SharePoint custom org charts: cards, layouts and themes

Most requests for a "custom org chart in SharePoint" start the same way: someone adds the built-in People web part, sees a flat row of faces with no reporting lines, and goes looking for something better. The People web part was never a hierarchy tool — it renders a list of people you pick by hand. Delve draws a real manager chain, but it is fixed: you cannot choose the fields, embed it in a page with your own branding, or start it anywhere other than the person viewing it.

Everything below uses SharePoint Smart Org Chart — free, MIT licensed, and running as an SPFx web part inside your own tenant. It reads the same Entra ID manager relationships Delve uses, and exposes the parts you actually want to change as settings rather than code.

Customize the person card

The card is where most of the customization value sits, because it determines whether your chart reads as an org structure or as a staff directory. Each card can carry the photo and display name plus any combination of job title, department, office location, phone and email.

A practical rule: on a company-wide chart, show name and job title only — five fields per card across two hundred people is unreadable. On a departmental page, turn contact fields on and the chart doubles as the team's phone list.

Choose the layout direction

Horizontal is the classic top-down tree everyone pictures. It works well for wide, shallow structures and for export to a slide. Vertical renders the same hierarchy as an indented, expandable list, which is far easier to navigate when the organization is eight levels deep or when the page column is narrow.

Pair the direction with an expansion depth. Opening two levels by default gives visitors immediate context without a wall of cards; anyone who needs more clicks to drill into a manager's team, and a breadcrumb tracks where they are.

Set the starting point and filters

A chart rooted at the CEO is the right answer for exactly one page on the intranet. Everywhere else, set the root to the relevant department head, or to the current user so the chart shows people their own reporting line. Department filters narrow a company-wide chart down to Finance or Engineering without a second web part instance.

Theme and branding

Four themes ship with the web part — Modern, Minimal, Corporate and Dark — and each respects the contrast rules that keep small card text legible. Set your company name and logo URL in the property pane and the chart stops looking like a bolted-on component.

If none of the four is close enough to your brand, the project is MIT licensed on GitHub — fork it, restyle it, and deploy your own build. That is the practical difference between a customizable open-source web part and a SaaS org chart where the theme list is the theme list.

What you cannot customize

Two honest limits. First, the hierarchy comes from the manager attribute in Entra ID — if that data is wrong, the chart is wrong, and the fix belongs in the directory, not the web part. Dotted-line and matrix reporting relationships are not represented, because Entra ID does not store them. Second, the web part is strictly read-only: it will never write a manager change back to Entra ID.

Go deeper

• Smart Org Chart vs the out-of-the-box SharePoint web part
• Build a SharePoint org chart from the manager field
• SharePoint org chart web parts compared
• SharePoint org charts: complete reference