Best Free Word Cloud Generators to Visualize Data

What Is A Word Cloud?

Word clouds (also known as tag clouds or word art) are used to visualize and summarize all sorts of data, from voice of the customer feedback to academic papers, and everything in between.

There are many word cloud generators to choose from, each one with its own unique design and customization capabilities.

In this guide, we’ve put together the 10 best free word cloud generators, to make it easier for you to choose a word art tool that fits your needs. While most of the word cloud generators listed below are free, but some charge a fee for more advanced features.

Start generating word cloud art to brighten up your projects and presentations.

[A quick note on Wordle: Wordle was discontinued last year (2021). It was one of the earliest word cloud generators on the scene and a favorite among word cloud users, so it definitely deserves a mention here.]

1. MonkeyLearn WordCloud Generator

MonkeyLearn's WordCloud Generator is completely free, and equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver more accurate and unique results than other word cloud tools.

It automatically detects collocations (words that often go together) in sentences, paragraphs, and documents, offering more context than word clouds with just single words. Take a look at this tag cloud, above, and notice phrases like “nice staff”, “friendly staff”, providing you with deeper insights about the hotel staff.

MonkeyLearn’s word cloud generator also reduces words to their root form, a process known as stemming, and determines which words are most relevant by measuring how rare, descriptive, and how long a word is – instead of just measuring word frequency.

You’ll find plenty of customization options, too.

Change fonts, color schemes, word quantity, and theme, then download your high-definition word art in PNG and SVG formats, and download your raw data (frequency and relevance scores) in a CSV file.

Want to go further than word clouds? Try out this sentiment analyzer, also created by MonkeyLearn.

2. WordArt.com

WordArt, formerly Tagul, is a popular word cloud generator, known for its wide range of designs. You can customize fonts, layouts, and color, and choose from custom shapes. This tool also offers some pre-processing options like stemming, and removing common words and numbers.

Once you’ve generated your word art, you can edit the number and density of words that appear in the word cloud, rotate words, add links, and more.

WordArt offers a freemium model but you'll need to upgrade to the paid version of the word cloud generator if you want to download high-quality word art, which might be useful if you are planning to print your word cloud.

3. WordClouds.com

WordClouds.com is a very user-friendly tag cloud creator with plenty of options to customize your word clouds. Choose from a variety of themes, colors, fonts, sizes, and custom shapes to create impressive word art.

As well as plenty of formatting options, WordClouds.com allows you to manually edit your word list. You also have the option to analyze web pages, just by pasting a URL into the source field – a cool feature that helps you discover the most frequent keywords your competitors are using!

4. WordItOut

WordItOut is a simple and effective word cloud generator. It recognizes emojis and a variety of symbols, and allows you to edit your stop word list so you can filter out words that you don’t want to include in your word cloud. You can also highlight word pairs or phrases by adding a hyphen or tilde (~) symbol between words. For example, ‘word~cloud~with~phrases’ would appear as ‘word cloud with phrases’ in the final word cloud. .

Change font, color, layout, word size to customize your word cloud, then save and send your word cloud directly to your email.

5. Jason Davies

Jason Davies’ is a Wordle-inspired word cloud generator written in JavaScript and available on GitHub under an open source license as d3-cloud. 

Its layout algorithm focuses on positioning words without overlap, allowing you to tweak parameters like scale and angle of inclination.

Generate archimedean or rectangular spiral layouts, change word quantity, then export your word cloud in SVG.

Although it delivers unique word clouds, Jason Davies’ word cloud generator is far less user-friendly than other word cloud creators on the list, and you don’t have the option to change the color of your word cloud.

6. TagCrowd

TagCrowd was developed by a Stanford graduate. This word cloud generator values efficiency and accuracy over aesthetics, supports more than 10 languages, and automatically groups similar words using the Porter Stemming algorithm – “a process for removing the commoner morphological and inflexional endings from words in English”.

 

You can set a frequency criteria for your word cloud, indicate words that you want to exclude, and choose to show frequency values beside each word.

7. Abcya

Abcya is a favorite among kids and teachers. It’s fun, playful, and makes word cloud creation incredibly easy. You can choose the number of words you’d like to display, change fonts, select a color palette, and alter the layout (there are a few basic options) of your word clouds.

This word art generator also includes a filter for stop words, and lets you “randomize” words (reorganize the words randomly).

8. Tagxedo

Tagxedo is an online word cloud tool that allows users to create word-based insights from URLs, tweets, blogs, and much more. Customization options include changing fonts, themes, orientation, and shapes. You can also import your own fonts and images to create custom word cloud shapes.

To use Tagxedo’s word cloud generator you’ll need to download Microsoft Silverlight, which is only supported in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.

9. Mentimeter

Mentimeter, although not a word cloud generator, includes an in-built word cloud feature in its interactive platform.

It’s one of Mentimeter's most popular presentation features and lets the audience input one or two-word answers to questions like ‘how are you feeling today?’, to create word clouds in real time.

The word cloud feature is used to visualize live polls in presentations, allowing audiences to answer questions like ‘how are you feeling today?’, and see their answers appear in a word cloud in real time.

The word cloud feature is a great interactive tool for businesses and a neat way to keep your audience entertained.

Just sign up to Mentimeter, choose the free plan, and start creating live word clouds with your audience.

10. Word Clouds in Python

If you’re looking for a challenge and know how to code, why not create your own word cloud using open-source word cloud tools in Python?

The wordcloud library, developed by Andreas Mueller, enables you to create a basic word cloud, adjust color, size and text quantity, and change the shape of your word cloud.

Follow this tutorial for more in-depth steps on how to create your word cloud in Python.

Generate A Word Cloud

Ready to create your first word cloud? Here’s how to create a word cloud in 4 simple steps with MonkeyLearn’s word cloud generator:

1. Upload your data as a CSV file or paste text directly into MonkeyLearn WordCloud Generator.

2. Click ‘Generate Cloud’ to create your word cloud.

3. Customize your word cloud. Change theme, font, color, and word quantity.

4. Download word cloud images, plus frequency and relevance scores.

Choose A Word Cloud Generator

Word cloud generators are an excellent way to simplify and present qualitative data. They make data easier to understand and help you gain insights from text data in the blink of an eye.

There are many word cloud generators to choose from, whether you need to create artistic word clouds or customized word art for a presentation

Want to visualize topics that are mentioned most often in your data? Build a word cloud with MonkeyLearn’s word cloud generator for a quick overview.

Word clouds are just the beginning of your text analysis journey. If you want to get more valuable insights from your data, visit MonkeyLearn, and discover advanced text analysis tools that take your word clouds further.

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