Timeline - Plan vs Actual.

Best for: Quarterly retrospectives, annual performance reports, project close-out reports, and the "what we promised versus what we delivered" section of an investor update

Use: Use it when looking back at a finished period and contrasting the schedule that was promised with the schedule that actually happened on one time axis: the roadmap-delivery section of a quarterly or annual report, milestone attainment against the last funding round, the schedule-variance summary in a project post-mortem, or an annual OKR retrospective. It fits the moment where naming the slippage and the early wins up front is what builds trust. Three to five milestones over four time ticks is the right density.

Avoid: Use timeline-gantt or timeline-roadmap to show only the plan ahead, timeline-parallel-tracks for two different workstreams on a shared axis, timeline-before-after-pivot to compare metrics either side of one turning point, timeline-milestone when only attainment matters and not the gap against a promise, timeline-growth-strip for a metric trend across points in time, and timeline-year-calendar to read schedule density across twelve months. Past six milestones the rows shrink until the planned and actual bars read as one block.