Canva home
  1. SWOT Analysis
SWOT Analysis Banner

Free online SWOT analysis

Identify internal and external factors that make your company competitive in the market. Brainstorm with your team using Canva’s online whiteboard tools and SWOT analysis templates and examples.

Create a SWOT analysis online

When it comes to building a strategic vision, a SWOT analysis is a crucial first step. It’s an important step for businesses and organizations to gain insights into their internal and external core strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Use SWOT analysis examples from Canva Whiteboards and assess the competitiveness of your brand or business with our easy-to-use features and tools.

Infinite space made for unlimited ideas

Professionally designed templates to fast-track your workflow

Share and ideate with anyone, anytime, on any device

Run a workshop with whiteboard elements, sticky notes, and a timer

Embed your SWOT analysis in Docs, presentations, and more easily

Easy online whiteboard tools and data visualization


How to do a SWOT analysis

How to do a SWOT analysis

What is a SWOT analysis?

A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning technique, developed by Albert Humphrey, to assess your brand or business objectively and develop competitive strategies. It’s a 2x2 grid that looks into internal and external factors that could be your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It’s ideally done before a new strategy so teams can evaluate how they fare in aspects such as people, resources, systems, and procedures.

Why use a SWOT analysis?

SWOT Analysis Infographic design

The market is always changing. As a brand or business, you’re expected to continuously adapt and develop strategies that make you competitive. Creating a SWOT analysis(opens in a new tab or window) can be one of your first steps to having a viable and successful company.

Doing a SWOT analysis uncovers challenges, risks, and negative assumptions that can be affecting your business’ performance. What you want to come out of your SWOT analysis are fresh insights and strategies to bank on your strengths, turn around weaknesses, take advantage of opportunities, and ward off potential threats.

Components of a SWOT analysis

SWOT Analysis Strengths

Strengths

Internal factors that bring clear advantage to your business. It can be something you do best compared to competitors.
SWOT Analysis Weaknesses

Weaknesses

Internal factors that bring challenges to your business. It can be something you lack or competitors do better than you.
SWOT Analysis Opportunities

Opportunities

External factors that can bring potential growth or success. It can be changes in the market, technology, or policies.
SWOT Analysis Threats

Threats

External factors that could stall your growth or negatively impact your business.

An opportunity to strategize

SWOT Analysis design

A great strategy doesn’t come overnight. It takes a lot of factors and pieces to consider to get the right insights. Analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that you have as a brand or business. Plus, create an impactful design that brings more clarity. Choose a SWOT analysis template from our collection and customize it with tools and features from Canva Whiteboards.

No creative weakness in sight

Add graphics to your SWOT Analysis designs

Make your SWOT analysis diagram always presentation-ready. Align with the company’s look and feel by using brand colors and fonts throughout your SWOT matrix. Instead of purely using lines and text, make an impact with striking images, illustrations, and icons. Upload your own, use one from our library, or visualize a new image with a prompt using Text to Image(opens in a new tab or window).

Strength in numbers

SWOT Analysis design with timer and sticky notes

In order to create a truly detailed SWOT analysis that takes all aspects of an organization or business into consideration, it’s best to get input from various teams or departments within your company. Call the marketing team and more. Invite them to your SWOT chart design and collaborate. Run a workshop on Canva Whiteboards, complete with a timer and sticky notes.

More design treats, less threats

SWOT Analysis design on desktop and mobile

Make space for more insights and fresh takes on your company. Expand to an infinite canvas and get all those brainstorming ideas coming. You can also work seamlessly across any device, so you can start from your desktop and carry on using your mobile. When you’re ready to present your findings, you can switch to a presenter’s view, share it online via a link, or add it to your Canva Docs.

SWOT Analysis templates

Don’t waste time with complicated software. Canva’s SWOT analysis templates are your shortcut to good-looking, easy-to-make SWOT analysis. Simply click on the graph to add your own data. Create your SWOT analysis in minutes. Choose from the templates below to get started.
Quotation mark
“When it came to design reports, Canva had a wide variety of simple easy to use templates that allowed me to easily plug in my graphs and information, and helped me to focus on the actual content instead of spending hours and hours on design.”

Assem A


Frequently Asked Questions

  • SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. These are four aspects you assess and look into as you identify internal and external factors in your brand or business. You can create a SWOT matrix using our free templates online.
  • You create a SWOT analysis before you plan a new strategy, whether for marketing, product, or sales. It’s as simple as drawing a 2x2 grid and assigning each square to your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. There are free SWOT analysis templates you can use right away with your team in our online whiteboard tool.
  • A SWOT analysis puts your brand or business in a balance, where you are given the chance to weigh your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats based on internal and external factors affecting your company. This helps your team avoid blindspots in your business flow and wrong assumptions on the market. Having an objective analysis of your business gives you a better outlook and the right strategy.
  • Some best practices you can consider as you do your SWOT analysis diagram are:
    • Avoid listing too long. In the end, you’d want to summarize them in concise statements to encompass what you’ve listed as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
    • Be clear with your insights. It would be nice to back it up with a marketing data or a substantive research.
    • Be open-minded as you do your SWOT analysis. Be transparent with your weaknesses, be realistic, and think ahead.
    • Complement your SWOT analysis with other strategy techniques such as TOWS, SOAR, and PEST.
  • SWOT and TOWS are similar in aspects to explore: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. However, the latter aims for a more holistic approach by analyzing the relationships between the internal and external factors affecting the company.

Related Charts and Graphs

Assess your business with a SWOT analysis

Create a SWOT analysis(opens in a new tab or window)