IBM Blueworks Live vs Lucidchart comparison

The compared IBM and Lucid Software solutions aren't in the same category. IBM is ranked #12 in BPD , with an average rating of 7.6, and holds a 3.5% mindshare in the category. Lucid Software is ranked #2 in MMS , with an average rating of 10.0, and holds a 24.2% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Lucid Software users who would recommend it.

IBM Blueworks Live

Read 20 IBM Blueworks Live reviews

2,468 Views
1,583 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Lucidchart

Read 54 Lucidchart reviews

858 Views
718 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

IBM Blueworks Live

Lucidchart

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Blueworks Live and Lucidchart based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Camunda, Microsoft, Software AG and others in Business Process Design.

To learn more, read our detailed Business Process Design Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Business Process Design

March 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

IBM Blueworks Live

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Process Design (12th)

Lucidchart

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

8.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Mind Mapping Software (2nd), Visual Collaboration Platforms (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

IBM Blueworks Live and Lucidchart aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. IBM Blueworks Live is designed for Business Process Design and holds a mindshare of 3.5%, up 3.2% compared to last year.
Lucidchart, on the other hand, focuses on Mind Mapping Software, holds 24.2% mindshare, up 18.4% since last year.

Business Process Design

Mind Mapping Software

Featured Reviews

AjarMathur

Global Innovation Director at Ernst & Young

An easily scalable and affordable solution that enables users to document and digitize processes with ease

IBM Blueworks is BPMN 2.0 compliant, but it does not adapt to the overarching BPMN 2.0 concepts. There is only one kind of BPMN 2.0 diagram. It is a process diagram. It doesn't have the concept of separate tools, which other products offer. If I had to do a hardcore BPMN 2.0 modeling, the product would have its own reservations. There were features we could not explore from a BPMN 2.0 perspective. Most of the time, people who are shifting from Microsoft Office tools to a digitized way of working still want the reporting capabilities to be strong. Some tools, like ARIS or Signavio, offer customized solutions from the reporting perspective. If I have documented my whole finance process and want to fetch out a complete SOP report in a very customized manner, IBM Blueworks cannot provide it. We have to rely on some other services. So that's one area in which we always struggled, how to really customize the reporting aspects. I understand that we need to keep the tool a little more asset-light. It's very difficult to keep adding many options, but at least a few BPMN 2.0 options were needed. We have been suggesting to IBM that we should have some way of customizing the reporting. At least we should get a custom way of reporting it into different formats like Excel or putting up a logo for one of the clients so that their SAP can be printed that way.

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MichaelChirinian

Data Engineer at Mindmap

Intuitive, integrates well, and is a great way to change text into visual ideas

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. Another thing that somewhat irritated me is the fact that there is a paste function in the menu, but when you right-click and select paste, it tells you that you can't use paste. You must press Command-V or Apple-V to paste. They give you a menu option to paste, but every time you use that, they say, "We don't accept it." On top of that, normally, you'd have an option for paste or paste values, but when you use the paste function, you don't have that capability. So, to copy text from one place, I have to use Command-V to paste it, but if I don't like the format, I've got to go back and do copy style and then paste style on top of that. It is a small detail, but when you're doing diagrams, it is annoying that they don't support paste values. It is a small irk. I'm not penalizing it, and I still think it is a five-star product. In terms of other bigger things, I don't really have any comments or criticism so far.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The business process discovery is excellent. The diagram or blueprinting functionality of the solution are very good. It's quite easy. You can link the sub-processes and get a big overview of the whole process then."

"The stability is pretty good. It is highly available, which is key. You don't lose your work and can autosave."

"It enables decisions based upon processes that we do model, and ultimately move forward with."

"The licenses are transferrable between different users."

"We are you using the product as a process mapping tool and as part of a larger process improvement project. We use it with IBM BPM and IBM ODM. We get an automated workflow solution for our customers, an improved workflow automation."

