See what overlapped what.

A board is your canvas. Give it a title and, if you like, a rough date range — you can change it later, or let the timeline fit itself to your events. That's the whole setup.

A lane is one thread on the timeline. Mark each as a protagonist (the subject you came for — a person, a project, a country) or context (the backdrop it sits against). Then fill it any of four ways:

• By hand — type events one at a time, entering dates the way you'd say them (1949, c. 1976, late 1973).
• In bulk — paste a whole spreadsheet to fill a lane at once: date, an optional end, a short label, the description, and a source — one row per event.
• Presets — add a ready-made context lane in one click: U.S. Presidents, Popes, Chief Justices, Nobel laureates, the decolonization of Africa, and more.
• Live import from Wikidata — search a person and drape their whole life as a lane, or import an office and get its full run of holders (every U.S. president, each with dates).

The first two are how you add your own subjects; the last two drape in context without the busywork. Every lane gets a colour and a distinct shape marker automatically, so lanes stay tellable-apart — in colour, in greyscale, and for colour-blind readers.

Switch to Compare and every lane lands on one shared, date-scaled axis. Zoom, fit to your data, pan, or focus a single lane to dim the rest. The coincidences you couldn't hold in your head — he was imprisoned clear across the moon-landing decade; those approvals cluster right after that appointment — surface on their own.

The thing that makes context useful is that it's sourced. Imported lanes link back to where they came from — our Wikidata imports are CC0, and every imported lane points at its origin. That's the opposite of a confident-looking guess: you can check it, and so can a classroom.

History rarely comes with exact dates. You know the year someone was born but not the day; you know something happened in the 1980s, or around 1976, or in late 1973. Most timeline tools make you pick a precise date anyway — so a rough guess ends up looking like a hard fact.

Stratatouille takes the date the way you'd say it:

• 1949 — a year
• 1980s — a decade
• c. 1976 — circa, an approximation
• Dec 1993 — a month
• 2 Dec 1993 — an exact day
• late 1973 — a rough part of a year

It works out how precise you were, shows it back, and stores exactly that. Then it renders the uncertainty rather than hiding it: a precise day is a crisp point; a month softens at the edges; a year softer still; a decade is a broad, gentle band; a circa date is the softest of all. You read at a glance not just when something happened, but how sure the date is. What you type is what you see — enter "late 1973" and it stays "late 1973"; we don't round it to a false-precise date, and we don't invent a day we don't have.

Built to WCAG 2.1 AA. The comparison never relies on colour alone — every lane pairs a hue with a shape — and there's a text-table equivalent of every visual, so a screen reader (or anyone) gets the same information. Full keyboard operation, labelled controls. The honest details, including known gaps, live in our Accessibility Statement.

Export any comparison as a PNG (for slides and docs), an SVG (crisp at any size), or a JSON snapshot of the underlying data (yours to keep and remix). Or publish a board as an unlisted, revocable, read-only link — share the view without exposing your account. Your boards are private unless you choose to share them.