Crochet and knitting pattern software, compared by someone who writes patterns

By Ali Lehrman · September 14, 2026 · Updated September 18, 2026

Almost every piece of software built for knitting and crochet designers is a chart editor. You draw a chart on a grid, and the good ones write the instructions out for you. What almost none of them do is lay out the finished pattern you actually sell, with the photos, the tables and the written rounds on one page. Stitchmastery says so in its own FAQ. That missing half is why most designers end up in Canva.

What I have used and what I have only read about

I design crochet patterns and sell them. I started with PowerPoint, then moved to Canva when PowerPoint got too tedious.

I have not used Stitchmastery, Intwined, Knit Visualizer, KnitBird, Stitch Fiddle, Chart Minder or Patternum. Everything I say about those comes from their own websites and documentation, and I link to each one so you can check me. Where their own site does not answer a question, I say that instead of guessing.

I also built NodeStitch, which is last on this list, so I am not a neutral party about that one.

Stitchmastery

The one people name first, and from its own description it earns that.

It designs flat, circular and two pass knitting charts, gives you a large stitch library plus your own custom stitches, annotates repeats, adds borders, checks that rows and columns add up, and automatically generates written instructions from the chart. It runs on macOS, Windows and Linux. It is £70 or $90 US for an activation key good on two computers, a one time purchase with lifetime access, though the site notes future upgrades may cost more.

What it does not do, in its own words: “Stitchmastery is not set up to send charts directly to print. You need to export the chart as an image file.” You get PDF, JPG, PNG, SVG and EPS out, and then you assemble the actual pattern document somewhere else.

That is not a criticism. It is a charting tool and it says so. But it is the clearest statement of the split this whole post is about, and it comes from the strongest product in the category.

Its site describes knitting throughout. I found no statement about crochet either way.

Intwined Pattern Studio

The one that covers the most crafts. Its own site lists knitting, crochet, lace and weaving, and the FAQ adds cross stitch.

It goes both directions, which is unusual: design a chart and it writes the instructions, or type instructions and it draws the chart. Over 200 built in stitches and symbols, custom stitches, SVG based, exports PDF and image formats. Windows and Mac, $44.

Two honest notes. The site shows version 1.5, with no update date given anywhere I could find. The FAQ lists compatibility as “all versions of Mac OS X” and Windows XP through Windows 10. Draw your own conclusion about how current that is, but check before you buy.

Its site does not describe page layout for a finished pattern document, or photo handling.

Knit Visualizer

Made by Knit Foundry. Its trick is the direction most tools do not go: you type a written stitch pattern and it draws the chart for you. Over 40 common stitches and over 75 cables, auto generated legends, printing with layout options.

The site is straightforward about its own state, so I will be too. Version 2.1 was released in December 2008. It is $185. It runs on Windows XP through 10 and Mac OS X 10.4 through 10.14, and the site says plainly that it does not support macOS Catalina or later. If you are on a modern Mac, this one is not available to you, by its own account.

KnitBird

Draws charts, imports an image and converts it to a chart, moves and rotates and repeats selections, exports JPEG and PDF. Windows and Mac through Adobe AIR.

Its own site says: “Development and support of KnitBird has ended.” It is no longer sold. It was €59 and it is now downloadable free with the activation key the site publishes. Its feature list is chart drawing and export, and I found no written instruction generation described.

A free working chart drawer is still a free working chart drawer. Just know that nothing is coming.

Stitchworks Software, or Crochet Charts

Designers have been recommending this one to each other since at least 2013, and the most recent recommendation I found was posted in October 2024. They are right that it is still there: the site loads and the software is still downloadable.

It serves over plain http only. The secure address redirects to the insecure one and the certificate does not match the domain, so Chrome marks the whole site Not secure. There are Home, Features, Screenshots and Download pages, and the product is Crochet Charts, version 1.2, for Windows and Linux. Clicking the Windows download gets you “Insecure download blocked” and a file named CrochetCharts-1.2.0-x86.exe.

You can override that block if you decide to. I am not telling you to, and the reason is narrower than it sounds. Over plain http there is no way to confirm that the file arriving on your machine is the file the makers published. That is a maintenance problem rather than a judgment about anybody, and it is a different thing from software simply being old.

I did not install it, so I cannot tell you how it works from my own use. The designers who did use it agree on the shape of it: it handles simple charts well and is not built for professional work, which is both Edie Eckman’s verdict and Yarn and Y’s. They also report no development since 2015. Two of them call it free and open source, while the 2013 review says the author paid $49.99 for it, so the licensing changed at some point and I cannot tell you when.

