Hierarchy Chart Templates

Hierarchy chart templates are for data that nests: a total split into categories, and those categories split again into subcategories. A company budget broken into departments and then line items is a hierarchy. So is website traffic broken into channel, then source, then campaign. Where a bar chart compares flat categories side by side, these three templates show the parent-child relationship itself: how a slice of the whole belongs to a bigger slice above it.

The three shapes encode that nesting differently, and the difference matters more than it looks. A treemap uses rectangle area (bigger box, bigger value) nested inside each other, so the two or three items that dominate a budget jump out at a glance. The sunburst nests the same way but as rings radiating from a center, giving each level its own ring; it reads more like an org chart than a size comparison. A marimekko is the odd one out: bar width carries one variable, like market size, and internal stacking carries another, like share within it. Two dimensions at once, not just depth.

All three run into the same wall: readability past two or three levels. A treemap's inner boxes shrink to slivers once you nest a fourth level in; a sunburst's outer rings get thin enough that labels stop fitting. If your real hierarchy runs five levels deep, the fix isn't a fancier chart. It's picking the two levels that actually answer the question and aggregating the rest into an "other" bucket before you chart it.