Introducing Creately – The New Interface for Work

Work today is done on multiple disconnected tools that can only execute bits and pieces of a project, leaving teams to go back and forth to retrieve data for decision-making to move work forward. 

When each team works with its own tools and siloed processes, achieving company-wide alignment is not easy. True cross-team coordination requires a more end-to-end solution.

Enters Creately

For over a decade, Creately has been a leader in the industry as a diagramming and visual collaboration platform, successfully reshaping how teams think and work together. 

And, today we are excited to announce the launch of a whole new Creately, aimed at addressing the multitude of challenges created by distributed teams, siloed processes, disjointed tools, and scattered information. 

The Easier Way to Work Smarter

Creately can now connect and centralize items from multiple apps, docs, and people in a single space. So you can brainstorm an idea using the brainstorming software, map out a process with process mapping software and then go on to add the in-depth details of that process and build the system to execute the process right inside Creately.

Everything is visual so it’s easier to understand, and being on a canvas, you can move, arrange, group, and structure the information any way you want.

Most importantly, all the visuals are data-linked, meaning that having a copy of the content in a completely different workspace will still be always synced with the central DB. 

With advanced capabilities such as Database relations, Formulas, and smart rules Creately is actually a clever no-code platform that allows you to build and model any solution to your team’s challenges.

A free-form visual canvas

One thing that sets Creately apart from the rest of the work management tools out there is its free-form visual canvas – an infinite space for you to go from ideation to execution and beyond in a single workspace. 

It finally lets you break free from the predefined table-based interface and put all your work, assets, and resources in one place, side by side, and move them around without constraints as you brainstorm, plan, manage projects, and capture knowledge.

Data-connected 

Creately combines the simplicity of a whiteboard with the power of a database, redefining how you manage data, make decisions, and see things together. 

In Creately, data exists as custom properties of items that can take any shape or form given the context – on the canvas as opposed to rows and columns in a spreadsheet. 

For example, an employee shape on an org chart can contain all the data from their roles and responsibilities to performance review notes.our org chart software You can do this by using Any type of data that you bring to the Creately canvas from any source thus can be morphed into any form you want it to be.

Visual tools everyone just ‘gets’

At its core, Creately is still very much visual. 

With its easy drag and drop interface and 10,000+ specialized shapes, Creately can help you create fitting visuals for multiple use cases across industries, whether it’s a Kanban board for agile project management or an Org chart for your HR planning. 

These visuals are meant to be more. As you connect your data to them and extend them by adding custom statuses, notes, and attaching links, you are actually building a database.  

And just like that, that org chart becomes a system for employee data management manage by HR Software, and that Kanban board is now how you manage tasks across teams.

Custom databases 

Not only can you build actual apps inside Creately just by using a few shapes, but you can also visualize your app data sets in multiple contexts or views suitable for different work styles. 

For this purpose, Creately has added a new library of intelligent frames which include a Kanban board, 2×2 grid, timeline, and X-Y chart along with cards to go on them. Whatever is placed on a frame, automatically adapts itself to match the context. 

A sticky note placed on a Kanban board becomes a task card, and a task card on a grid converts itself into a pin. Although context changes, all changes made on the card are reflected across all the places it is used. Now, isn’t that neat?     

Custom workflows 

Creately’s built-in code-free workflow designing capabilities make it easier to optimize any task, project, or process in just a few clicks. 

  • Multiple views to manage your tasks; Kanban board online, timelines, grids, lists, Gantt chart maker, and more.
  • Keep track of all your to-dos, comments, & checklist items assigned to you with My Tasks. 
  • Add sub-tasks and checklists in tasks and organize larger projects into manageable workflows with task properties.
  • Set estimated times and due dates for tasks and allocate resources based on availability and skillsets.
  • Assign tasks to complete items in context. Link tasks to or from other project management tools seamlessly.
  • Use color-coded tags and prioritization grids to keep track of which tasks to prioritize and which to de-emphasize.
  • Tailored templates for your projects and tasks so you can build the workflow and process you need with the tools at your fingertips.

A fresh take on the team Wiki

Creately will become your new single source of truth. Its powerful documentation capabilities combined with its infinite canvas and multi-user collaboration make it the perfect knowledge management tool for teams.

