Project Timeline
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About Project Timeline
A compact alternative to traditional Gantt charts
Most Gantt tools give you a giant spreadsheet bolted to a chart — rows of fields to fill in before you see a single bar. Project Timeline flips that: the chart is the editor. You drag, click, and connect directly on the timeline, and the plan builds itself as you go.
Why it exists
Project Timeline was created by a program manager who had spent years in the usual tools, and kept thinking the same two things: this can be simpler, and it should not cost what the incumbents charge.
It began as a personal tool — a way to draw a clean timeline summary for a presentation, without wrestling a spreadsheet or exporting a chart that looked like a screenshot. Those charts started getting used on live work, so the planner grew around them: dependencies, a critical path, resources, baselines, working calendars, and exports that paste straight onto a slide.
That is still the brief. A timeline you can finish in minutes, usable on small work as well as large, with the picture on the slide the same as the picture you plan in.
Coming from GanttProject?
Like GanttProject, but want a modern web-based alternative? That is what Project Timeline is: the same kind of plan with nothing to install, open on any machine, and a chart that pastes straight onto a slide. GanttProject imports are coming soon.
Why it's compact
- One view, not three. Tasks, milestones, decisions, notices, dependency arrows, the critical path, and resource utilisation all live in a single chart — no separate views to keep in sync.
- The resource chart merges into the timeline. Utilisation heat-map rows sit flush under the schedule, sharing the same day columns, so over-allocation is visible at a glance instead of buried in a report.
- Edit where you look. Drag a bar to move or resize it, drag from its edge to connect a dependency, click its progress bar to set completion, double-click to open full details — all without leaving the chart.
- Rows stack, or spread out. The default packs several items onto each row to keep the whole plan on one screen. Switch to Gantt view when you want the traditional one-row-per-item layout instead.
- It keeps itself readable. Titles step aside when a dependency line or another bar would run through them, long marker names wrap, and links between items that already touch can be hidden — so a dense plan still reads at a glance.
- No setup tax. No project template wizard, no mandatory fields. Add a task and start dragging.
What's built in
Describe the change and the plan rewrites itself — “shift everything after PCB Layout by two weeks”, “assign the QA team to testing at 60%”. It answers questions about the plan too, and every edit is one undo away.
Working-day aware. Weekends, public holidays for 14 countries, custom non-working days, and each person's days off are all skipped automatically when tasks shift.
Drag a connection between tasks and the critical path highlights automatically as the plan changes. Dates cascade through everything downstream.
Zero-duration markers for key dates, decision points and call-outs, each drawn distinctly from tasks, without cluttering the schedule.
Assign people at a flat percentage or a variable day-by-day schedule, and see their load as a heat-map under the timeline.
Lock a plan and track slippage against it in days — green for early, red for late. Give resources a day rate and the chart totals cost per task, per person, and per project.
Colors, fonts, corner radii, categories and rows, ready-made palettes and your own saved ones, and control over the small things — which dependency arrows are drawn at all, where a marker's title sits, how big a milestone is. Export a chart that looks designed, not defaulted.
Save a plan as a template to start the next one from, and keep a company resource list and reusable work calendars that follow your account across projects.
English, French, German, Italian, Dutch and Spanish, with dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy and a currency that follows your region.
Invite someone by email and you are both looking at the same plan, with the same history — no exported files going back and forth. On the free tier a shared project is view only; a Pro plan of their own lets them edit it too.
Pro: one view of who is booked across every project on your account, not just the one you have open. Anyone over 100% on a day is outlined — the clash you cannot see from inside either project on its own.
Attach a note to any task, milestone or decision and it stays off the chart until you point at the item, then appears under the plan. Detail without clutter.
SVG, PNG, or a true vector PDF with clickable links — plus CSV and full-project JSON for backup or migration. Exporting a PNG also copies the chart to your clipboard, so it pastes straight onto a slide.
On your phone
Project Timeline also runs as a phone app. It is the same project — the same data, the same scheduling engine, the same account — laid out for a small screen: a searchable task list with progress and critical-path flags, a tap-to-edit sheet that nudges dates and lets dependencies cascade, resources, Timeline AI, and export. Turn the phone sideways and the whole screen becomes the Gantt chart.
Install it from your browser's Add to Home Screen menu and it opens like any other app. The mobile layout is newer than the rest and is still in Beta, so if something looks wrong on your device, the feedback link in the app goes straight to us. It needs a connection to load — there is no offline mode yet.
Free, and what Pro adds
You can use Project Timeline without an account and without paying. The free tier is a real working tool, not a trial: it holds 4 chart rows, 3 resources, 2 saved projects, the first 10 tasks in the data table and 3 saved versions per project, and every chart carries a small project-timeline.com mark. Timeline AI is the one part that needs an account — signed in, the free tier gets 2 requests a day.
Pro raises those to 20 rows, 50 resources, 50 projects, 100 table rows, 15 saved versions and 50 AI requests a day, removes the watermark, and unlocks baselines, saved templates, work calendars, color palettes and a company resource list shared across your projects. It also adds project sharing, the ability to edit projects other people have shared with you, and the shared resource chart. Nothing is taken away from the free tier to make room for it.
It is €3.99/month or €34.99/year — about 27% less than paying monthly. Both start with a 14-day free trial, and you can cancel before it ends without being charged.
Your data stays yours
Without an account, your work is saved in your browser on this device and never leaves it. Sign in and projects sync to your account with a version history you can restore from. Either way your projects are private by default, protected at the database level, and you can export them as JSON or CSV — or delete your account and everything in it — at any time. See the Privacy & Terms page for details.
Read more
- Free Gantt chart maker — what you get without an account, and where the free tier stops.
- Gantt chart to PowerPoint — getting the chart onto a slide as vector, so it stays sharp.
- Gantt chart with a critical path — how the critical path is worked out, and what it does not tell you.
- A lighter alternative to Microsoft Project — what it replaces, and what it does not.
Support the project
Project Timeline is free, and the free tier is meant to stay properly usable rather than be a trial in disguise. There is no company behind it and no investors to answer to — just one person, evenings and weekends.
If it has saved you an afternoon, you can put something towards the hosting and the time. It is entirely optional, and nothing in the app changes either way.