Lucidchart and Lucidspark are solutions from Lucid Software designed to work together throughout the visual collaboration workflow. Lucidchart focuses on creating professional diagrams, flowcharts, mind maps, and other visual documents. It excels in organization, precision, and collaboration on these structured visuals. Lucidspark focuses on brainstorming, free-flowing ideas, and planning sessions. It offers a virtual whiteboard with sticky notes, drawing tools, and real-time collaboration for messy but creative exploration.
Lucidchart and Lucidspark stand out in user reviews for their real-time collaboration capabilities and integration with other tools, offering significant productivity and efficiency enhancements.
Lucidchart is the go-to for professional diagramming and documentation, while Lucidspark fosters creative exploration and collaborative brainstorming. Used together, they offer a powerful suite for visual thinking and communication throughout the project lifecycle. The summary above is based on recent user interviews with Lucidchart and Lucidspark users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The most valuable features are the different templates that they have already created, as well as all the different shapes you can use in the process charts because each shape stands for a different element or thing that's being done. It's easy to distinguish between different steps using the already set-out shapes."
"I've been using Lucidchart for quite simple things, but it's definitely much easier making process maps using Lucidchart than it is using Google Docs for basically everything. It's much simpler in terms of how easy it is to use Lucidchart. The way that you can get the arrows on the flow charts, based on the process mapping, you can drag the arrows from one box to another and it automatically shows you where you can put it. It makes decisions for you in terms of if you have a decision diamond, then the line is automatically a yes or no. This just makes it so much easier."
"The interface is very good and easy to use. We don't need documentation on how to use it. It is self-explanatory, which is very convenient for a new user."
"Its ease of use is most valuable. As compared to draw.io, connecting the lines and doing things like that are much easier in Lucidchart. It has been great for some of the process flow diagrams and data flow diagrams. I can export these diagrams as PDFs and share them with team members."
"The usability is very nice in terms of flowchart components that are available."
"It's very easy to use. I didn't go through any tutorials or any documentation. It was very easy for me to start. It is intuitive. Right after logging in, I was able to quickly just drag and drop and do the things I wanted to do, without any prior knowledge of the solution."
"I love the simplicity and how clean all the different boxes, arrows, and charts can be. Especially with something complicated like our sales flow, it could be really easy to be all cluttered and everything like that, but my favorite feature is how clean it is, how straightforward it makes our flow look, and how easy it is to understand. Lucidchart accommodates both Mac and PC users which is important to us because at my company right now, our sales floor and then every other computer we have as a company is a Mac, but a lot of our employees actually have PCs and Android as well. So it's really beneficial because if we're ever on the go or we need to make a change, it's versatile and is open for both Mac and PC."
"The organizational charts for visualizing and understanding team hierarchies and relationships are the reason why we purchased the package that would allow me to do more with it. I tried to find all the cheap ways to do things but the ease of access and the already preset structure that Lucidchart had in place made it easier. Out of all the choices that I saw come across my desk, Lucidchart was the best and easiest choice."
"I discovered over time, after going through Visio and OmniGraffle, that when I started to use Lucidchart it was vastly superior. It is just so much more intuitive, so much more smooth. It works, it doesn't crash. It's just perfect."
"The whiteboard has been very helpful. It's a nice tool. At least for me, as a teacher, that's been very helpful and it's an easy tool. There are specific tools within the whiteboard for drawing. It makes things easier, so I like that."
"I like the fact that Lucidspark has got all these templates that we can use."
"We have used this solution for remote or virtual brainstorming sessions. We're a 100% remote company and therefore having that capability is important."
"I found the whiteboard very customizable. You can create different stages of a flow chart, for example. You can play around with a lot of variables."
"I am a visual person, which is why I like Lucidspark. Its user interface and intuitiveness are pretty good. It is pretty intuitive to understand how we are moving forward and drawing things on the whiteboard. It's very simple, not complicated. The things that I use are mainly the post-it notes and containers, where I can grab a group of post-it notes, then put them in a container and move them around."
"The time is no longer spent trying to get everybody to be in one document or sending documents back and forth so that everybody is on the same page. Those things add up, especially as a team gets larger. Also, there are errors that come with that, e.g., sending the wrong version of a document. If the document is held somewhere, then it is easy to determine who made the last correction. Everybody is a part of the team so I can remove people as an administrator who need to be removed or add them to a specific thing. It is very straightforward and worth it in that manner."
