Amity is one of the five factions in the world of Divergent. Members of Amity are dedicated to peacefulness, kindness, forgiveness, trust, self-sufficiency, and neutrality. Amity was formed by those who blamed war and fighting for human nature's faults. Their substance in the Choosing Ceremony is soil, which is symbolic of them doing the farming for all the factions.

Candor is one of the five factions in the world of Divergent, and was formed by those who blamed duplicity and deception for human nature's faults. Because of this, the Candor are known to value honesty, and their symbol is a set of unbalanced scales bound by a circle. Their substance in the Choosing Ceremony is glass. Its faction colors are black and white.

Erudite is one of the five factions in the world of Divergent, the one and only faction dedicated to knowledge, intelligence, curiosity, and astuteness. It was formed by those who blamed ignorance for the war that had occurred in the past, causing them to split into factions in the first place. Their substance for the Choosing Ceremony is water. Its leader, Jeanine Matthews, is the main antagonist of Divergent and Insurgent.

Factionless is a status in which a person is not welcome into any faction. This is described as being homeless and even worse than death itself because the factionless have to suffer. It is a common practice for Abnegation to give food and medical attention to the factionless. It is not desired by any individual to ever be factionless. Some say they would rather die. The factionless are completely impoverished and live in the ruined section of Chicago.

They don't have a manifesto or a symbol, but some believe that the symbol is an empty circle.

Dauntless is one of the five factions in the world of Divergent. They are the faction dedicated to courage, bravery, strength, intimidation, and fearlessness. It was formed by a group of people who blamed fear and cowardice as the cause of problems that society faces, genetic impurity. Dauntless leaders believe that preparation and facing one's own fears is key to overcoming cowardice, initiates, sixteen year olds who have chosen said faction at the yearly choosing ceremony, at Dauntless are worked to both physical and mental breaking points to achieve this. There are technically two 'subsets' of Dauntless, one believing in 'freedom from fear', or eradicating fear by performing more and more reckless acts. Another subest believes in 'fear under control', or boldness, standing up and doing things in spite of fear. This subset is generally less extreme, and closer to what the faction originally was. However, the Dauntless leaders at the time of Tris's initiation were mainly aligned with the more extreme 'freedom from fear' subset, which called for more intense training methods.

Members generally wear provocative or full black leather clothing (or other black materials), piercings, tattoos and are usually seen freerunning through the ruins of Chicago. The last leaders of Dauntless, Eric and Max (Four or Tobias, is often seen as leader of the official Dauntless but is not until the second book when the Dauntless at Candor elect him, Tori Wu and Harrison), are often in dispute of how Dauntless should be lead. Eric claims that initiates should be prepared to die for the faction, preferring much more dangerous tactics of training initiates - whereas Four will discretely go against Eric's methods - such as when he intentionally misses Tris in the knife throwing range after Eric tells her to stand against the target.