What is a Gantt chart?

A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart that illustrates a project schedule by plotting tasks as horizontal bars along a time axis. Each bar spans from the task's start date to its end date, making it easy to see durations, overlaps, and sequencing. Lines or arrows between bars represent dependencies - Task B cannot begin until Task A finishes. Named after Henry Gantt, who popularized the format in the 1910s, it remains one of the most recognized planning tools in project management.

When Gantt charts work well

Gantt charts excel when a project has well-defined phases, hard deadlines, and significant task dependencies. Construction, event planning, and waterfall software projects benefit from the visual clarity of seeing which activities run in parallel and which must happen sequentially. They are particularly useful for communicating timelines to stakeholders who need a high-level view without diving into individual task details.

They also help with resource planning. When bars overlap, you can see that two tasks require the same person at the same time and adjust accordingly. This makes Gantt charts valuable for coordination-heavy projects where scheduling conflicts are a real risk.

However, Gantt charts have limitations. They assume scope and durations are known upfront, which is often unrealistic in iterative or discovery-driven work. Maintaining a Gantt chart as requirements change is time-consuming, and the chart can give a false sense of precision. For teams practicing agile or kanban, a board-based view that focuses on current flow is usually more practical than a timeline that tries to predict the future.

How Flux relates to Gantt charts

Flux is a kanban platform and does not include native Gantt chart views. Kanban boards prioritize flow visualization - what is in progress right now and where bottlenecks exist - rather than timeline-based scheduling. For most agile teams, this real-time flow view is more actionable than a pre-planned Gantt.

That said, Flux cards support start dates and due dates, giving you the date boundaries that Gantt tools need. If your workflow requires both a kanban board for daily execution and a Gantt view for stakeholder reporting, you can use Flux's REST API to export card data into a dedicated Gantt tool, keeping the kanban board as the team's source of truth while generating timeline views on demand.

Related terms

See also: Milestone, Project management, Lead time.