Looking for a way to make your data heavy story easier for readers to engage with on your website and social media pages?
Try these free and easy to use web tools to create infographics, graphs and charts to simplify complicated data.
Datawrapper
Datawrapper is marketed as a tool built by journalists for journalists.
Like the rest of the free tools below, you do not need any knowledge of coding or design as it provides sleek, customisable templates for graphs and charts.
The site also helps you create chloropleth maps (where data is portrayed as a colour shade over a region) or symbol maps (which portrays data as an icon in a specific location).
For free use, it allows you to create projects “occasionally” with the expectation that the article on your site would get less than 10,000 views a month.
info.gram
Infogr.am lets you create up to 10 projects for free. Its layout lets you create infographics, maps and graphs quickly, ideal if you are on a tight deadline. Compared to some of the other tools in this article, infogr.am has several creative templates such as bubble graphs to show correlations, and pictorial charts for comparing sizes and amounts.
Visme
Visme allows you to create three projects for free before paying for a subscription.
They have templates for social graphics such as Twitter headers and YouTube banners, as well as charts and infographics.
The site also lets you easily upload data from an Excel spreadsheet straight in to the site or link your Google sheet and it will create an interactive graph for you.
Piktochart
Piktochart is great for creating longer infographics with pictures and graphs.
You can either create your own from scratch or use one of the free templates. Useful for portraying step-by-step guides or creatively laying out facts and figures.
The tool allows you to embed customisable and interactive content, ideal if you are not Photoshop savvy.
Canva
Canva also provides free customisable templates which enable you to create the right sized graphics for social media, as well as infographics and charts. It is well known that posts with images on Twitter or Facebook gain more views and engagement than those without.
So consider promoting your article with a visual social post. The site also lets you easily create complicated charts, such as mind maps and Venn diagrams, by choosing and editing one of their templates.
These can be embedded on to an infographic or shared on its own within an article.
Also, check out our article on Flourish, another free data visualisation tool, which enables you to easily create interactive graphics with no knowledge of coding.
Free daily newsletter
If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).
