About Cladogram Maker
Cladogram Maker is a free tool for drawing cladograms and phylogenetic trees in the browser. It was built because the alternatives were either research software with a steep learning curve or general drawing tools that know nothing about trees.
What it does
You can build a tree by hand, adding and removing branches directly on the canvas, or generate one automatically from a character matrix. Once the diagram exists you can restyle it: fonts, sizes, colours per clade, branch shape, layout direction, and labels that can be moved, rotated and resized individually.
- Build by hand, from a table of characters, or from one of five ready-made templates
- Horizontal, vertical and circular (radial) layouts
- Cladogram or phylogram mode, with branch lengths to scale
- Import Newick, and export Newick and NEXUS, the standard phylogenetics formats
- Export a high-resolution PNG or a true vector SVG
- Add free text boxes and images for figure labels and annotation
Who it's for
Mostly students and teachers. Cladograms turn up in secondary school biology, AP Biology, IB Biology and first-year undergraduate courses, usually as "here is a character matrix, draw the tree". The tool is built around that task, while still producing figures clean enough for a poster or a report.
How your data is handled
The tool runs entirely in your browser. Your tree isn't uploaded anywhere, it's saved to your browser's local storage so it's still there when you come back, and it stays on your device. Exports are generated locally too. There is no account and nothing to sign up for.
The site is supported by advertising, which is what keeps it free to use. See the privacy policy for details of what advertising partners may collect, and the terms of service for the terms of use.
Guides
If you're new to cladistics, these walk through the concepts:
- What is a cladogram, a plain definition and the parts
- What is a clade, monophyletic, paraphyletic and polyphyletic groups
- How to make a cladogram, the full process, from taxa to finished diagram
- How to read a cladogram, nodes, clades and relatedness
- Cladogram vs phylogenetic tree, what the difference actually is
Feedback
Bug reports and feature requests are welcome via the contact page. If something renders incorrectly, it helps to mention your browser and roughly how large the tree was.
Build yours in the browser, no signup, no install.
Open the cladogram maker