treediagrammaker.com

Phylogenetic Tree Maker

Type the clades, get the tree. A phylogeny drawn from an indented outline — free, no signup, PNG and PDF export.

A phylogenetic tree is a diagram of the evolutionary relationships between organisms, genes, or populations. Every internal node is a common ancestor, every split is a divergence event, and the tips are the things being compared. Some phylogenies scale branch lengths to time or genetic change; this tool draws the topology — who split from whom, in what order.

To draw one: put the root group on the first line, indent each descendant clade one level, and keep indenting down to individual species. The tree redraws on every keystroke. The same outline can be rendered in 5 themes and both layout directions, then exported four ways — PNG, PDF, plain-text tree, and SVG — with only the SVG export reserved for Pro. The primate phylogeny loaded below carries 12 tips and 23 labelled nodes in total.

Outline

Indent = child (Tab or 2 spaces) · (0.5) probability · [yes] branch label

LemurLorisStrepsirrhiniTarsierCapuchinMarmosetPlatyrrhiniMacaqueBaboonCercopithecoideaGibbonOrangutanGorillaChimpanzeeHumanHomininiHomininaeHominidaeHominoideaCatarrhiniSimiiformesHaplorhiniPrimates

Reading the primate tree above

The preset walks the order Primates down to Hominini. Primates splits into Strepsirrhini (lemurs and lorises) and Haplorhini; inside Haplorhini, tarsiers are sister to the monkeys and apes; Catarrhini splits into Old World monkeys and the apes; and Hominidae runs orangutan, then gorilla, then the chimpanzee–human pair. Each of those statements is one indentation step in the outline box, which is why editing a phylogeny here is faster than dragging shapes: you change the nesting, and the topology follows.

Building your own phylogeny

  1. Start with your root taxon or clade on line one. Everything in your analysis lives under it.
  2. Indent each daughter lineage. Sister groups share an indentation level and a parent line.
  3. Name the internal nodes if the clade names matter for your write-up; skip them and put tips directly under their ancestor if they don't.
  4. Annotate a branch by opening the line with a bracketed label — [gene duplication] Paralog B — which draws the text on the branch leading into that node, and travels with the line if you move it.
  5. Left-to-right is the default here because deep phylogenies read better sideways; the top-down toggle gives you the portrait version for a poster or slide.

What this tool does and doesn't do

It is a drawing tool, not an inference tool. It does not align sequences, run parsimony or maximum likelihood, or read Newick and NEXUS files — if you need a tree computed from molecular data, that is a job for MEGA, RAxML, IQ-TREE, or an equivalent package, and you would then bring the resulting topology here to redraw it clearly. What it does well is the last mile: a legible figure for a lab report, worksheet, lecture slide, or revision sheet, produced in the time it takes to type the names.

Because nothing is stored server-side, your outline stays in the browser — autosaved to local storage per page, and shareable only when you press Share link, which packs the whole tree into the URL. That makes it practical to send a classmate or a class a working phylogeny without either of you signing up for anything.

Related trees on this site

If your assignment asks specifically for branching order without any timing or distance information, the cladogram maker is the same engine preloaded with a vertebrate cladogram and the bare textbook styling. The general tree diagram maker covers non-biological hierarchies — org charts, taxonomies, file trees — and family tree diagrams handle genealogy, which is the same nesting idea applied to one species at a much shorter timescale. Every example on the site opens in the editor from the examples gallery.