The cheap, no-nonsense Gantt chart for Mac (and Windows)

Published April 30, 2026 · Updated May 23, 2026

Updated May 2026: EverGantt is now a web app you can use on any browser, this post has been updated to match.

The cheapest way to make a Gantt chart in 2026 is, surprisingly, not free. The tools marketed as “free” almost always restrict you the moment you try to do something real: export the chart, start a second project, or invite a teammate. At that point you’re looking at $15 to $30 per seat per month, billed forever.

EverGantt takes a different approach: free to build and export in the browser, and $3.99/user/month if you want to save to the cloud, open saved projects across devices, or invite your team. This post is a quick walkthrough of how that model works in practice, and the tradeoffs you accept by going this route.

Why most Gantt pricing feels wrong

A Gantt chart is a lightweight artifact, not a live service. Once it’s drawn, your timeline is just a small file’s worth of structured data, it doesn’t need a fleet of servers to keep showing it to you. But almost every Gantt tool today ships as SaaS priced at $15 to $30 per user per month because subscriptions generate predictable revenue. You pay not because the product costs $15/month to run, but because the company has decided you should rent the right to look at it.

For a 50-person organization with a dedicated project-management team, that model is at least defensible. For a freelancer running three projects a year, a small studio, or a team that sprints once a quarter, it’s hard to justify.

What “fair, browser-based” actually means

EverGantt runs entirely in your browser, no install, no platform lock. It works the same on a Mac, a Windows machine, or a Linux box. You can open it right now and start building a chart without creating an account.

The free tier lets you build and export your chart. If you want to save it to the cloud so it’s there next time you open the browser, share it with a teammate, or access it from another device, that’s the paid tier at $3.99/user/month. Your data is always exportable, you can pull a JSON copy of any project anytime, and deletable. We don’t hold your charts hostage.

That sounds obvious and yet most tools in this category don’t work this way. The few remaining one-time-purchase desktop apps sit at $200 to $350. The subscription SaaS tools start “free” and gate everything useful behind a paywall.

What EverGantt actually does

A Gantt chart in EverGantt is a list of stories (high-level phases) with tasks underneath each one. You add stories and tasks, set their dates, and connect tasks that depend on each other. Dependent tasks shift automatically when their predecessor moves, so you don’t spend time hand-correcting the timeline every time something slips.

For team capacity, you can assign more than one teammate to a task with hour estimates per person. The capacity panel at the bottom stacks those hours by week so you can see at a glance who’s overloaded. On the Pro plan, you invite teammates directly and collaborate on a shared project.

When you’re done, export the chart or save it to the cloud. Your timeline is just a small file you can export anytime, if you ever leave EverGantt, you take your data with you.

What you give up

EverGantt is for the 80% case: stories, tasks, dependencies, capacity. You give up PMI-style baselines and earned-value tracking. If you’re managing a regulated, audit-grade project with 50 collaborators and formal change-control processes, a heavy enterprise PM suite is the right answer.

You also give up the deeply integrated desktop experience, there’s no native menu bar, no AppleScript automation, no OS-level file association. It’s a web app, which means it runs everywhere but integrates less deeply with any one OS.

The tradeoff is the point

Software priced fairly is software where the developer’s incentives stay aligned with yours. At $3.99/user/month, with a genuinely free tier to try it, we’re not betting on lock-in or annual-commitment discounts. The bet is that if the tool is useful and the price is honest, you’ll keep paying. If it stops being useful, cancel with no fuss.

Start free in your browser. Related: why planning software costs too much.