Project managers often find themselves knee-deep in complex projects—juggling multiple tasks, people, and expectations at once. A detailed Gantt chart template is a great way to bring order and structure to your project management efforts.
Here are 15 free Gantt Chart templates to get you started.
But First, What Are Gantt Chart Templates?
A Gantt chart is a popular, visually-driven calendar that displays your project schedule. Its structure typically mimics that of a cascading waterfall.
You map your tasks (as a horizontal bar) along a timeframe to get a better sense of how to proceed with the project.
The position where the bar starts signifies the start date of the project, and the bar length indicates the time you have in hand to complete said task.
You also get a bird’s eye view of:
- start and end date of the project
- key activities, deliverables, and tasks in the project
- milestones and deadlines
- task overlaps and dependencies
- the team’s progress
- the remaining work
- project’s current state
And more.
This graphical chart provides insights into what everyone is doing on the project and how to set realistic deadlines. Gantt charts can be prepared easily using free Gantt chart software or conventional tools like Excel.
Let’s now look at 15 free Gantt chart templates to improve your project planning and achieve tasks in record time!
15 Free Gantt Chart Templates in Docs, Word, Excel & More
1. Simple Gantt Chart Template by Nifty
Want to see the big picture of your ongoing project, including active milestones, dependencies, and more?
Nifty’s Getting Things Done template is custom-made for your visualization needs.
This Gantt chart empowers you to plan ahead and allocate resources optimally so that there are no delays.
But how does it work? Nifty automatically pulls Tasks within the interface and converts them into a simplified Gantt chart (under the Roadmaps column).
The best part is that you can color-code the task status—just one look, and you’ll know whether your project is on track or if there’s any task that’s pending (depending on the color of each Gantt chart bar).
This template is ideal for beginners as well as seasoned project managers who want to visualize their project easily across tons of use cases—thanks to Nifty’s 6+ project views such as Swimlane, Calendar, Kanban, List View, Timeline, Report, and more.
2. Personal To-Do Gantt Chart Template by Nifty
Imagine having a ready-made personal to-do checklist at your fingertips.
Nifty offers a Personal To-Dos template so that you don’t have to create a checklist from scratch:
Simply customize the template fields as needed and tick off items from your checklist.
What makes this template even more powerful is you get to see all your checklist items and essential activities at one glance in the form of a visual Gantt chart template.
With all the data accessible at first glance, no detail will ever fall through the cracks.
3. Content Writing Calendar Gantt Chart Template by Nifty
Make no mistake – creating a content writing calendar is not an easy ask.
You need meticulous planning. More importantly, you need to organize your article ideas and themes in a more balanced capacity throughout the month.
This is where Nifty’s Content Writing Calendar template shines:
This template comes with ready-to-use fields such as Ideas, Writing, Editing, Need to Fix, Approval, and Completed, ensuring you follow the content marketing process to the T.
To make your life easier, Nifty allows you to view these fields in the Gantt chart format under the Roadmap tab, as shown below:
With a granular and graphical understanding of what’s pending, ongoing, and completed, your team will be able to work with greater efficiency and less chaos.
4. Blog Writing Gantt Chart Template by Nifty
When it comes to listing marketer-friendly Gantt chart templates, no list is complete without mentioning a Blog writing workflow—like the one Nifty offers:
Expertly curated and mindfully conceived, this template covers important fields such as Upcoming article ideas, Draft, In Progress, Editorial, and Completed so that your blog publishing process becomes streamlined.
Having separate fields for every aspect of blog writing enables you to deliver high-quality and well-researched blogs that convert.
All in all, if you want to save time on planning—and collaborating for—blogs and spend more time actually writing them; this Gantt chart template fits the bill.
👉 Get this blog management Gantt chart template 👈
5. Agile Software Development Gantt Chart Template by Nifty
Agile project managers understand the need to have every aspect of software development documented.
Whether it’s recording key milestones, tracking the backlog, crossing off items from the to-do list, or implementing QA, there are multiple moving parts to take care of.
Nifty is here with a handy Agile Development template to streamline all these processes:
Whether you’re engaging in user acceptance testing or want to A/B test the content of your app, this template adds a layer of organization to your project management.
All the tasks, like the other templates featured here, get automatically converted into a free Gantt chart template:
Bring better alignment, teamwork, and coordination to the team with these highly visual, simple-to-digest Gantt charts.
