To make a tier list for anything, you gather your items, drag each one into a ranked row, and export the finished board. A free tier list maker starts you with five rows — S, A, B, C, D — and lets you add unlimited more, rename them to fit any topic, and rank text or images without an account.
The same simple steps make a tier list for any topic. Whether it is games, sports teams, food or fictional characters, here is the formula — plus where to start for popular topics.
Every tier list follows the same three steps: (1) list your items, (2) drag each into a tier from S to D, (3) export and share. It works the same whether you are ranking pizza or programming languages. New to it? Start with how to make a tier list.
On this site every new item lands in an unranked tray below the board — a holding pool where things wait until you drag and drop them into a row. You can start from scratch on a blank board, gather the whole set first, then rank in one pass and download the PNG once the tray sits empty. When it’s time to show people, the sharing guide covers links, images and video.
If your items are names — foods, teams, songs — use the text maker and paste a list. If they need pictures — characters, logos, posters — use the image maker and upload them.
Not sure which? Ask whether a stranger would recognize each entry from a small thumbnail. Album covers, screenshots and photos pass that test. Topics that are words only — “best decades,” “most quotable lines” — don’t, so type them instead. You can also run both at once: the maker shows image tiles with text labels together, or either one alone.
Many already exist as ready templates — or browse tier list ideas for more.
Pop culture runs deepest: anime seasons, manga arcs, cartoons, memes, and the celebrities, YouTubers and streamers your feed won’t stop arguing about. TV shows get ranked episode by episode, artists album by album, books across a whole series — every fandom has a “best episodes” debate waiting for a board.
Food gets personal fast: pizza toppings, cereal, chips, coffee orders, desserts, restaurant menu items, the drinks in a gas-station fridge. Everyday stuff works too — dog breeds against cat breeds, animals, cars, sneakers, brands, fonts, colors, emojis, board games, holidays. Zoom out and you can tier decades, cities, states, countries, presidents and other historical figures. Reality-show contestants, niche products only your group chat cares about — if you can name it, you can rank it.
Rename the tiers to suit the subject (“Must-play” to “Skip” for games, “Elite” to “Benched” for sports), recolor them, and add a title. Then export a clean PNG to share.
Custom tier names don’t have to be words — emoji labels work fine, so a snack board can run 🤤 down to 🤢. Add rows when a topic needs finer grades, remove rows when it doesn’t; the right number of tiers depends on how much spread your items actually have. Swap the whole color theme in one click, or change the background to match the subject. If you want colors that carry meaning, see tier list colors and the exact color codes.
The single biggest upgrade to any tier list: decide what you’re judging before you place a tile. One axis, applied with consistency. Are you ranking by quality, by personal enjoyment, or by raw power? Those are three different criteria, and they produce three different boards — a game can be objectively rough and still be a top-tier guilty pleasure.
Once the criterion is set, placement gets easier. Handle the standouts first: the best of the best go straight to S, the worst drops to the bottom, and the middle sorts itself when you compare items side by side. When two feel close, a quick head-to-head pick is usually more honest than agonizing — and if you’d rather not run those comparisons yourself, Duel mode shuffles your items and asks you to choose between pairs until an order emerges.
Your gut feeling is allowed. A tier list is an opinion, not a measurement — but a consistent one makes a better argument, because you can defend every placement with the same reasoning instead of quietly switching what “importance” means halfway down the board.
Tier lists aren’t just for fandom fights. Dragging tasks into rows is prioritization with the boring parts removed — faster than a spreadsheet, easier to read in a meeting. Product teams tier product features before a roadmap review; project leads sort next quarter’s projects into “now,” “soon” and “someday.” It’s a looser cousin of the Eisenhower matrix, with as many grades as your planning needs.
Teams can collaborate on it, too. Run a brainstorm, dump every idea into the tray, then rank together and let the arguments surface the real decisions — retros work the same way with “keep,” “tweak,” “kill” rows. If the group can’t meet live, a community poll lets people vote on rankings instead. In a classroom, students can tier study topics by confidence so the teacher sees exactly where the gaps are. And ranking your own skills from “could teach it” down to “still learning” is a five-minute workflow that beats a blank self-review form.
The same handful of mistakes shows up whether the topic is sneakers or senators:
List your items, drag each into a tier from S to D, then export. The steps are identical whether you rank food, games, sports or anything else.
Use text for names (foods, teams, songs) and images for things that need pictures (characters, logos, posters).
There are ready-made templates across food, entertainment, sports and lifestyle — and you can build a custom board for anything else.
Anything you can name or picture. If a topic contains a handful of comparable things — foods, characters, teams, apps, decades, coworkers’ meeting habits — it can be tiered. Text topics need nothing but a pasted list; visual topics just need images. The one real requirement is that the items are comparable on the same axis, which is why “movies” works better as “90s action movies.”
Pick one criterion and stick to it. Weak tier lists judge by quality in the top rows and nostalgia at the bottom, which makes every placement debatable in a bad way. Decide what you’re measuring, rank the obvious extremes first, then sort the middle by comparing pairs. Label your tiers, keep images recognizable, and don’t be afraid of an empty row.
Absolutely — text-only boards are fully supported. Open the text tier list maker, paste your list of names, and every entry becomes a draggable tile. It’s the faster route for topics like foods, songs or hot takes, where a picture adds nothing.
On this site there’s nothing to sign up for — no account exists at all. Open the maker, build your board, and it autosaves to your browser’s local storage on every change, so it survives closing the tab. Exporting a PNG and sharing a link work without a login too.
Yes, and it’s underrated for it. Sorting tasks, features or project ideas into tiers forces the prioritization conversation a flat list lets everyone dodge. Build the board live in a meeting and argue placements as a group, or share the link and collect reactions asynchronously.
A tier list is a ranking chart that sorts items into labeled rows, usually S down to D. The full explainer is in what is a tier list.
S is the top grade, sitting above A, and the rest descend in order to D. What each letter signals — and when to rename them — has its own page: tier list letters explained.
Farasat is an engineer who designs websites and builds practical online tools in his spare time. He created Tier List Maker after using other ranking sites that asked for an account, stamped watermarks on downloads, or simply did not work well on a phone. He is not a professional gamer or a self-described tier-list expert — he builds and maintains this site himself, fixes issues, and adds features based on what visitors actually ask for.