SWOT Analysis Maker

About the SWOT Analysis Maker

A SWOT analysis sets out what is going for and against a business, a product, a project or a career: its strengths and weaknesses — inside, what you control — and the opportunities and threats around it. Type the points into the four boxes, mark each as high, medium or low priority, and the maker keeps the most important ones at the top of each box.

A SWOT on its own is a list; the TOWS matrix turns it into strategy. It pairs each internal factor with each external one: use a strength to take an opportunity (SO), use an opportunity to fix a weakness (WO), use a strength to meet a threat (ST), and reduce a weakness so a threat hurts less (WT). The maker writes the questions from your highest-priority points and keeps the strategies you choose beside them.

Start from a template for a café, an online store, a freelancer, a software product, a local shop, a small manufacturer, a charity, a career plan or a product launch, and keep up to twenty analyses in this browser. The finished analysis is a two-page document — the four-box grid and the TOWS matrix — which downloads as PDF, PNG, Markdown or CSV with a Pro pass; without one, the board and the questions work and the document shows as a free preview.

Writing good points

• Be specific. “Delivery in two days anywhere in the city” says more than “good service”; numbers and examples help.
• Internal or external? Strengths and weaknesses are about you — your people, products, money, reputation. Opportunities and threats are outside — customers, competitors, prices, rules, technology. A growing market is an opportunity, not a strength.
• Compared with whom? A strength counts when you do it better than the alternatives a customer has.
• Prioritise. A few points that really matter beat a long list. Mark them high; keep the rest as medium or low so the TOWS questions use the right ones.

The TOWS matrix

Heinz Weihrich’s TOWS matrix90120-0) puts the internal factors in the columns and the external ones in the rows, and names the four kinds of strategy that come from pairing them: SO (maxi–maxi) uses strengths to take opportunities, WO (mini–maxi) uses opportunities to overcome weaknesses, ST (maxi–mini) uses strengths to avoid or reduce threats, and WT (mini–mini) works on weaknesses to avoid threats — the defensive plan. The maker writes a question for every pair of your two highest-priority points on each side, so each cell has a short, focused list to work through.

The document and the files

• PDF: two landscape pages, A4 or US Letter by your country: the four boxes in colour, high-priority points in bold and low ones in grey, then the TOWS matrix with your strategies — or, where you have none yet, the questions. A box too full for its page keeps what fits, says how many more points there are, and the rest follow on a “Continued” page.
• PNG: either page as a picture, for slides and chat.
• Markdown: the whole analysis as text with headings, for a document, a wiki or a project tool.
• CSV: one row a point or strategy, with its box and priority, for a spreadsheet.
• Backup: the analysis as a small file you can open again here, in any browser — your own data, always available.

Limitations

• Up to 15 points in each box and 20 analyses in this browser. Long boards get smaller type in the PDF; points or strategies that still do not fit in their box continue on an extra page.
• The questions pair your points; they do not judge whether a strategy is a good one.
• The PDF and its PNG pages draw Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Vietnamese letters; text in other scripts (Hindi or Japanese, for example) shows as “?” there, and the page says so — the Markdown and CSV files keep it.
• The analyses are kept in this browser on this device: save a backup to move one to another device or to share it.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. Your analyses are kept in this browser’s storage on this device and are never uploaded; a backup file is made on your device.