974,000 installs.
That's how many organizations have downloaded just one third-party org chart app from the Google Workspace Marketplace. Nearly a million companies looked at their Google Admin Console, looked for an org chart, and went elsewhere.
Because it isn't there.
What the Admin Console actually does
Google's own documentation for organizational units explains that OUs are "designed primarily for managing settings and policies rather than for visualizing organizational hierarchies."
Read that carefully. Google built organizational units for settings management. Not for showing you who reports to whom.
Your IT admin uses OUs to control which groups get Drive access, who can install Chrome extensions, and which security policies apply to which department. They're flat, policy-based containers. They exist so your IT team can push configurations at scale.
They have nothing to do with your reporting structure.
OUs vs. reporting hierarchy: two different things
This is the confusion that trips up every Google Workspace admin at least once.
An organizational unit in Google Admin Console might be called "Engineering" and contain 40 people. But it tells you nothing about:
- Who manages that team
- How many direct reports each manager has
- Which engineers report to which leads
- Where the VPs sit in relation to the directors
- How the team connects to the rest of the company
An OU is a bucket. An org chart is a tree. Buckets group things. Trees show relationships. You need both, but they serve completely different purposes.
You could have a perfectly organized set of OUs — Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Finance — and still have zero visibility into your actual reporting structure.
The "where is the org chart?" moment
Every Google Workspace admin has the same experience. A VP asks for an org chart. The admin opens the Admin Console, clicks through Users, looks at the directory, and realizes: there's no chart view.
Google Workspace stores manager relationships in its directory. The data is there — each user can have a manager field. But Google never built a visualization layer on top of it.
So the admin does what everyone does. They Google "Google Workspace org chart."
And they find the Marketplace.
The Marketplace gap
The Google Workspace Marketplace reviews tell the story better than I can.
One user on a popular org chart app: "I can't find it either. I guess it is bugged."
Another: "Doesn't work. Only two nodes appeared from the six I had under the CEO."
These aren't edge cases. They're the typical experience with tools that half-heartedly read from Google's directory API without understanding how to build a proper tree from the manager field data.
The challenge isn't just reading the data. It's handling every edge case: employees with no manager set, circular references, people who report to someone in a different OU, contractors and external users mixed in with employees.
What you actually need
An org chart tool for Google Workspace needs to do three things well:
1. Read the real data. Not OUs. The actual manager field in Google's directory. That's where reporting relationships live.
2. Handle the mess. Real directories are messy. Missing managers. Duplicate entries. People who left but weren't removed. The tool needs to surface these problems, not crash on them.
3. Stay current. The directory changes constantly. A tool that imports a snapshot is just another static chart waiting to rot. It needs to sync — automatically, continuously — so the chart reflects reality without anyone touching it.
The gap between "data exists" and "data is useful"
Google Workspace has the raw ingredients for an org chart. Every user profile can include a manager, a department, a title, a location, a photo. The directory API exposes all of it.
But raw data in an API isn't the same as an interactive org chart your leadership team can use. It's the difference between having flour, eggs, and sugar versus having a cake.
Someone has to assemble it, handle the edge cases, make it navigable, keep it current, and make it look good enough that people actually use it.
How ChartPull fills the gap
ChartPull connects to your Google Workspace directory through Google's official API. It reads the manager field — the actual reporting relationship — not the OU structure.
From that data, it builds an interactive tree. Click to expand. Search by name or department. Filter by location. Export to PDF or CSV. Share a read-only link with your board.
When someone joins, leaves, or moves in your Google directory, the chart updates automatically. No manual rebuilds. No stale snapshots.
Your Google Admin Console is excellent at what it does: managing policies, pushing settings, controlling access. It was never designed to show you who reports to whom.
For that, you need something that reads Google's directory data and turns it into something visual, interactive, and always current. That's what ChartPull does.
14-day free trial with all features. Two minutes to connect. Your org chart is already in your Google directory — it just needs a screen to show up on.