

ProWorkflow provides some of the most feature-rich flowchaflowchartsoject management plans in the industry, especially for large businesses with a global workforce. Its features, such as time zone adjustment and email alerts, can help you organize and track the performance of a global remote workforce effortlessly.

It goes beyond project management with its quoting and invoicing features, available with a separate subscription fee. That means it can help you manage everything, from creating flowcharts to tracking the performance of your employees and billing your customers.

While this all-around impressive service comes at a higher cost, as ProWorkflow is one of the most expensive solutions we’ve tested, it’s undeniably one of the best choices for large enterprises looking for a cutting-edge solution.

Besides its excellent performance, we were also impressed by its customer support team, which took no more than five minutes to respond to a live chat query.

Pricing

ProWorkflow is one of the most expensive flowchart and project management solutions we’ve tested, and it gets even more expensive if you decide to include its optional add-ons into the package.

While its cheaper plan offers dozens of advanced features, it lacks custom fields and offers just 25 GB of file space. ProWorkflow offers a 14-day free trial period, though, allowing you to test its services.

9. Quire — Great Team Collaboration Features

Quire is an exceptional free-flow chart maker for teams looking to improve team collaboration while optimizing project management. It’s a user-friendly solution that does an excellent job of breaking projects into smaller, bite-sized tasks without overwhelming the users.

It offers several ways for your team members to keep track of project progress and their responsibilities, including a Kanban board, Dynamic Timeline, and a calendar-like view. That encourages efficiency and transparency while allowing you to create customizable flowcharts that are easily accessible.

Quire lets you use its Workspace to create lists to visualize your ideas and break them down into tasks. For each task, you can add a comment, tag, description, and more to help your team members understand the purpose of each project or flowchart component.

To avoid overcrowding the list with inputs from other team members, Quire offers Sublists. Sublists let each member modify a copy of the flowchart without adding anything to the original.

Besides being an excellent brainstorming pick, Quire offers unparalleled team collaboration features, including the infinite nested list, which allows you to map out your thoughts and tackle them with your coworkers.

While its free plan lets you use its nested list and Kanban board, it lacks many essential features, such as time tracking, timesheet, permission customization, and more. However, it’s more generous than most of its competition, as it allows up to 10 free users per account and lets you create up to four projects free of charge.

Pricing

Quire offers a solid free plan for up to ten users, with unlimited subtask levels, data import, and integrations with popular software, such as Zapier and Slack. It has three pricing plans, at competitive prices, for businesses of all sizes.

What we like about the pricing structure is that most features a small business needs can be found on its cheapest premium plan, while most of its competition reserves them for more expensive options.

10. BQE CORE — Reliable Accounting and Project Budgeting Tool

BQE CORE is a powerful pick for businesses looking for an all-in-one financial and project management solution. With its three plans focused on accounting, CRM, and HR, BQE can help businesses of all sizes improve their project, department, and company-level budgeting, staff management, and client relationships.

For this review, we’ve tested its project management features and found a robust feature set that helps businesses with task allocation, forecasting, and budget streamlining.

While it has fewer task management features than other picks on our list, BQE CORE offers invaluable reporting and analytics features, customizable dashboards, and well-designed Gantt charts.

The first thing we noticed while testing BQE CORE is that its dashboards are well-designed with interactive graphs and excellent color choices. There are numerous widgets you can use in the Dashboard panel, including employee data widgets, such as paid time off for all employees or total billable hours.

BQE CORE provides hundreds of pre-installed task and graph templates you can modify, but it also allows you to create new ones with custom fields. In addition, it offers a robust Gantt chart to link tasks and represent the flow of work from one task to another, identifying possible bottlenecks.

BQE CORE also offers excellent time-tracking features. You can use these features to complete basic flowcharting tasks, such as illustrating when specific tasks are worked on or completed.

While it has an impressive interface and feature set, BQE CORE is the only flowchart tool on our list that doesn’t display its pricing publicly.