On Creately, your Wikis are structured visually. A single shape on the canvas – whether it is a step in a process or a node in a mind map – can be a doc itself. With Shape Data, you can add notes, files, links, images, and more to each element in a visual, building more context into each step. 

Add anything, from multimedia files to screenshots to doc links with in-app previews onto your Creately canvas, right next to your work, to centralize all information needed to run your projects smoothly.  

Take your whiteboarding to the next level

Creately’s canvas doubles as an interactive whiteboard that offers teams – especially distributed and hybrid ones – a collaborative space to brainstorm and plan visually around their work. 

Paired with intelligent diagramming, it becomes the perfect solution for bridging the gap between ideation and getting work done.

Draw anything using our freehand drawing tool, and use shapes and connectors to turn your ideas directly into actionable projects, upload images, and embed almost anything, including external content to provide more context as you plan your way around.

Integrate & extend your other apps

Creately is built as an all-in-one work management tool to boost productivity and reduce the frustration and inefficiency caused by using multiple apps. 

We get that toggling between multiple apps all day may not be the most productive way to spend it, so we came up with the perfect solution that allows every type of team to customize their workflow and bring all their work in one place. 

Starting with the GitHub two-way integration, Creately has begun to build a hub of integrations that connect the tools you use every day to Creately, so you can bring data from them, visualize them with 2-way sync on the canvas, and add more fields extending that data. 

This will ultimately help you streamline your workflows in one place. You can finally stop wasting an enormous amount of time jumping back and forth between different tools for each and everything that you do – because you can do everything you need to get your work done, on Creately. 

A New Era of Work 

Building a flexible platform that teams love is at the core of everything we do. With the new Creately, you can reduce work about work, align cross-functional teams, save time, and keep work flowing in the right direction.

All of these new capabilities are foundational to what Creately enables you to do. It’s unlike anything available now and for most of you, it will be a completely new way to think about how to organize and manage your work. 

At Creately, our mission is to make the world more productive, and that starts with you! Please check out these new capabilities, and as always, let us know what you think so we can continue to make them even better.

14 Years In, We Are At Day One. Say Hello To Creately!
launching creately

Since the founding of Creately, I’ve been waiting over a decade to write this post.

When we founded Creately, we thought the way we interacted with apps, data, and docs can be better by an order of magnitude. 

At the time, what we built was a platform to model systems visually with integrated data. It focused on IT systems and parts of enterprise architecture. Experiments and iterations followed. Here’s a preview of some of the things we built. This time for Salesforce CRM. Note the time stamp on the video, 2011. 🙂 

While there were niche pockets of teams that loved our product, this way of working with visual tools on the web was too alien for most that were stuck in the classic productivity toolsets. In essence, it was too early. Most people wanted the diagramming part of the product, so we focused on that. 

However, after over a decade, it’s finally time!

Today we are launching Creately. The original purpose of our team, realized to match today’s challenges of distributed teams working with multiple apps and systems. 

Creately is the new interface for work. 

Ambitious. But it’s no BS marketing speak. This is exactly what it’s designed to do.

Here’s how.

  • Creately can centralize all workflows. It’s a clever no-code platform to build whatever flow of information you need.
  • Bring everything to the same canvas. Creately’s canvas can host your ideas, brainstorms, data from other systems, or embeds. What used to be in multiple tabs is now on the same canvas. You can move, annotate, arrange, and update things any way you like. I love how this opens up connections that you didn’t see earlier. 
  • It’s your knowledge base. Usually, note-taking apps and wikis are where ideas go to die. Finding them is hard and serious curation is needed for active use. Creately has a first-class note-taking capability that works with 2-way links, data embeds, and more. But more importantly, it flips the script on how you organize them. Visual structures are the navigation for the detailed notes. So you can go from a big picture view to details in the same space. 

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Creately is a first-class diagramming tool and a visual collaboration platform. Millions of users love Creately for these capabilities.

But these new capabilities unlock something foundationally untapped.

It starts with how we look at data. Every kind of work and task you do, if it’s digital, it’s creating or changing data. For many of us, this data is in a cloud application or a spreadsheet. 