6. Project Tracker Gantt Chart Excel Template
Here’s another accessible Excel Gantt chart template to help project managers track projects—be it by category or by the employee assigned to them.
You can customize the template with text, graphics, etc., flag over/under the input—thanks to a built-in calculator, streamline your planning, add videos, animations, or transitions, and share at one-click with this simple Gantt chart Excel template:
Use this easy-to-use Gantt chart Excel template and see for yourself.
7. Simple Gantt Chart Excel Template
Truth be told, we’d be nowhere without idea planners!
Whether it’s goal-setting, task-planning, or due date-tracking, an Idea Planner Excel Gantt chart template like the one shown below cuts down the confusion and repetitive work in half:
This simple Gantt chart Excel template follows a weekly schedule and offers plenty of room for scribbling notes. The color-coded status levels are the real star, allowing you to categorize—and comprehend—the information in one go.
8. Marketing Growth Strategy Gantt Chart Template by Nifty
Devising a marketing growth strategy is nearly impossible without strategic planning.
And the first step towards successful campaigns is getting all the data collated and organized for the team to see.
Enter Nifty’s Marketing Growth Strategy Gantt chart template.
Our marketing team has taken special care to build this free Gantt chart template for you. Some of the most helpful tasks that you can customize to your liking include A/B test idea, Team review, Ready for launch, A/B test live, Test evaluation, Winner, Loser, and Completed.
Even if all the fields don’t suit your current marketing requirements, having a foundation helps to kick off the planning with speed, agility, and productivity.
💥Level up your marketing with this marketing Gantt chart template 👈
9. Link Building Gantt Chart Template by Nifty
Search engine optimization forms the bedrock of effective content marketing. But how do you engage in powerful, synchronized link-building if you don’t keep track of the articles and the links to insert?
A free Link Building Gantt chart template like the one shown below is the answer to your brand’s link-building efforts:
This template provides a visual representation of your link-building activities over time, such as Outreach, Negotiation, Article writing, Article finished, Article ordered, and more.
With a Gantt chart, you can see the timeline of each article and its associated link-building tasks. This way, you’ll be able to better plan, track, and manage your link-building initiatives—from start to finish.
10. Legal Case Management Gantt Chart Template by Nifty
Building a legal template is a different ballgame altogether.
Unlike other types of templates, your tasks are more granular, highly detailed, complex, and related to the immediate legal requirements. Naturally, creating—and maintaining—them can be a pain.
What’s more, the deadlines may be more stringent.
Nifty’s ready-to-use Legal Template saves you a lot of effort and time—the main currencies in the field of law!
With in-built tasks such as Appeal, Pre-trial, Trial, Summons, Discovery, and more; you won’t have to worry about documenting the minor details.
👉 Get this legal case management template 👈
The 360-degree Gantt chart view will ensure you stay on top of your legal tasks and are able to manage your workflow effectively.
11. Work Breakdown Structure Gantt Chart Excel Template
Here’s a Work Breakdown Structure Template by ProjectManager to help manage all your projects online.
Irrespective of your project size and scope, this simple Gantt chart Excel template literally breaks down the larger project phases into smaller (more achievable) project tasks as well as deliverables.
Use this free Gantt chart template to schedule and assign tasks to the right team member at the right time and avoid getting overwhelmed altogether.
Leverage this interactive Gantt chart (also available as a spreadsheet in Excel) and create dependencies, attach files, find the critical path, and more.
12. Construction Management Gantt Chart Template by ClickUp
Construction is another business area that requires extensive planning to manage projects effectively. Often times, the responsibility of tracking costs, budget, and labor falls at the feet of project managers.
ClickUp makes it easier for you to keep your construction projects on track with this easy-to-use construction Gantt chart template. Use it to track milestones, drive time management, and keep the team on the same page.
This tool will do all the grunt work for you—planning, coordinating, and communicating with everyone involved. You can also connect tasks to resources and improve teamwork.
So, whether you wish to create visual timelines of the project’s progress or alter milestones to fit real-time demands, this customizable Construction Gantt Chart template is just what you need.
13. Gantt Excel Template by Excel
The Gantt Excel Pro template automates all aspects of project planning—from milestones to tasks.
