Free Gantt Chart Templates by Industry
A blank Gantt chart is intimidating for exactly the same reason a blank page is: the hardest part isn't filling it in, it's deciding what the first ten rows should say. These five templates give you a realistic starting task breakdown for common project types. None of them are meant to be used exactly as-is — treat every row as a placeholder to adjust for your own scope, team, and timeline.
💻 Software Development
Kickoff and planning → requirements gathering → architecture design → UI/UX design → frontend and backend development (run in parallel) → database integration → testing → user acceptance testing → deployment.
Customise: if you're shipping in sprints rather than one release, break "development" into per-sprint chunks rather than one long bar — a single 20-day development task hides more risk than it shows.
🏗️ Construction
Site survey → design and permits (often the longest pole in the schedule) → site preparation → foundation and structure → roofing → M&E → internal finishing → landscaping → inspection and handover.
Customise: add explicit float after any phase exposed to weather, and treat permit approval as a milestone with its own dependency chain — most construction delays trace back to this one step.
📣 Marketing Campaign
Market research → strategy and brief → budget approval → creative concept → content creation and design (parallel) → campaign setup → launch → performance monitoring → results reporting.
Customise: separate "monitoring" from "launch" — campaigns often get marked done the day they go live, when the real work of watching performance and adjusting spend runs for weeks afterward.
🎯 Event Planning
Concept and objectives → venue booking → budget approval → vendor sourcing → programme design → invitations and registration → marketing → logistics and setup → event day → post-event review.
Customise: vendor sourcing and programme design usually overlap rather than run sequentially — model them as parallel tasks so the chart doesn't overstate how long planning actually takes.
🚀 Product Launch
Ideation and research → business case → specification → prototype → user testing → refinement → marketing materials and sales training (parallel) → beta and QA → launch.
Customise: mark launch itself as a milestone, not a task with duration — everything before it is preparation, and treating "launch" as a multi-day bar tends to blur the actual go/no-go date.
Using these as a starting point
Every one of these breakdowns skips something your specific project needs — a compliance review, a client sign-off step, a dependency on an external vendor. Treat the first draft as a working hypothesis: build it, walk it past whoever owns the delivery date, and expect to add five to ten rows they think of that you didn't.
All five templates are built into GanttCraft — pick one, and it loads with tasks, categories, and people already filled in, ready to adjust.
Open a template in GanttCraft →