All of that is reported opinion rather than anything I confirmed with the makers, which is why it is not in the comparison table below. Every row in that table is a claim, and I do not have confirmed claims to put in one.

Stitch Fiddle

Web based, and the broadest of any of these: crochet, knitting and cross stitch, plus diamond painting, fuse beads, latch hook, quilting and pixel art.

The free tier allows up to 15 charts, 50 colors or symbols per chart, and grids up to 300 by 300. Premium is $2.75 a month, or $33 a year prepaid, and lifts those to unlimited charts, 250 symbols, 1000 by 1000 grids, plus layers, collaboration, picture uploads and vector exports. Its site says the free version stays free.

For the price of a coffee it is the cheapest real charting on this list. What I could not confirm from their pages is whether it generates written instructions or lays out a full pattern document, so I am not claiming either way.

Chart Minder

Free online chart maker. Image to chart conversion, freehand drawing, gauge and measurement calculations, save charts as images. There is a Pro tier; I did not find its price on the pages I read.

Its own material describes knitting. Written instructions and full pattern documents are not addressed.

Patternum

This is the one that surprised me, and it is the reason I had to rewrite the top of this post.

Patternum is a free app from the Row Counter App people, for iOS and Android, and it is not a chart editor with a document bolted on. Its own description is a pattern creation tool for knitting and crochet: you add gauge, abbreviations and materials, you can build charts with predefined or custom symbols, patterns can include images and videos, and it automatically generates a PDF you can download, sell or distribute. Finished patterns import into their Row Counter app so a maker can follow along interactively.

So the flat claim that nothing in this space does pattern documents is not true, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to make my own product look better.

What is different is control. Patternum optimizes the layout for you into a responsive pattern that reflows on a phone or tablet. That is a real strength if what you want is an interactive pattern people follow on a screen. It is a different thing from composing a fixed page, deciding this photo sits here at this size next to this round, and selling that exact page as a PDF. Which of those you want is a genuine choice and it depends on how your customers read.

It is also a phone and tablet app. I write patterns at a desk.

Canva and PowerPoint

These are the honest answer to what most pattern designers use, and no listicle ever includes them because they are not pattern software. PowerPoint is where I created my first few patterns before moving to Canva.

They are good at the thing everything above is bad at. You get a fixed page and you can put anything anywhere on it, which is exactly what a pattern page needs. Photos go where you want them at the size you want them. Canva makes a genuinely good looking cover, and my covers got better the day I started using it. It also has a boatload of art behind it, photos and icons and banners you can drop straight in, which mine does not have at all. You can upload whatever you find elsewhere, but you have to go and find it. Both export a clean PDF. PowerPoint you probably already own, and Canva has a free tier, so the barrier is nothing.

What they do not do is know what a pattern is. You type “Rnd 1” and then “Rnd 2” and then “Rnd 3” down the whole page yourself. Insert a round in the middle and you retype every label under it. Nothing checks a stitch count. And every photo caption is a number you typed, so inserting one photo means fixing all of them by hand. I once had a pattern with over 100 photos, added one image in the middle, and spent at least half an hour renumbering the rest.

I wrote a longer post about exactly this, if that is the comparison you came for.

Illustrator and Inkscape

Both are general vector graphics programs. Illustrator is $22.99 a month for the single app plan as listed today. Inkscape is free and open source, works natively in SVG, and imports and exports AI, EPS, PDF, PS and PNG.

Designers do use these, and the ones who are fluent in them produce the best looking charts and schematics of anybody, because there is no limit on what you can draw.

Neither knows anything about knitting or crochet. There is no stitch library unless you build one, nothing counts anything, and nothing checks anything. And they are hard. I am comfortable with software and I gave up on Illustrator because the distance between opening it and getting a usable pattern page out of it was further than I was willing to walk.

Excel and Google Sheets

Almost nobody lays out a pattern in a spreadsheet and nobody should. It earns a place here anyway, because it is the best tool on this list for one job: a stitch count column with a formula behind it that tells you when a round does not add up.

The grid also works as a rough color chart if you square up the cells.

It cannot lay out a pattern anyone would pay for. Nobody claims it can. But do not skip it out of snobbery, because a formula that checks your counts is worth more than most features.

The comparison

Prices checked September 9, 2026.