The problem is that this data is LOCKED into a structure that’s determined by the host application. Typically it’s a table. You think of data, you think of a spreadsheet. 

At Creately we start with the `items`  (or entities). The ‘items` have properties and that’s the data.

So our unit of visualization is an item. Each row in a table in Creately is an item. Each ‘thing’ in your application (like Salesforce, hr system, or project management tool) is an item on the canvas for Creately that can take any shape or form depending on context.

This gives you the freedom to do things otherwise not possible.

  • Take a subset of items from anywhere and view and manage them separately
  • Connect individual items from multiple systems together in the canvas. Like a ‘front-end data integration’, [ex. build project dependencies between items from different apps].
  • Put items from multiple systems on a common workflow.
  • Add additional data and notes to items from other systems.
  • Link free-form ideas and visual plans together with items that are in a workflow.
  • Visualize the same items in multiple places for multi-perspective understanding. Since it’s data-backed, one change anywhere is synced with other copies of the item instantly. 

All of these capabilities are foundational to what Creately enables you to do. It’s unlike anything available now and for most of you, it will be a completely new way to think about how to organize and manage your work. 

We see it as an evolution of how people work with apps and systems. It’s flexible, visual, easy to change, and cuts down grunt work between systems. A single portal for the details and the big picture that’s always in sync. 

We cannot wait to see what you’ll build with Creately.

Transform the Way You Work and Collaborate; Introducing Creately Visual Workspaces
Introducing Creately Visual Workspaces

Creately first launched to the public in 2009. We innovated what it meant to be a diagramming tool built for the web and enabled millions to express their ideas visually that they otherwise would not have been able to. Today Creately is one of the leaders in this space, and we are super thankful to all of our customers for helping us get here.

Our renowned ease of use and simplicity of the experience was enabled by providing deep capabilities that are contextual and available for our users at the right time. Making sure that from primary school kids to professionals are able to express and collaborate around ideas visually without having to think about the tool that supports them. 

Now after 12 years, we are ready for our next major step. Today we are announcing Creately Visual Workspaces. 

Introducing Visual Workspaces From Creately

While maintaining our core diagramming capabilities, going forward Creately will focus on providing collaborative Visual Workspaces for teams to brainstorm ideas, plan, execute and analyze work across multiple functions in organizations. 

By focusing on these use cases, we expect to serve you better to solve actual organizational problems (that usually diagrams or visuals are a part of), at a higher order. So scenario-specific functionalities are being added to Creately to help teams on each focus area achieve their objectives more effectively and efficiently.

100s of professionally-drawn templates have been added that help you get things done, under;

You can insert any template into the workspace via the template panel. These templates are powerful and help structure your work around the problem area you want to solve.

Creately Visual Workspaces

What is Changing?

If you’ve come to rely on Creately for core diagramming and collaboration, those capabilities will still be in Creately as it always has been. We will continue to add and update features in diagramming as it provides the base for all of our new capabilities. 

But our infinite canvas, contextual features, and dynamic templates will enable you to find more uses with Creately beyond just diagramming. That’s where this is going.

Documents from now on will be called, Workspaces. We envision you being able to use our infinite canvas as a common, shared workspace with your team members to focus and work on any problem area, visually with new-found clarity.

A Myriad of New Features

To support this transition, we’ve shipped over 80+ deeper drawing and collaborative capabilities on Creately in the last 6 months. Just to highlight a few,

  • A fresh new look for Creately
  • Completely redesigned folder panel and document management interface
  • Containers for improved drawing capabilities
  • Improved real-time collaboration
  • Auto alignment snapping and guidelines
  • Shape locking
  • Advanced table
  • Kanban board
  • New shape libraries (BPMN, Archimate, Kanban)
  • Improved comment threads

This Is Just the Start of Something Bigger

This change to Workspaces is the very first step of a larger transformative journey for Creately during this year. Our core purpose is to help teams be their best creative and innovative selves, by providing a visual platform to collaborate and understand each other.

Staying true to that purpose, we will be adding advanced capabilities to help move work forward with an aim of making your Creately workspaces the central Visual command center around the projects that you work on.

