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.
"For documenting processes and systems, I would rate the solution a nine out of 10. I'm not aware of any other software that is as usable as this, because of the templates. They make documenting these things really easy."
"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."
"Documenting things such as processes, systems, and new teams has been my primary use case. Lucidchart is really, really valuable for its ability to create a process chart from start to end. The web app makes it easy because everything is similar to other tools like Visio but Lucidchart feels a little bit more intuitive. It has been easy to use the web app. I definitely have learned a lot about how to bring in my own graphics or images in place of some of the shapes and I'm able to create and use the arrows within the processes, so it definitely has been useful for me."
"In general, this product has improved our organization because it makes accessing up-to-date processes and planning a lot easier."
"The swimlanes feature is one that I use a lot. I have used swimlane diagrams to create business process flows and I think that it does the job pretty well."
"The ability to have more than one person editing at the same time is the most valuable feature. You can have one diagram and have multiple users on it at the same time. We haven't been able to do that on other software. So that's the main reason we moved to Lucidchart."
"Lucidchart is a 10 out of 10 when it comes to documenting things such as processes, systems, and new teams. It's just so user-friendly. The fact that even if you've never used Lucidchart, if you take a template and adapt it, you'll inevitably find something to fit your needs, but it's also perfect for building from scratch. It's the ease of use, clarity, and the different functionalities that make it incredibly useful."
"The templates are quite valuable, as is the fact that you can export to PDF, to a Visio document, or as a picture. These are valuable features for me because they give me the ability to make changes in any other product that I'm using. I'm not bound by one platform."
"I like the templates that it comes with. I also like how easy it is to change colors and icons and just flip back and forth. It is really easy to maneuver and use."
"Lucidspark has done an incredibly good job of providing a very robust library of templates. I'd like to see more of those. But right now there are many more useful templates than anything I've seen with any other similar apps. Hats off to Lucid for that."
"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 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."
"It definitely helps when prioritizing things. For a business problem, you can create many different documents and easily compare them, then you can decide which one that you want to go forward with."
"The ease of using Lucidspark is definitely my favorite. It has been very intuitive, and it is easy for me to drag and drop my ideas to be able to be viewed by my colleagues. It is easily accessible for everyone with whom I'm working."
"I have really enjoyed Lucidspark's virtual whiteboard. It is a big step up from some of the other tools that I have used... I appreciate the robustness of Lucidspark quite a bit. It adds a lot more functionality when it comes to multiple participants, and I really appreciate that it is an expanding canvas. The limited size and shape of something like a Jamboard is not conducive to new ideas expanding, going further."
"The virtual whiteboard is useful for brainstorming and quickly drawing and getting your thoughts out without having to do a formal, formatted drawing. For example, if I am doing a Zoom call, I can just share my screen and I can draw freehand, and change colors."
"They could provide more documentation or tutorials of ERDs or DDD on the Lucidchart site. That could be better."
"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."
"If it could be a little more visual, in terms of being able to make it stand out a little bit more, then that would be helpful."
"They should make it more user-friendly. The only option is either to use the existing template with already existing colors and gradients. If you want to do custom colors and gradients, then it's too complicated to use and should be simplified."
"The UML diagram that it gave me initially was a huge flow with a bunch of UML tables, and I wasn't going to need that many. If it was a more simple linkage between the tables then it would be easier to finish projects, instead of having to select unnecessary tables and delete them."
"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."
"It can have more colors or graphics. Currently, it is a little boring. It can have a little bit more fun factor."
"There is a premium for the use of certain elements in Lucidchart... It becomes very annoying, especially if you are a first-time user of Lucidchart and you don't have a premium plan. It feels a little too restrictive, in terms of using very basic shapes and icons. It asks you to sign-up for the premium account, which I think shouldn't be the case."
"There is room for improvement with the user interface. It almost feels "uncooked." It sometimes feels like a prototype rather than the real thing."
"I would like to have a dark mode, but the option is not available."
"The one other significant recommendation is because I do work with folks outside of my organization quite regularly. The user experience of having them all have to set up a free account to join me in a workspace is a bit cumbersome. I really would love it if there was a Visitor link that would allow contributors who don't have free logins to join and participate."
"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 is an emphasis on Google as a set of cloud apps and cloud storage but I don't use Google so that doesn't really help. We're a Microsoft shop so we've got a lot of OneDrive. We have been using Box, which I don't like and which we're moving away from, but my legacy storage asset was Dropbox. Some flexibility there would be worthwhile."
"Using my iPad, it seems clunky and isn't as responsive as my PC."
"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."
"In terms of improvement, having layout guides would be nice."
Earn 20 points
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.
See our list of best Visual Collaboration Platforms vendors.
We monitor all Visual Collaboration Platforms reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
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!