“Not described” means exactly that: their site did not say, and I am not going to fill in a blank for somebody else’s product.

Which one you should actually use

You design knitting patterns with cables or lace and you need real charts. Stitchmastery. It is the most complete charting tool here and it writes your instructions out for you. Buy it and lay the document out separately. I would tell you this even though it means you are not using mine.

You need charts for both knitting and crochet and you want to spend $44. Intwined, with a look at how current it is first.

You need a chart occasionally and do not want to spend anything. Chart Minder or Stitch Fiddle. Stitch Fiddle’s paid tier is under three dollars a month if you outgrow the free one.

You want an interactive pattern people follow on their phone, and you are comfortable working on a phone. Patternum.

You are already fluent in vector software. Stay in Illustrator or Inkscape. Nothing here will give you more control than you already have.

Your pattern is words and a stitch key and nothing else. Word. Genuinely.

You want a good looking pattern PDF and you do not mind doing the numbering by hand. Canva. It is what I used for years, it is free to start, and it will make a better cover than anything else here.

You are laying out a pattern PDF with photos, tables and written rounds that someone is going to buy. That is the job nothing above was built for, and it is why you are in Canva. It is also why I built the last thing on this list.

NodeStitch

I want to describe this as a category rather than as a winner, because the honest thing this post shows is that the category was mostly empty, not that my app beats a charting tool at charting. It does not chart at all.

It is layout first. You get a fixed page in the browser and you compose the document you are going to sell on it: the written rounds, the stitch count tables, the photos, the cover. What makes it different from Canva is that the page knows what a pattern is. Rounds number themselves as you type. Photos carry numbers that relabel when you insert one in the middle. Tables are built to hold stitch counts. And there is a review pass that reads what you wrote and flags a round that needs more stitches than the previous round produced, a repeat that does not divide evenly, a fasten off with no rejoin after it, and a gap in your photo numbering. Mark the text box holding your abbreviations as the stitch key and it checks that too, both ways: what you used and never defined, and what you defined and never used.

You can also photograph a handwritten pattern out of your notebook, several pages at once, and have it come back as numbered lines with the spans intact.

It does not write patterns. It helps a designer write their own. It flags what looks wrong and it will make the correction, but only one you have read and ticked yourself. Nothing changes in your pattern unless you approve it, and it does not invent a single stitch. Fiber communities are suspicious of anything with AI attached to it and they are right to be, because AI generated patterns waste people’s yarn. Snappy Tots keeps a directory of 88 real designers specifically so people can tell the difference. So I say the line first instead of waiting to be asked.

The honest catch, and I would rather you heard it here than at the end of a pattern. Writing the pattern is free, and so is the numbering that does most of the work: rounds, rows and photos. A free account gets three tries in total for the life of the account, shared across reading a pattern in from a photo, the stitch counter and Pattern Review. Three between them, not three each. After that, all three features are Pro. PDF export, background removal and version history are Pro from the start, with no free tries at all.

If you need charts, use one of the tools above. If what you need is the document, this is what I could not find anywhere else, which is why it exists.

Sources

Every claim about the pattern software above came from these. What I say about Canva and PowerPoint comes from using them.

• Stitchmastery: https://stitchmastery.com/ and https://stitchmastery.com/frequently-asked-questions/ and https://stitchmastery.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009891778-How-much-does-it-cost-and-what-payment-options-are-there
• Intwined Pattern Studio: https://intwinedstudio.com/ and http://intwinedstudio.com/FAQ
• Knit Visualizer: https://www.knitfoundry.com/knitvisualizer.html
• KnitBird: https://knitbird.com/
• Stitch Fiddle: https://www.stitchfiddle.com/ and https://www.stitchfiddle.com/en/premium/pricing
• Chart Minder: https://www.chart-minder.com/
• Patternum: https://rowcounterapp.com/patternum-pattern-creator-app.html
• Inkscape: https://inkscape.org/about/
• Adobe Illustrator: https://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator.html
• Stitchworks Software: https://stitchworkssoftware.com/ serves over plain http only, and the Windows download is blocked by the browser. What other designers say about it comes from four reviews rather than from the makers:
  • https://cre8tioncrochet.com/2013/10/stitchworks-software.html
  • https://www.edieeckman.com/2016/07/31/in-search-of-crochet-charting-software-part-2/
  • https://yarnandy.com/is-it-worth-using-crochet-charts-for-your-patterns/
  • https://zeensandroger.com/2024/10/21/creating-crochet-charts/