Ending the Year on a High: G2 Crowd Names Creately a Leader in the Diagramming Category
Creately Wins G2 Badges

As the year comes to an end, we are humbled and filled with gratitude for the overwhelming response we received from our users. 

Software customer review site G2 Crowd recognized Creately as a Momentum Leader for Fall 2020 in the Diagramming Category.

This badge, along with several others including High Performer- Mid Market, High Performer- Enterprise, and Leader- Fall is based on 1000s of independent customer reviews. Every month, nearly 2.5 million people visit G2 Crowd’s site to gain unique insights. G2 Crowd aims to bring authenticity and transparency to the business marketplace.

G2 ranks products based on two factors: customer satisfaction through user reviews and market presence, with market share, vendor size, and social impact all considered. These badges represent an overall satisfaction rating from the people we value the most – our customers.

Leader: Products in the Leader quadrant in the Grid® Report are rated highly by G2 users and have substantial Satisfaction and Market Presence scores.

High Performer Enterprise: Products in the High Performer quadrant in the Enterprise Grid® Report have high customer satisfaction scores and low Market Presence scores compared to the rest of the category.

High Performer Mid-Market: Products in the High Performer quadrant in the Mid-Market Grid® Report have high customer satisfaction scores and low Market Presence scores compared to the rest of the category.

Momentum Leader: Products in the Leader tier in the Momentum Grid® rank in the top 25% of their category’s products by their users.

Creately has seen a consistent rise in overall user ratings. Our launch of new collaborative features and improved product capabilities and support has resulted in more and more users choosing Creately as their default diagraming tool.

2020 saw a seismic shift in the way teams and organizations work together. With prolonged locked down orders and teams having to work remotely for extended periods of time, organizations around the world were looking for ways to facilitate better teamwork and collaboration. 

As the collaboration space continues to grow, Creately will be at the forefront of innovation, aiming to remove the remaining friction that exists in remote collaboration software. The introduction of real-time collaborative features like in-app video conferencing and live mouse tracking, coupled with our years of expertise in the diagramming space has resulted in a robust tool where teams and individuals can get together and work visually.

The fall of 2020 saw the highest surge of registered users on Creately which has firmly placed us in the leader quadrant of the G2 Grid® for Diagramming.

We are proud and honored to be the visual workspace choice for so many customers who use Creately to plan, draw, ideate, and discuss. 

Creately received an average rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars and is used by everybody from students to C.E.O’s.

We look forward to continuing to delight our customers and are excited to bring further innovation to the visual collaboration space.

Saying Goodbye to Creately Classic

We launched Creately Classic exactly a decade ago. Our goal was to simplify the process of creating and collaborating on diagrams online. It was a simple and effective solution, and our users worldwide loved it. 

With advancing time, came the need to shift our trajectory. As the needs of our users evolved, so did our goal. Our next mission became to find a way to improve upon the way our users collaborate visually.  

Subsequently, in July 2019, we introduced a brand new Creately – Creately Next – an app version that is completely rebuilt from the ground up to solve the problem of collaborating visually. Since then, we have come a long way. We’ve grown to be more than just an online diagramming tool – we’ve become a visual workspace where teams come together to think, communicate, brainstorm, plan, analyze, and innovate.  

As Adobe and all major browsers have already announced their plans to stop supporting Flash, which the older version of the app is built on, we’ve decided to terminate Creately Classic by the end of 2020. We hope that this notice period will provide you with enough time to migrate your important Creately Classic documents to Creately Next.

What Can You Do

If you are still using Creately Classic or any of its plugins and have important files still stored there, here’s what you can do. 

Creately Classic Online

To migrate your Creately Classic documents or folders to Creately Next, follow the steps below.

1. Log in with your Creately account email address – This is important to import your documents from the Classic app, and if you’re using a new address and an account in Creately, you are required to log in with your previous account. 

2. Go to Creately app and click on the profile picture on the bottom of the app and select Import from Classic option

3. Select the Folders (Projects) you would like to import and click the “Import” button.

Learn more 

Creately Classic Desktop 

You are able to access all your documents and folders created in the Classic Desktop from the new Desktop app as well. Simply follow the steps to transfer from Classic to the New Desktop version.