With a clearly defined project flow, it becomes easier to see how the project timeline is progressing at every step of the way.
The template is created in such a way that you can create tasks and link them to the underlying dependencies. This invaluable data can then be used to track project progress against timelines, overdue tasks, and milestones.
An interesting feature to note is that the timeline columns automatically highlight holidays and weekends so that you don’t miss them, no matter how chaotic your day gets!
14. Featured Gantt Chart by PowerSlides
Another winner on our Gantt chart template list is the Featured Gantt chart template by PowerSlides, a robust Gantt chart tool.
This Gantt chart template is as creative as it gets. You can use it to illustrate a project schedule and easily demonstrate how a task or a specific event maps to the timeline.
This deck of slides also helps you to experiment with wide-ranging layouts and editable shapes, making personalization easy.
15. Gantt Chart Template by LibreOffice
Last but not least, we have a Gantt chart template by LibreOffice that is specifically designed for project management.
What makes this Gantt chart template a worthy contender is its ease of use.
All you need to do is simply input the basic project details such as task and owner names, start and end date, milestones, etc., and the tool will instantly generate a graphical Gantt chart you can use right off the bat.
What’s more, you can edit the task completion percentage to track the status of your tasks by simply entering the start date. It is that simple!
Benefits of Using Free Gantt Chart Templates
Now that we’ve covered all the Gantt chart basics let’s understand why you should use Gantt chart templates.
In essence, Gantt chart templates offer the following benefits to users:
- Time-saving: Being a pre-designed template, you save time and effort on creating a Gantt chart from scratch.
- Easy to use: These templates come with user-friendly interfaces, allowing beginners to use them with ease and without any expertise.
- Easy to understand: Given they represent the project schedule visually, you can grasp the timelines and dependencies without much effort.
- Better organization: They help in organizing tasks, resources, and timelines in a structured manner.
- Increased customization: You can customize the template to suit your specific project needs (think: adding or removing columns, adjusting time scales, etc.)
- Improved collaboration and communication: The templates are easy to share with team members, keeping everyone in the loop. Plus, they drive clear communication of project plans and progress to stakeholders across the board.
- Faster progress-tracking: Gantt charts track project progress and help you stay on top of delays and bottlenecks.
- Optimal resource management: These templates focus on managing resources efficiently as you can visualize resource allocation and availability—at one click.
- Historical data: They serve as historical records of project timelines and milestones, particularly for future projects.
Create Visual Gantt Charts in Nifty with Just One Click
If your project information is not easy to digest, it spells trouble. Using Gantt chart software can help track project progress in real-time and automate updates.
Your team members won’t be able to understand who is working on what.
Your stakeholders won’t understand how the project aligns with their expectations.
Your client may be unhappy if they feel that the project is a hit-and-miss in terms of agreed goals and objectives.
Long story short, your project data should be easily accessible, deceivingly simple to create, and easy to digest at all times. This is where using a Gantt chart template pays off.
Try Nifty’s diverse Gantt chart templates that can be tailored to any role, use-case, or business end goals project managers need (or even want!). Sign up today.
FAQs
Are there any free Gantt chart templates for project management?
Yes, there are plenty of free Gantt chart templates for project management that you can use right off the bat. Nifty, for instance, offers useful templates such as Agile Sprint Retrospective, Scrum Project, Agile Development, Product Roadmap, Bug Tracking, and more.
How to create a Gantt chart?
Here’s how to create a Gantt chart within minutes:
Step 1: Add your project details (such as project start and end dates, description, objectives, etc.) within your preferred project management software.
Step 2: Add the required tasks to your project to create a timeline for your task list.
Step 3: Now, it’s time to schedule your tasks based on your timeline and priority.
Step 4: Create critical project milestones to track deadlines, meetings, etc.
Step 5: Add corresponding dependencies to tasks and start assigning team members to the tasks.
Step 6: Finally, color-code your task for enhanced visualization.
Pro tip: Once you add your custom tasks in Nifty, the tool automatically creates a Gantt chart for you (under the Roadmaps section).
Which tool is best for creating Gantt charts?
Some of the best tools for creating Gantt charts are Nifty, Instagantt, Smartsheet, Microsoft Project, ClickUp, ProofHub, and more. Make sure to try at least two to three tools before you make a final choice.