Pricing

BQE CORE has no free plan, but you can schedule a demo session to see if the software suits your requirements. You’ll need to contact the sales team to get a quote for your business, which means you’ll only be paying for what you need.

What is the Best Free Flowchart Software to Use?

After thoroughly testing each provider on our list, we’re confident ClickUp is the best program to use for flowcharts if you’re a freelancer, a small startup, or are on a strict budget.

It’s one of the rare few to include advanced features with the free plan, including its Whiteboard feature, which lets you create detailed flowcharts and diagrams.

However, you won’t have access to its Gantt charts, unlimited custom fields, or resource management tools, which add significant value to the product alongside its flowchart solution.

Key Factors to Consider When Choosing the Best Flowchart App

Investing in flowchart software is a big step toward optimizing your business’s processes and improving team collaboration. However, you’ll need a reliable solution that can positively impact your productivity and the clarity of your visualizations.

Here’s a list of crucial factors to consider before you commit to a subscription:

• Ease of use — The best flowchart software should also be the easiest to use. Look for solutions with drag-and-drop editors and a user-friendly interface that allows you to create, edit, and customize flowcharts without a steep learning curve.
• Compatibility — If you’re looking for the best flowchart software for Mac, Android, or another operating system, ensure the provider has compatible apps. Consider a web-based flow diagram maker if you can’t find a suitable solution for your device.
• Templates — The best flowchart software should have numerous pre-built templates to help you create professional-looking flowcharts quickly.
• Integrations — Look for diagramming software that seamlessly integrates with other business solutions you may already be using. In addition, most diagram software solutions are a part of project or task management tools, so you should evaluate their capabilities before committing to a subscription.
• Price — Pick a diagram tool that’s part of a package your business can make the most of. In addition, ensure the provider offers multiple pricing plans that can accommodate your business’s needs as it grows.
• Reputation — Although we’ve tested the providers on our list, we still combed through third-party user reviews on websites such as Trustpilot and G2. These provide unique insights into the first-hand experiences of long-term users, giving us a more rounded perspective of the user experience.

Techopedia’s Project Management Guides

Project management solutions have many more features to offer beyond flowcharting and the capabilities described in this article. Here’s a list of our project management guides to consider if you’re still uncertain about your final pick.

• The Best Project Management Software
• The Best Gantt Chart Software
• The Best Resource Management Software
• The Best Online Collaboration Tools for Teams
• The Best Remote Work Tools for Project Management
• The Best Construction Project Management Software

How to Make a Flowchart — A Quick Guide

Here, we’ll provide a quick step-by-step guide to help you start using Monday, which we rate as the best flowchart software provider. Most flowchart solutions have the same signup process, so you can still follow this guide if you opt for another provider.

Step 1 — Create Your Monday Account

Go to Monday and click “Get Started” to create an account, either by logging in with Google or manually setting up an account with an email address.

Step 2 — Complete the Registration Process

Monday will ask you a series of questions regarding your business to help determine the right pricing plan for your needs. Once you answer all the questions, you can invite your team members to the account and create your first content board.

Step 3 — Use the Project Workflow Template

Navigate to the Template Center by clicking on the icon in the top left and then “Explore more products.” Once there, click on “View templates” and look for “Project Workflow.”

Step 4 — Create Your First Flowchart

Once you activate the Project Workflow template, you’ll see a whiteboard page you can freely edit and share with others.

Conclusion — What is the Best Flowchart Software to Use in 2023?

After thoroughly testing more than a dozen flowchart services from various providers, we’re confident Monday offers the best value for money with its exceptional features and well-designed interface.

We found its interface intuitive and surprisingly simple for a product offering a wide range of capabilities. Monday can help you track tasks, projects, and workflows, and you can effortlessly create flowcharts with its Whiteboard and other templates.

In addition, you’ll find more than 11 different board view types with detailed graphs and widgets you can use to present and simplify processes.

Besides making it easy to stay informed about your business’s performance, Monday provides superb workflow automation features. Its cheapest plan is affordable, and it offers a 14-day free trial that allows you to try its services risk-free today.

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