  1. Go to the Classic Online where you will be able to see all your Classic Desktop folders and documents.
  2. You can then switch to the new Online app and import these files to the new app as instructed above.
  3. Open the new Desktop app and all your documents and folders will start syncing, and you will be able to access them within minutes.

We are also offering free Classic Desktop licenses for the term of your remaining subscription, so you can sync your documents to the local computer and continue to work on them after Creately online is terminated at the end of the year. Creately Classic desktop will continue to work offline, although it will still require Flash to be installed to operate. 

However, we encourage you to move your existing Creately Classic Online and Desktop documents to the new app during this period. Once Creately Classic is terminated, you won’t be able to sync your existing Creately Classic Desktop files/ documents with the Creately Next app.  

Learn more.

Creately Classic for Confluence Server and for Jira Server

New document migration tools for both Creately Classic Confluence and Jira plugins are still underway and will be available for use by mid-December. 

In the meantime, we are already giving a free upgrade to the new Creately Diagrams for the Confluence Plugin  – a new, faster and Flash-free version – with which you can continue to incorporate Creately diagrams into your Confluence pages. 

A new Creately Plugin for Jira is also in the making, and it will be rolled out in early 2020. 

What’s Next

At its inception Creately Classic has helped us pave the way for a new way of thinking, working, and collaborating. It has set the foundation for where we are going next as we explore the world of visual collaboration. Although it will be missed, we have exciting new things to look forward to with the new Creately.

Introducing Enhanced Creately Comments: Stay on Top of Your Communication with Collaborators
Enhanced Creately Comments

Creately’s job is to enable all types of collaboration between teams, be it synchronous or asynchronous. 

Our collaborative online workspace is specially designed to help teams ideate and plan in spite of where they are or in which timezone, using whatever format they want – diagramming, whiteboarding, writing, visualizing, video conferencing, etc. 

Over the past few months, we’ve been analyzing user requests, digging deeper into their needs, and trying to understand where we can make improvements to enhance collaboration even more.  

What have we come up with? An upgraded set of commenting features to let you communicate with collaborators, share your ideas, make decisions, and move forward with everyone on the same page, right inside the app. 

What Can You Do with It?  

You can use Creately comments to start a conversation anywhere on the canvas and easily share change requests and feedback with collaborators. This allows you to keep all conversations in one place, making it painless to trace important requests and comments whenever you want.

Simply press C and click anywhere on the canvas to add a comment or start a discussion thread. Anyone with edit or view access to your Creately documents can use the Comments feature to share their feedback on the canvas.

Use Comments as To-Dos 

Add comments as to-dos to easily draw the collaborators’ attention to the next set of changes to work on. Changes are done? Resolve the comment to mark it as completed and move on to the next.  

You can also use comments to annotate designs, blueprints, mockups, screenshots, etc. you are working on the Creately canvas by adding comments, enabling collaborators to process information faster.  

Discuss Things in Context 

Attach comments to specific shapes or areas of the canvas to discuss things in context. Continue the discussion in threads letting all collaborators join in and share opinions and ideas synchronously or asynchronously. With resolved threads, they can follow back on discussions to find quick answers and make sense of new changes made, in context.   

Or you can use it as an internal chat (an in-app chat widget is coming soon to Creately!) when you want it. While on a call, press C on anywhere on the canvas and maintain a discussion thread to communicate or make quick notes of changes discussed with other collaborators. 

Edit and Hide Comments 

By default comments are always visible, which makes it easier to draw everyone’s attention when you want. However, if you find it distracting, you can quickly declutter the canvas by toggling the comments. Want to make a quick change to something you have said? You can also edit and update what you have commented on the canvas.   

Get Instant Notifications 

Get real-time notifications when a collaborator adds a new comment or leave a reply to a thread on the canvas with popup notifications.  You will also receive email notifications on all conversations on your Creately documents, so even if you are not working on the canvas you can still get updates. 

How to Get Started?

Log into Creately and try the new commenting features with your co-workers. A detailed explanation of how to use the comments on the Creately canvas can be found in our support article here