"We specifically sought to aggregate data and brainstorming and then to look at the ideas that seemed to have the most value. We were able to prioritize and identify productivity issues and move forward. Being a continuous improvement expert, I tend to use very specific tools for prioritizing, but the tools in Lucidspark did help us do that on a qualitative basis, very effectively."
"The communication with sales has been pretty poor. They have been spotty in terms of response. So far, that has been our problem with it. We were in contact with one of their representatives, but he just kind of disappeared one day and we couldn't find him anymore. He has not been responsive to email."
"The flowcharting feature would be improved if it had some kind of prediction capability that helped to create the diagrams, such as the ability to automatically join components with my database."
"One of the things that I find frustrating is that all of our Tableau information is on a server, so when I send that out people can't open it and use it. I then have to go back and do extra work to convert everything into an Excel format that everybody can use. It would be really important to me, if I send something out to somebody who doesn't have a Lucid account, that they can just click and see it, instead of having to log in and create an account."
"When you want to add text to a connector arrow, I have not figured out how to position the text vertically. It always wants the text to stay horizontal."
"When I download a flowchart as a PDF file, it breaks it up. I would like to see the continuous display of flow charts, even if they are larger than one page."
"A couple of times when I tried to move a line, connecting two shapes on an organizational chart, occasionally the line doesn't move as intuitively as I think it should. I have to fiddle around with it a few times to get it to do what I want it to do."
"One of the major drawbacks is that we have to extract the work in Lucidchart as an image when we want to create a presentation."
"I'm not a super user, and there might be a way of doing it that I haven't explored, but I was looking for some specific icons that are just standard icons, and I found the icon library to be very focused on architecture icons. It didn't have as many standard or generic icons."
"There are still some things that are a little confusing or too advanced, which is why it's not easy to use and hop on. There could be some other features that could be added, like other templates."
"Whatever they can do to help make the visual look a little cleaner would be great because it can get a bit messy, or inconsistent. If there were automations to do things like making sure that elements are of the same size and correct alignment, it would help to make the visual more presentable."
"One thing that I noticed, when I was creating a document or something else, is a lot of empty space. If I am creating from a particular position, there is a lot of empty space above it. I am not sure why this happens. If there is a solution for this, then it would help."
"Layers would be great. They don't have a layer feature. When you have a lot of items in the same place, it is hard to pick them out."
"There is room for improvement with the user interface. It almost feels "uncooked." It sometimes feels like a prototype rather than the real thing."
"In terms of improvement, having layout guides would be nice."
"When two people are editing, there should be a way to lock the other person's changes to avoid having a person overwrite someone else's changes. When multiple users access the same document, there should be some way of locking others out, possibly by changing user permissions."
"There might be a way to do this in Lucidspark, but if there were a way to leave comments for internal collaborators, that would be good. Let's say we were brainstorming something. It would be helpful to have comments that we could see, but if we were to share a view with someone else, they wouldn't see those behind-the-scenes comments."
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Lucidchart is ranked 3rd in Visual Collaboration Platforms with 54 reviews while Lucidspark is ranked 4th in Visual Collaboration Platforms with 33 reviews. Lucidchart is rated 8.6, while Lucidspark is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Lucidchart writes "Good brainstorming features, facilitates collaboration, and keeps us focused on our work". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Lucidspark writes "Facilitates a lot of the productivity of our working and brainstorming sessions". Lucidchart is most compared with Figma, Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, Visio, Visual Paradigm and erwin Data Modeler by Quest, whereas Lucidspark is most compared with Figma, Miro, MURAL and Jamboard. See our Lucidchart vs. Lucidspark report.
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Hi @Krista Thompson - Yes, LucidSpark is a much more nimble and, in some ways, user-friendly tool than LucidChart. LucidSpark is designed to do a better job managing multiple users participating simultaneously and I've found its ease of use is really helpful when working with clients who likely don't have any previous experience.
I use LucidChart for detailed process maps and flow charts (just me, working alone). I used LucidSpark as a virtual whiteboard for dynamic brainstorming (working collaboratively).
I hope this helps!