How to make a choropleth map online — free, no sign-up

A choropleth map shades each region by a number — GDP by country, rainfall by state, sales by territory. It is the fastest way to make a table of numbers readable at a glance: instead of scanning 50 rows, your reader sees the pattern instantly — the dark band across one coast, the pale gap in the middle. Here is how to build one in MapPalette in about two minutes, plus the handful of cartography rules that separate a clear data map from a misleading one.

When a choropleth is the right chart

Use a choropleth when your data is one number per geographic region and the regions themselves matter to the story: literacy rate by state, election margin by county, exports by country. Two cautions worth knowing before you start:

• Prefer rates over raw counts. Large regions and populous regions dominate any raw-count map — a map of "total sales" mostly shows where people live. "Sales per capita" or "growth %" almost always tells a truer story.
• Region size distorts attention. Russia and Canada draw the eye no matter what their value is, while Singapore is nearly invisible. If your story is about small regions, zoom the map to them before exporting, or call them out in the title.

1Pick your map

Open the world map for country-level data, the India map for state-level data, or any of 250+ country maps for provinces and subdivisions.

2Prepare and import your data

Your data needs just two columns: a region name and a value. Clean it up in your spreadsheet first — the two problems that cause a region to stay gray are a name mismatch (write United States of America, not USA; Odisha, not Orissa) and stray text in the value column (remove currency symbols and thousands separators, so 1420 rather than $1,420). If a region doesn't shade after import, hover over it on the map to see the exact name the map expects.

1. Choose a color scheme in the Palette dropdown — sequential ramps like Blues or Viridis work best for choropleths. There's a colorblind-safe option too.
2. Click 📊 Import data in the Actions panel.
3. Paste your rows, one region per line: India, 92 — straight from Excel or Google Sheets (tab-separated works too).
4. Click Apply. Regions are shaded from low to high in five classes, and the legend is filled in with the value ranges automatically.

The importer splits your values into five equal-interval classes. That default is right for evenly spread data; if one outlier (say, one country ten times richer than the rest) washes everything else into the palest class, either exclude the outlier and mention it in a caption, or bucket the values yourself in your spreadsheet (e.g. 1–5) and import the bucket numbers instead.

3Polish it

• Type a map title and a legend title in the sidebar.
• Edit any legend label — the ranges are a starting point, not a rule.
• Adjust the sea and background colors to fit your document's style.
• Anything the import missed can be colored by hand — just click the region.

4Export

Choose PNG (up to 10,000 px wide) or SVG in the export panel and hit Download. The legend and title are included in the file. Your work also autosaves in the browser, and the 🔗 Share button gives you a link that recreates your exact map for anyone who opens it.

Which format? PNG for slides, documents and social media — set the width to at least 2,000 px so it survives projection and cropping. SVG for print, Illustrator/Inkscape editing, or embedding on a web page: it is a vector file, so it stays sharp at any size and every region remains an editable shape.

Choosing the right color ramp

• Sequential (Blues, Reds, Greens, Viridis) — for values that run from low to high. This is the correct choice for most choropleths.
• Diverging (Red–Yellow–Green) — only when your data has a meaningful midpoint, like profit vs. loss, above vs. below average, or swing between two parties. The neutral middle color should sit on that midpoint.
• Colorblind-safe — about 1 in 12 men can't reliably tell red from green. If the map is going to a wide audience, use the colorblind-safe palette or a single-hue ramp like Blues, and avoid red–green diverging scales.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Rainbow palettes. Hue has no natural order — readers can't tell whether orange is "more" than purple. Stick to ramps of one hue, dark = more.
• Too many classes. Beyond about seven shades, adjacent classes become indistinguishable from each other and from the legend.
• No units in the legend. "50–75" of what? Put the unit in the legend title: Rainfall (mm/year), Literacy (%).
• Mapping raw totals. As above — normalize by population or area unless the total itself is the story.
• Unlabeled gray regions. If some regions have no data, say so — add a "No data" entry to the legend rather than letting gray read as "zero".

Frequently asked questions

Can I make a choropleth of states or provinces, not countries?

Yes. Every one of the 250+ country maps supports the same data import — paste province names and values on the Germany map, USA map, or the India map exactly as you would with countries on the world map.

Do I need to sign up or install anything?

No. The tool runs entirely in your browser, is free, and exports carry no watermark. Your data is processed locally in the browser and is not uploaded to a server.

Can I edit the class ranges the importer chose?

The legend labels are fully editable — click any label and type your own range or wording. To change which regions fall in which class, bucket the values in your spreadsheet before importing.