Some prefer to make a mood board with a free-form style, which works more like mind-mapping or brainstorming. Others have a more defined style, where your visual elements are arranged in a neat collage. No matter what you prefer, these free mood board sites and apps will make it easy for you to create one, even if it’s your first time.

1. Go Moodboard (Web): Free and Fast Collage-Style Mood Board Creator

Go Moodboard is the fastest way to create a professional-looking mood board collage and share it with others. The website doesn’t require you to register to use it. Choose a blank mood board to start, or select one of the templates for inspiration in creating your mood board.

Then upload all the images you want to add to your mood board. Go Moodboard will automatically arrange them into a beautiful collage, regardless of their size or orientation. You can also add comments to any image.

Once you’re done, share the URL with anyone else for them to view your mood board. Comments appear when the recipient hovers over any image. From the original computer, you can edit this mood board later.

2. Visualist (Web): No-Signup Mood Board With Background Remover

Visualist is a dead-simple mood board creator that is completely free and doesn’t feature any ads. You can use it without registering for an account and export your mood board as a PNG, JPG, or PDF file. Of course, if you do decide to sign up, you can save mood boards to your account to access them later.

The web app gives you an unlimited canvas on which you can upload images from your hard drive. You’ll need to install the Chrome extension if you want to add elements while browsing. You can quickly save any image on a web page to your Visualist board (as long as you are signed in).

You can resize, crop, and lock any image. Visualist also features a smart AI to remove the background of any image. As you can see in the screenshot above, it works pretty well.

Once you’ve uploaded your images to Visualist, you can choose to keep it free-form style or ask the app to auto-arrange images into a grid. Depending on your choice, the"Tidy Up" tool will arrange them in a cluster, rows, or columns,

Download: Visualist for Chrome (Free)

Like Visualist, Ledavio Design is a free-form mood board creator on an unlimited canvas. Before jumping into the app, check out the two blog posts by the team on how to create mood boards and how to use them in graphic design projects. These are insightful articles for beginners to learn what makes a good mood board and how to implement it in your work scenarios.

Once you sign up for Ledavio Design, the mood board app is pretty intuitive. You can add a new image by uploading it from your hard drive or searching the web’s top sites for copyright-free images. The images load in Ledavio’s app itself, so you never have to leave the window. Similarly, you can also search for stock icons and clip art.

Apart from photos and illustrations, you can also add stylized text headers, text boxes with larger blocks of text, and sticky notes with comments. You can add up to 10 elements in the free account. Each element on the canvas has customization options, and you can freely resize or move them. Ledavio can also auto-arrange the elements into a grid, where you choose the number of columns from two to seven.

You can share a Ledavio mood board with others, which is great to use with clients. The free account lets any registered user add two “customers,” start two “projects” per customer, and create two “mood boards” per project. So that’s a total of eight mood boards with the free account, which you can upgrade to remove all restrictions.

4. Moodzer (Web): Free Collage-Style Mood Boards With Image Editing

If you want to quickly create a collage of images to make a mood board, look no further than Moodzer. You can upload the pictures from your hard drive, and the web app will arrange them into a beautiful grid.

You are free to adjust this grid as you want. You can resize any images, replace them, or change their order with simple mouse gestures. You can individually edit each image too. Rotate or flip the image, add one of five filters, and adjust the hue, brightness, contrast, or saturation. You can also add text to the image, placing it anywhere with customizable fonts, colors, and sizes.

You can stick with the default white background or change to another color in the main grid. You can also add a color swatch to your grid instead of an image if you’re trying to give visual options. Moodzer also lets you set the size of the gutters between images.

Once you’re done, give the board a title and a description, and you’re ready to download it. The free account has a few limitations. Moodzer allows a maximum of 20 images, up to 2MB in size each. The downloaded file will have the board title and you are limited to a single board, unlike unlimited boards in the Pro version.

5. Milanote (Web, Chrome): Most Powerful Online Mood Board Creator

There’s no two ways about it, Milanote is the most powerful online mood board creator, and it’s frankly surprising that it’s free to use. But perhaps it’s best for advanced users and those used to creating mood boards regularly, rather than beginners.

Milanote lets you create free-form mood boards on a blank canvas and will auto-arrange them if you want them sorted into columns and rows. You can add images from your hard drive or search Unsplash images directly from Milanote’s app. Apart from images, Milanote also supports videos, animated GIFs, color swatches, design files, and other custom uploads.

It also has a few neat tricks for collaborations. For example, you can invite anyone to your Milanote mood board to contribute to it or share the board as a private read-only link. You can also add tasks in a mood board with a custom to-do list widget, which also supports due dates, and you can assign tasks to collaborators.

Milanote offers a range of templates for different types of common mood boards. If you choose to use a template, you can keep the original images and replace them or keep their outlines while adding your content.

Milanote also doubles up as a tool to get over writer’s block and a way to visually organize bookmarks. This wide range of features makes us think you might want to try the other simpler mood board creators first, and if you find those limiting, then graduate to Milanote.

Download: Milanote for Chrome (Free)

With Mood Boards, Less Is More

It’s tempting to turn your nose at limitations like 10 images in a mood board and go for premium packages or unlimited apps. But the secret to making a good mood board isn’t to throw in more; it’s to be selective and focused.

Most designers advise going with the “Less is More” principle, wherein you should try and limit yourself to a few key images. Some of the best mood boards are just five to six images, with a few color swatches next to it. Clarity is more important than variety.