Chile has experienced an accelerated development of doctoral programs. In recent years, the offer has doubled, and the variety of options has significantly expanded with the creation of programs in new areas of knowledge, in different territorial contexts, of an interdisciplinary nature, organized collaboratively among universities. The study seeks to describe and understand the diversity of this offer with the aim of enriching quality improvement initiatives for the programs. Through a cluster analysis, a typology of doctoral programs was constructed based on nine variables that account for four dimensions: inputs, processes, outputs and outcomes.The typology describes and reveals the horizontal diversity within the system, differing from the logic of other tools, such as rankings. The results show an offer organized around five types of programs: strong, consolidated, emerging, developing and weak. The diversity of the system has an ambivalent character: on the one hand, the development of programs in new areas of knowledge, in different territorial contexts and with new characteristics; on the other, the vast differences between the types of programs show that the system does not currently guarantee equivalent quality levels for doctoral students.