Free Card Sorting Tool

Yes. Click Import in the toolbar to bring cards from a pasted list or a CSV with a card column (optional description, category and image columns). You see a preview first and can undo. Setup only: results from other tools can't be imported.

Card sorting shows participants a set of content items, one per "card", and asks them to group the ones that belong together. It's how you discover a navigation structure that matches how real people think, rather than one designed around your own team's internal logic, before you build anything.

Open sort: participants create their own groups and name them, which is best when you don't have a structure yet and want to discover one from scratch. Closed sort: you provide the categories and participants place cards into them, which is best for checking whether an EXISTING or proposed structure makes sense before you commit to it.

Somewhere around 30-60 cards is typical for a full information architecture exercise; this tool caps you at 60. More than that and participants tend to fatigue and sort carelessly toward the end, which quietly corrupts your results without looking like a problem.

Which pairs of cards were grouped together most often, as a percentage of everyone who took the study. The closer to 100%, the stronger the agreement that those two belong side by side. For an open sort you also see the group NAMES participants chose most, which is often the more useful finding: it tells you the language your actual users reach for, not the language your team uses internally.

Yes. Building a sort, previewing it as a participant and reading your results cost nothing, and there is no credit card step. Each study takes up to 1,000 responses, with up to 60 cards and 20 categories. You sign in with an email link only to get the share link for real participants. You bring the participants; there is no recruitment panel.

The Nielsen Norman Group has long suggested around 15 participants for a card sort, because patterns settle down at about that size. Fewer can still show you where people disagree, but read a small sample as indicative, not conclusive.

Paid tools mostly add a participant panel, team workspaces and support. This one doesn't recruit for you, so you send the link to your own users, colleagues or a panel you already pay for. What you get free is the part most people need: open, closed and hybrid sorts, image cards, a similarity matrix, a dendrogram, category agreement and CSV and PDF exports.

A hybrid sort gives participants your categories and lets them add their own. It suits a structure you mostly trust but suspect is missing a group. Their new group names show you what to add.