Free Gantt Chart With No Login: A 10-Minute Test, and What You Give Up
Search for a free Gantt chart and you will find plenty of tools that are free right up to the moment you want to save, export or share your work. Many want an email address before you can add a single task. If all you need is a plan on a screen, that is a lot to ask.
This post gives you a short test you can run on any Gantt tool, including Gantto, to find out whether it is really free and really usable without an account. After that comes the part most tool pages skip: what Gantto's free version does not do.
Three things "free, no login" can mean
The phrase covers very different products. In practice most tools fall into one of these patterns:
- Free to try, account to keep. You can drag bars around straight away, but saving needs a sign-up, and your plan lives on the vendor's server.
- Free with an account. Genuinely usable, but the free tier usually caps something: projects, users, exports or history. Your plan is in someone else's cloud.
- Free and local. The plan is a file on your own computer. There is nothing to log in to, and nothing to lose if a service changes its pricing. The trade-off is that you manage the file yourself and share by sending it.
None of these are wrong. They suit different people. The mistake is finding out which one you picked after you have spent an afternoon building a plan in it. Plans, limits and pricing change, so check any specific tool's current terms rather than trusting a comparison table that may be a year old.
The 10-minute test
Run these seven steps in order. Stop at the first one that fails, because that is where the tool will annoy you later.
- Open it in a private window. Can you add a task before any sign-up prompt?
- Build a small plan. Make three phases with four or five tasks under each. Can you collapse and expand the phases?
- Link the tasks. Can you make one task wait for another? Can you choose the type of link (finish-to-start, start-to-start and so on) and add a lead or lag?
- Move the first date. Push the first task out by a week. Do the tasks that depend on it move, or do you have to retype them?
- Save, close the tab, reopen. Does the plan come back? Where is it stored: a file you can see, or a server you cannot?
- Turn off your Wi-Fi and repeat steps 4 and 5. If the tool needs a connection to reschedule or save, you will find out on a train or a client's guest network.
- Try to hand the plan to someone. Export a PDF or image, or share a link. Is it free? Is it watermarked? Does the other person need an account to look at it?
Step 4 is the one that separates a drawing tool from a scheduling tool. A chart where you place every bar by hand looks like a Gantt chart but cannot tell you what a delay costs.
How Gantto does on the same test
Gantto is a single HTML file. You download it, open it in your browser and start planning. There is no account and no install. Here is how the free version does on each step:
| Test step | Gantto free |
|---|---|
| 1. No login | Yes. Open the file and add a task. |
| 2. Phases | Yes. Task hierarchy with collapsible summary tasks. |
| 3. Links | Yes. All four link types (finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish, start-to-finish) with lead or lag, plus milestones. |
| 4. Move a date | Yes. Dependent tasks move with it. What happens when one task slips shows this on a real plan. |
| 5. Save and reopen | Yes. Plans save as files on your computer, and Gantto keeps a recovery copy in your browser. |
| 6. Offline | Yes. Everything runs in the browser with no server involved. |
| 7. Hand it over | Partly. You can send the saved file to anyone with Gantto. PDF, PNG and CSV export and Share Read Only are part of the one-time Solo licence. |
Also free: importing a Microsoft Project XML export, the colour themes, task status, and the AI helpers that let you paste a plan in or copy one out as text for an assistant to review.
What the free version does not do
This is the part that should help you decide, so here it is plainly.
- No live collaboration. There is no server, so two people cannot edit the same plan at the same time, and there is no cloud sync between devices. If your team needs to work in one shared plan together, a cloud-based tool is the right choice and Gantto is not.
- Sharing is file-based. To give someone an editable plan you send them the file. To give someone a view-only copy that opens without Gantto, you need Share Read Only, which is a Solo feature.
- Exports are paid. If your plan needs to land in a slide deck or an email as a PDF or image, that is the Solo licence (£9.99, one-off, no subscription).
- Deeper analysis is paid. Baselines, Critical Path Analysis, Schedule Risk, resource capacity and Plan History are Solo features.
- It is a scheduler, not a project management suite. It plans dates, dependencies and ownership. It is not an issue tracker or a place to chat about tasks.
If those limits are fine for you, the free version is a complete planning tool rather than a demo. If they are not, you have lost ten minutes finding out.
Who this suits
Freelancers and consultants who keep client plans on their own machine, people planning on a network they do not control, and anyone who wants a plan they can open in five years without checking whether a service still exists. If you would rather start from a structure than a blank page, the project templates are ready-made plans you can open and edit.
If you want to see it working before you download, watch the short introduction video.
Related reading: How to Create a Gantt Chart · How to Create a Project Plan · Importing a Microsoft Project XML file
Run the 10-minute test on Gantto. No signup required.