"It has the ability to document in different formats. It is not tied to a specific model. You can look at it from different angles and see the intuitive nature of it. It always generates a valid diagram. You cannot create something that is not BPMN compliant."

"IBM Blueworks Live is cloud-based and provides easy access to all your processes in one place."

"This solution is good at utilizing standards rules for connectivity."

More IBM Blueworks Live pros

"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."

"The interface is really good and it is very easy to use."

"Lucidchart is a lovely tool for creating visual representations of any process or organization."

"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."

"The ability for Lucidchart to create database schemas or modify existing data structures is strong. That's what I initially introduced it for in our organization. The script that Lucidchart provides works with other systems like Oracle, SQL Server, and Postgres that I can copy-paste, and get a quick dump of metadata and import into has saved me a ton of steps that I didn't have to manually create these tables. I had a lot of things where I still had to put in the linkages between tables, but I didn't have to type in every field name, every data type, and everything else that came in. That saved me tons of time."

"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."

"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."

"Creating flowcharts and documentation is easy to do and the results are very nice."

More Lucidchart pros

Cons

"Sometimes, the tool is automatic, which can complicate it, but once you're accustomed to manipulating it, you can use it very effectively."

"The APIs are great, except the normal business user doesn't know how to create APIs. So it's hard because IBM comes to us as the business users and tell us to create reporting with APIs, except we don't know that, so we have to turn around and flip it to our IT people."

"We'd also like to see it be Six Sigma or Lean compatible, a lot of people have asked about that."

"The font size is really, really small and it's really not useful to print out process models because you cannot read what's written in different boxes. This makes it necessary for people to have access to the tool. We view licenses to see how the printing or output is. It's not very good."

"There should be an option to import from and export to Microsoft Visio. Being able to move files back and forth between Blueworks Live and Visio would be good."

"The solution is a very basic discovery product so it doesn't have that much modeling capability. This can be improved."

"It is BPMN-compliant but the tool needs to be more involved to get into a completely 2.0 oriented tool. It has a few things but it's not the complete BPMN model."

"The user interface is quite easy at first but process analysts soon run into roadblocks of limited functionality, which is disappointing."

More IBM Blueworks Live cons

"I would really like to be able to set default appearance settings for new documents because I have a set of appearance settings that I always use. I end up setting that manually every time. There may be a way to do that, and maybe I am not able to find it. This is my only major point of feedback for improvement. There are other little nitpicky things, such as being able to lock layers without them looking like a big red line around them would be nice, but every graphic design software does that, so I understand why they have that. All my concerns are nitpicks. They're not big."

"One of the issues has been that, as far as I understand, even to view it, the other person needs a Lucidchart account unless you send them a PDF. That's been a bit of an issue because some people in our organization don't have Lucidchart accounts, only certain people have logins. If we just want to collect comments from people, that's been a bit complicated."

"It would be helpful if there were different options available for organizing the folders, such as having a high-level display with pictures."

"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."

"I would like an on-premises version of the software that I can just download and use. I think that it's easier that way."

"Lucidchart subset their older components or something like that had happened. I don't entirely know the totality of it, but we were forced to upgrade to a different integration with Lucid than what we had. I've had a lot of frustrations with that because I've lost a lot of diagrams. I can't get them back and I'm getting pop-ups that are showing me that our data will be loading and I can't run four or five years of my engineering diagrams"

"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 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."

More Lucidchart cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are editor licenses that are around 50 euros per month, and contributor licenses that are around 30 euros per month."

"We are seeing ROI from this solution. The solution has saved us time."

"The solution is not very expensive."

"They have a free subscription model that gives a lot of power to the users."

"Based on the licenses purchased, from a footprint perspective, you can have as many people as you want. You have multiple different categories of licenses to keep the cost low."

"Price wise, IBM Blueworks Live is in the middle range, and I would give it a five out of ten."

"The solution is very, very cost-effective."

