Process, by owner
Swimlane diagrams, from a description or from the file you already have
Say who does each step and the lanes are drawn for you — or drop in the Visio swimlane that already exists and get it back on your brand.
Straight answer first: there is no canvas here and nothing to drag. You describe the swimlane in a sentence, or bring a file you already have, and it is drawn for you — on your own brand. If you want to place every shape by hand, draw.io is free and better at that. If you have the numbers already, read on.
Your file is read once to draw the diagram and is never stored. Converting turns on anonymous usage analytics — we never send your file, its contents or your brand URL. What we measure
Paste any URL. We read its palette and type and redraw the diagram in them — about a second, no account.
Colour
Found on your site
Any colour
Found on your site
Any colour
Found on your site
Any colour
Found on your site
Any colour
Found on your site
Any colour
Found on your site
Any colour
Or set it yourself
Every choice here redraws the diagram. Nothing is saved.
Language
The layout mirrors and the Arabic type scale applies, free. Translating the labels needs an account on a paid plan.
Skin
Type
Motion
Line
Depth
A bar in relief still measures correctly — the top face sits on the bar's end. A pie does not: squashing the circle makes the near slices read larger than the far ones at the same share.
Show
Font
Your diagram
Selected shape
Icon
Fill
Border
Label
Pages in this file
Try it with this
Paste this into the description box above — it is the example that produces the worked swimlane in the gallery.
A customer files a ticket, an agent triages it, engineering fixes it, the agent replies.
When a swimlane beats a flowchart
A flowchart answers "what happens next". A swimlane answers "and whose job is that" — which is the question that actually causes arguments. Use one when the handoffs matter more than the steps: a ticket moving between support, engineering and the customer, or an approval crossing three departments. Use a plain flowchart when one team owns the whole thing, because empty lanes make a simple process look like a committee.
What comes out
Drawn by this pipeline, not picked to flatter it.
What you get out
SVG and PNG on any plan. PowerPoint with real editable shapes and live text — not a picture of a chart you cannot fix a typo in — plus our own .dgm format, which is plain text you can edit and re-import. Every conversion returns a ledger saying what changed, because you know your own diagram and would notice anyway.
Questions people actually ask
- Will it read my existing Visio swimlanes?
- Yes. Visio is the commonest place swimlanes already live, and .vsdx is read directly — including the lanes themselves, not just the boxes inside them.
- How many lanes is too many?
- Past about six the diagram becomes a table and reads worse than one. Nothing stops you, and nothing is dropped, but a process crossing eight teams is usually two diagrams.
- Can the lanes run horizontally?
- Yes — lane direction follows the reading direction, and in Arabic the whole flow mirrors rather than the labels simply being translated.
Other diagram types
flowchart maker histogram maker process flow diagram pie chart maker venn diagram maker gantt chart maker org chart maker er diagram tool
All 53 types have a worked example in the gallery.