Want to Use Infographics for Free? These Tools Can Help

With an ability to transform tedious text and provide vital visual stimulation, infographics have become an essential part of any Content Marketing Strategy, and with more and more free infographic tools available, anyone can produce something visually attractive.

Infographics are a great way of providing a visual representation of survey results, reviews, how to guides, and much more. Usually designed with attractive colors, trendy typefaces and informal illustrations, infographics can be highly viral content, shared healthfully across social media.

Using Infographics to build awareness

It has become quite apparent that infographics provide a great way to gain quick exposure of your brand and build authority in your niche. As a first step to tap into this, you must plan content that can be well represented with statistics and graphs and would be relevant and useful to your readers. We ask you to plan your content because, as with any link building technique that can be gamed, this one has attracted some low quality link builders. There are many infographics being built with sub-standard information every second. Building a sub-standard infographic that lacks concrete content or statistical information based on real facts can create problems for your brand, or may even be interpreted as spam by search engines. This is what Google's former head of Webspam Team, Matt Cutts, has to say about infographics:

"In principle, there's nothing wrong with the concept of an infographic. What concerns me is the types of things that people are doing with them. They get far off topic, or the fact checking is really poor. The infographic may be neat, but if the information it's based on is simply wrong, then it's misleading people."

Hence, we recommend you only create infographics if you have relevant content from your niche and strong statistical data to support it.

Free Infographic Tools

Infographics do not require professional designing skills. With some really useful online tools you can just drag and drop elements on to pre-made templates to create a killer infographic in about an hour.

We have hand-picked some great instant infographics creation tools. These tools are perfect for small businesses or small budgets as they are all free and have optional additional features for an affordable fee.

In addition, we will also offer some free chart creation tools and icon tools that will help you integrate these elements conveniently into your infographics.

Piktochart

Piktochart consists of great visually appealing infographic templates that can be manipulated according to your preferences. With a free account you have access to three templates and can upload five images. The downside of having a free account is that the infographic will carry a Piktochart watermark. However, you could sign up for free to check how comfortable you are working with this tool and then opt for an affordable plan of $29/month or $199/year later.

View a sample template below

Easel.ly

As the name suggests, this tool creates an infographic easily; you do not even have to register on their site. There are many useful and visually attractive themes called vhemes for you to choose from. You can customize the theme by changing background colors, dragging and dropping images, icons and any custom graphics you choose. A Pro Account is available for $3 per month.

View sample templates below:

Canva

Canva offers a free easy to-to-use platform for creating mini infographics or club multiple graphics from the tool and attach it to your infographics template. You can buy images for $1 and collaborate with co-workers.

Infogr.am

This tool is especially useful for creating charts and graphs. Additionally, it allows you to input stats that can transformed into cool visual presentations of your data (see below). It comes with some free templates and you can sign in using a Facebook or Google+ account. There are numerous chart options, including column, pie, line, area, scatter, bubble, pictorial, table, gauge, treemap and wordcloud and subscriptions start from as little as $19/month.

Sample of visual representations of data:

Venngage.com

This is another addition to this list. Venngage allows content marketers to create infographics for free, with a number of templates available, making it easy to build an attractive infographic without investing too much time. There's also a premium version offered, which unlocks premium themes and templates, with access to unlimited white-label infographics and easy export features. This will also remove the branding from templates used.

You can see some examples of infographics on the Community page.

View a sample of their featured templates below:

Top Tools to Create Infographic Charts:

Create.ly

This tool helps you incorporate charts, geometric shapes, stars, balloons, people's silhouettes and flow chart elements. It is easy to use and you can try it for free without registering on the site. However, the free version is very limited.

iCharts.net

This is a cloud-based charting tool that allows for fast and easy transfer of your excel data into attractive and professional looking charts, which you can incorporate on your infographic. In the free version you have unlimited access to standard charts.

Google Chart Tools

Google also offers free chart tools that are created with HTML5/SVG technology. You can add these charts to your website and your infographics. It is free to use.

Chartsbin

This is a tool that provides global statistical data in the form of geo charts on various topics ranging from economics to health. You can embed the HTML from the existing stats and incorporate it in your in-house designed infographic. They do not, however, guarantee the accuracy of the information provided; you can read more about this in their legal policy.

Gliffy

This tool to create flowcharts, Venn diagrams and technical diagrams is incredibly easy to use. With drag and drop options and no registrations required, this free tool is great to work with to create your own charts and graphs.

Amcharts

Amcharts is a provider of JavaScript/HTML5 charts that include pie, radar, scatter, bubble and more. You can even download these charts for free. However, in the free version the chart includes a link to their website on the top left corner.

Free Tools to Create Infographic Icons

Icons make great attention grabbers on infographics. Here are some free resources to obtain relevant and appealing icons for your infographic.

IconArchive

This is an icon search engine with over three million icons free to use.

FreeIconsWeb

This site provides plenty of free icons to choose from. They look great on infographics.

FreeIconsDownload

Royalty-free icons of high quality are available at this site.

IconsPedia

IconsPedia offers a wide selection of free icons normally used by web designers. These can be used in your infographics as well.

Take a look at some inspiring infographics designs at SixRevisions.com.