"Making it less expensive would be good."

"We signed up for the month-to-month and it charged us all at once for the whole year. I believe we signed up for the $7.99 one. I think that was the price."

"The price was low enough to make me think that it was fine, I'll go for it. I think it's $80 or so. It's not too expensive."

"I was using the paid version, but at $12 USD per month, I canceled the plan because it was a little bit too expensive for me."

"Lucidchart's pricing model is not excessive, as compared to similar products. It is pretty much in line with everyone else."

"Pricing comes in at about $100 for a year's subscription, which is very reasonable if this is a tool that you will use more than once."

"There is a nominal charge for the paid version of the product. They have a free version available and from what I could see, there was not much difference between it and the pro version."

"I pay $95 a year for it. It seems like a reasonable price."

"The licensing is pretty cost-effective but I haven't considered it on an enterprise level."

More Lucidchart pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Business Process Design solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM Blueworks Live?

The solution is easy to operate. Also, there is an automatic mode to make the business flow. You don't have to put any lines or arrows in a decision point in IBM Blueworks Live; it's very automatic.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Blueworks Live?

The solution costs around 600-700 dollars/year, which is quite affordable.

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What needs improvement with IBM Blueworks Live?

Sometimes, the tool is automatic, which can complicate it, but once you're accustomed to manipulating it, you can use it very effectively.

See all answers

LucidChart vs LucidSpark for brainstorming sessions over Zoom

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 ...

See all answers

Do you recommend Lucidchart?

I definitely recommend Lucidchart. I feel it is one of the top visual collaboration platforms that’s available on the market. Out of all the solutions I have tried, it is by far the best for diagra...

See all answers

Can we use a product like Lucidchart for "personal" use?

Absolutely! Lucidchart is a clever tool that is fit for purpose for whatever activity you would like - whether it's your thoughts or processes. There is a well-populated library of well-designed te...

See all answers

Comparisons

Visio vs IBM Blueworks Live

Compared 34% of the time

SAP Signavio Process Manager vs IBM Blueworks Live

Compared 18% of the time

ARIS Cloud vs IBM Blueworks Live

Compared 10% of the time

ARIS BPA vs IBM Blueworks Live

Compared 6% of the time

Camunda vs IBM Blueworks Live

Compared 6% of the time

More IBM Blueworks Live Competitors

Figma vs Lucidchart

Compared 15% of the time

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect vs Lucidchart

Compared 10% of the time

Visio vs Lucidchart

Compared 9% of the time

Visual Paradigm vs Lucidchart

Compared 9% of the time

ARIS BPA vs Lucidchart

Compared 3% of the time

More Lucidchart Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Blueworks Live

March 2025

Download IBM Blueworks Live product report

Buyer's Guide

Lucidchart

March 2025

Download Lucidchart product report

Also Known As

IBM Lombardi Blueprint

No data available

Overview

IBM Blueworks Live is a cloud-based business process modeling tool that helps you discover, map and document your processes. It is easy to use, allowing you to learn and perform business process modeling in minutes.

With Blueworks Live you can:

Simplify business process modeling
Quickly build business processes in a straightforward, cloud-based interface designed for both IT and business users.

Improve process efficiency and accuracy
A central process repository eliminates version control and consistency issues by providing users real-time access to process workflows.

Enhance cross-team collaboration
A shared team workspace engages all business process owners, encouraging cross-team participation and continuous process improvement.

IBM

Our online diagram application makes it easy to sketch and share professional flowchart diagrams. From brainstorming to project management, we support all of your communication needs. That’s why millions of users choose Lucidchart.

Lucid Software

Sample Customers

Cloudsoft Corp. Ltd., Bayer, S¾SS, Essex County Council

Google, Salesforce, Adobe, Whirlpool, Uber, Wal Mart, Pearson, Twitch, Riot Games, Western Union, Trimble, Starbucks

Buyer's Guide

Business Process Design

March 2025

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