Creately diagramming software review

Create professional diagrams and easily share with your colleagues

(Image: © Creately)

TechRadar Verdict

Creately is a great tool for sharing strategies, plans, visual information, and future goals with your team, whatever your work environment. Featuring thousands of pre-designed templates organized by occupation, it’s extremely easy to search graphs and charts already in your field of interest. Spend your time filling in information and collaborating with your team, rather than trying to build professional diagrams.

Pros

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    Thousands of pre-designed diagrams

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    Diagrams are organized by occupation

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    Templates look professional

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    Easy to draw your own ideas

Cons

  • -

    Can only cancel subscriptions by email

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Creately helps you collaborate visually with your team, so whether you specialize in information technology or work in human resources, there’s now a great place to draw your ideas and share them with anyone you want in real time. The platform allows users to add members and all edit the same diagram together, add comments anywhere on the visual diagram and easily start a thread to chat.

Creately makes it easy to produce your own diagram or choose from thousands of templates, giving teams access to flow charts, mind maps, block diagrams, and many more graphs to keep your ideas organized. 

(Image credit: Creately)

Plans and pricing 

Pricing is divided into several different categories - whether you want Creately for individual use or a team, from the cloud or for a desktop, and whether you’d like to pay annually or monthly. If you’d like to download Creately for individual use only, you can generate up to five public diagrams for free and share with three collaborators. If you’re looking for something more in-depth, you can upgrade to any of the paid plans deployed from the cloud. 

The personal plan costs $4.95 per month when billed annually, and includes unlimited private documents, unlimited folders, five collaborators, and access to high resolution exports. You can easily export any of your diagrams to share your ideas, but although this plan includes up to five collaborators, it’s intended for more personal use. 

The team plan costs $18.00 per month when billed annually, and includes everything in the personal plan, plus unlimited collaborators, unlimited video and real-time calls, and team member management. You can have up to three managing team members, but you can upgrade to more if you need to. 

Next, there’s the enterprise plan which has custom pricing. This plan includes everything in the teams plan plus an account manager, audit trials, and more support from Creately. 

If you’d like to purchase Creately directly to your desktop, you can easily do so by paying a one-time fee. The personal plan costs a flat fee of $75, or you can purchase the teams plan for $225 (includes up to three users). Creately also provides a free option, so you can try any of the templates to see if you like how it works before making a purchase.

(Image credit: Creately)

Interface  

Creately’s interface is extremely organized, making it easy to navigate. You can search for pre-designed diagrams based on your field of work, or choose from over 50 shapes and many color options to draw your own design. There are many themes and styles to choose from, so you can personalize your designs, and if you need to export a document, Creately allows you to export as PNG, SVG, or JPEG files. You can also pick which area on a diagram you’d like to leave a comment or start a thread.  

(Image credit: Creately)

Features 

Creately gives users access to thousands of pre-designed diagrams, and if you browse the company's website, you’ll be able to see examples of flowcharts, organizational graphs, marketing funnels, and venn diagrams. All of the templates are color-coded with professional ready-to-use formatting, meaning it’s easy to search for a specific template in a particular occupation. 

Another unique aspect of Creately is the integration feature. You can easily connect Creately to your Google Drive and manage documents, sharing permissions, and folders straight from Drive. You can also connect to Slack so your team is notified when there’s a diagram ready for their attention. 

There’s an option to connect to Confluence too, so that you can add more visuals right to your server. The Creately plugin for Confluence includes access to all of the templates, over 50 diagram types, and advanced features that won’t slow your speed.

(Image credit: Creately)

The competition 

Top competitors to Creately include Lucidchart, Draw.io, Visio, and Cacoo. Creately and Lucidchart are very similar in features and roughly the same price, although Lucidchart is slightly more expensive. Both diagramming tools are rated highly by users. The biggest difference is how each program is organized. Lucidchart makes it easy to visualize complex ideas and systems, but the templates aren’t organized as well as Creately and they look more outdated.  

(Image credit: Creately)

Final verdict

Overall, Creately is an excellent tool for anyone who wants to create a quick diagram and share with their team. You can write down your ideas, save important information, and ask for the opinions of your colleagues while keeping everything organized in one place. The ideas you can share on any of the paid plans are endless, and there’s a free option that allows you to test the templates. The integration feature connects Creately to Google Drive and Slack so you can have even more communication and sharing options with team members. If you have an idea that doesn’t fit any of the pre-designed diagrams, you can draw your idea using the program's design tools. With over a thousand templates available, you’ll always have a unique way to collaborate with your team. 

Chyelle works as a freelance writer for The Daily Beast and edited articles for Forbes, Inc.com, Fox News and other review sites. She researches products and services related to internet consumption and works on TechRadar Pro on SAAS offerings.