Sankey Diagram Templates and Other Flow Charts

This page covers five ways to show something moving or changing state rather than sitting still: sankey diagrams, chord diagrams, funnel charts, timelines and Gantt charts. Most people land here searching for sankey diagram templates specifically, and that's the right template when you're tracking a quantity that splits and recombines as it moves: energy flowing from source to end use, or a budget splitting across departments and then across line items. The other four templates answer a related but different question: not what a value splits into, but how it moves through time or through a two-way relationship.

Chord diagrams are sankey's cousin for relationships that run in both directions at once: trade between countries, migration between regions, who transfers work to whom. They're arranged in a circle so an A-to-B flow and a B-to-A flow can both show without the diagram running off the page, which is exactly what a sankey's strict left-to-right layout can't do. Funnel charts strip flow down to a single narrowing path: one entry point, a handful of stages, one number at each stage that only ever goes down. Timeline and Gantt chart both plot movement through calendar time instead of a quantity moving between categories: a timeline marks events as points along one axis, a Gantt chart draws tasks as bars with a start and a length, stacked so overlapping work is visible at a glance.

None of these are diagramming tools. If you need boxes and arrows for a process map or an org chart, that's a different category of software entirely. Everything here is quantitative: every link, bar or stage carries a real number pulled from your spreadsheet, not just a label. The trade-off across the family is complexity against legibility: a sankey diagram scales the furthest, since a dozen nodes and thirty flows still reads cleanly, while a chord diagram gets cluttered past eight or nine categories and a funnel starts to feel like guesswork past six or seven stages.