To make a tier list, you add your items to a free board, drag each one into lettered rows from S down to D, and export the finished chart as a PNG — no account or signup at any step. The board autosaves in your browser between drags, so a half-finished ranking survives a closed tab.
Making a tier list takes about two minutes: add your items, drag them into ranked rows, and export an image. Here's the whole process — plus what those S–D letters actually mean.
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A word on the text-or-images call in step 1: recognizable images make the strongest boards — logos, album covers, posters, character art, even screenshots. An image tier list reads instantly in a feed, while text tiles win whenever no clean art exists. Everything you add waits in the unranked tray until you place it, and a display toggle shows labels alongside images, images alone, or text alone.
For step 3, five to six tiers is the sweet spot — enough spread to matter, few enough that each row means something. Three tiers works for quick yes/maybe/no calls, and an S+ row above S is a fun house rule when one pick towers over the rest. Custom labels and tier colors are both open in Customize; the default palette runs warm-to-cool so the order reads at a glance even before the labels do.
And past the PNG in step 4: the share link packs your tiers and items into the URL, ready for the group chat, a Reddit thread, or any social media post — the person on the other end opens a live copy, not a picture. Photos you uploaded yourself don't travel in the link, so post those boards as a PNG. The watermark text is editable and can be hidden entirely. There is no embed widget; the PNG or the link covers both jobs.
S tier is the best — a rank placed above A. The letter comes from Japanese grading systems, where S stands for Special, Superior, or Superb. After S, tiers follow the alphabet from A down, so a typical board reads S, A, B, C, D (and sometimes E or F for the worst).
The letter grades aren’t sacred, though — the ranks are whatever you name them. “God Tier” above S is a common house rule for the best of the best, and joke labels land just as well. The deep dive on the letter itself lives in what does S tier mean.
You can build a tier list in Google Sheets — color a column for each tier and type items into rows. It works, but you'll fight cell sizing, you can't drag items smoothly, and exporting a clean image means screenshotting and cropping.
A dedicated tier list maker handles all of that for you: real drag-and-drop, instant recoloring, and a one-click PNG that's already cropped and shareable.
Prefer a tool you already have open? Here are step-by-step guides for each — though a dedicated maker is faster than all of them:
A few that don’t need their own guide: Excel and Google Docs behave like Sheets, only clumsier — tables fight every drag. Letterboxd can rank films in an ordered list but has no tier rows, so screenshot-and-annotate is the usual workaround. And there’s no app to install here — the maker runs in the browser, works on mobile, and lets you build without signing up for anything.
The step nobody writes down. (Quick definition first: a tier list is a grid that sorts items into ranked rows — the full picture is in what is a tier list.) Choose a clear category before you open anything: a bounded topic like “ice cream flavors we’ve actually tried” ranks cleanly, while “food” stalls by the third tile. Decide on one axis to judge — taste, value, nostalgia — because mixed criteria produce boards even you won’t defend.
Then gather your items: 10–40 is the workable range. Fewer feels thin; more turns the first pass into homework. Seed the board with anchor items — one obvious best and one obvious worst — and let gut feeling place everything else against those two.
What separates a good tier list from a lazy one: keep S rare. One or two standouts, not six — a stacked S row reads as low standards, and it kills the debate a good board is supposed to start. Rank the extremes first and let the middle argue itself into place.
Check consistency before exporting — if two tiles in B feel further apart than B and C do, something is misplaced. An empty tier is fine; leaving D empty says nothing deserved it, which is itself a take. And re-rank later. Opinions drift, and dragging three tiles beats rebuilding the whole board.
The usual ways boards go wrong: too many tiers (nine rows means nothing separates them), everything in S, and unlabeled items nobody outside your head can identify. On the visual side, blurry or tiny images turn a shared board into a squint test — crop to faces or logos before uploading — and clashing colors bury the order. The default palette already runs warm-to-cool, red S down to cool blue; if you recolor, keep some gradient so the hierarchy survives a glance.
Tier list videos are their own genre on YouTube and TikTok — a creator reacts tile by tile and the suspense does the work. For the short-form version you don’t even need a screen recorder: the maker’s video export renders your finished board as a vertical 1080×1920 MP4, roughly twelve seconds of tier-by-tier reveal, sized for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts.
The clip is encoded right in your browser and ships without an audio track, so you can lay your own commentary or a trending sound over it. For a longer YouTube ranking video, record your screen while you drag and argue — the placements are the content.
S usually stands for Special, Superior, or Superb. It is ranked above A to mark the very best of the group.
Five (S, A, B, C, D) is the classic setup, but there is no rule. Add or remove rows in Customize to fit your topic.
No. A tier list is an opinion — the fun is defending your placements. Drag, rearrange, and make it yours.
A tier list works by sorting items into horizontal rows ranked from best (S) at the top to worst (D or F) at the bottom. Instead of scoring each item with a number, you compare it against the rows’ meaning — “is this S-good or B-good?” — and drop the tile where it belongs. The finished grid shows your whole opinion at a glance, which is exactly why boards get shared and argued over.
One you can defend out loud. A good tier list has a clear topic, a single judging criterion, a rare S row, and placements the maker can argue for tile by tile. Shock placements are fine — a beloved pick sitting in C starts the best conversations — as long as you have reasons ready. If every row is full and nothing surprises anyone, it’s a shrug in chart form.
Mostly browser-based makers rather than installed apps — nothing to download, and they work on a phone. We compared the options in best tier list makers.
Every tool on this site is free: open the text or image maker, add items, drag, export. There’s no paid plan to dodge, no locked features, and no watermark you can’t remove — the watermark text is editable and can be switched off. Free here means the whole thing, funded by ads rather than subscriptions.
Yes — text tiles work fine. The text tier list maker takes typed or pasted items, one per line, and you rank the words themselves. For topics with no clean art (habits, names, excuses) it beats hunting thumbnails, and the download is the same PNG an image board gets. A display toggle also lets image boards show text only.
No. There’s no account, login, or signup anywhere on this site — boards save automatically to your browser’s local storage, and a share link packs everything except your uploaded photos into its URL. Come back on the same device and your boards are waiting on the My Lists page. It’s a design decision, not a free-tier limitation; there’s no premium plan holding features back.
Boards are private by default here. Everything you build lives in your own browser — uploaded images are read locally, and rankings autosave to local storage rather than a server. Nothing turns public unless you post the board to the community gallery yourself, and sending a share link exposes just that one board, only to the people you send it to.