Creately is presented as a visual workspace for brainstorming, planning, executing, and analyzing around projects. An "infinite canvas" supporting diagramming and drawing along with real-time collaboration, enabling teams to centralize documents, resources, tasks, and communication, creating a single source of truth for effective decision-making and increased productivity.
More specifically it features:
- Specialized shapes for 70 diagram types and an extensible library helps you visualize virtually anything.
- Drawing shortcuts so users can create shapes and connectors in a single interaction.
- Apply formatting and other changes with the toolbar.
- Predefined styles, themes and formatting options.
Creately supports marketing use cases by enabling users to plan all marketing activities and brainstorm ideas, and keep track of campaign deliverables, and note dependencies on the canvas, or use Creately as a hub for a creative workshop, or create a shared workspace to interact better with sponsors, partners, and stakeholders.
For product development, users can create a release plan, capture actionable feedback and ideas, and prioritize features, as well as plan and outline product launch initiatives and coordinate cross-functional team effort. The user can also map personas and journey maps to communicate insights across the design and development teams. For IT projects, Creately enables users to isualize a project charter, identify task dependencies, allocate resources, and track milestone progress, as well as communicate progress to stakeholders.
Creately also suggests educational use cases, such as tracking student progress and homework in real-time and providing immediate feedback where needed. Users can shared a central repository of resources, and facilitate different types of learning activities through collaboration, mind mapping, brainstorming, and discussions.
These use cases are in addition to general business use cases, such as org charts, mind maps of various kinds, Gantt charts, flowcharts, wireframing, BPM, or SWOT analysis.
Creately is available on a free plan, supporting up to 3 document and a limited usage (60) of elements, and community support. Tiers of paid service provide upgrades to premium support, advanced collaboration features, and unlisted use of elements, as well as unlimited product documents and folders.
Creately is a product from Cinergix, a company founded in 2008 and headquartered in Melbourne. They boast a number of high profile users of Creately, including users at Amazon, Siemens, Deloitte, Orange, Huawei, and eBay, among others.