Lucidchart vs Lucidspark comparison

Lucidchart and Lucidspark are both solutions in the Visual Collaboration Platforms category. Lucidchart is ranked #3 with an average rating of 10.0, while Lucidspark is ranked #4 with an average rating of 9.0. Lucidchart holds a 7.4% mindshare in VCP, compared to Lucidspark’s 5.8% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Lucidchart users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 97% of Lucidspark users who would recommend it.

Lucidchart

Read 54 Lucidchart reviews

6,882 Views
5,888 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Lucidspark

Read 33 Lucidspark reviews

5,876 Views
5,297 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Lucidchart

Lucidspark

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 21, 2024

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.

Features: Lucidchart excels with a comprehensive library for diverse diagrams (e.g. network diagrams and UML charts) catering to technical layouts. Lucidspark, however, shines in real-time collaboration and user-friendly navigation, making it ideal for team brainstorming and projects with its flexible templates.
Integration: Lucidchart was praised for seamless integrations with external data sources for data visualization. A key differentiator of both solutions is their integration with each other. You can seamlessly import a Lucidspark brainstorm into Lucidchart to turn raw ideas into polished visuals.
Pricing and ROI: Lucidchart and Lucidspark are included in free individual plans with limited features. Paid plans are tiered based on features, users, and storage. Lucidchart emphasizes streamlined project execution, reducing misunderstandings and visualizing complex processes, leading to productivity gains. Lucidspark focuses on dynamic brainstorming, real-time collaboration, and visual organization, accelerating project timelines and enhancing team output.
Room for Improvement: Lucidchart could simplify its learning curve, improve mobile optimization, and expand external integrations. Lucidspark, in contrast, needs more intuitive navigation, diverse templates, and more flexible pricing plans.
Deployment and customer support: Lucidchart and Lucidspark are cloud-based solutions with excellent documentation and tutorials, making setup easy for most users. Both received positive reviews for customer support. Users praise their responsiveness and helpfulness.

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.

To learn more, read our detailed Lucidchart vs. Lucidspark Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Lucidchart vs. Lucidspark

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Lucidchart

Ranking in Visual Collaboration Platforms

3rd

Average Rating

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Mind Mapping Software (2nd)

Lucidspark

Ranking in Visual Collaboration Platforms

4th

Average Rating

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Visual Collaboration Platforms category, the mindshare of Lucidchart is 7.4%, down from 15.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Lucidspark is 5.8%, down from 14.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Visual Collaboration Platforms

Featured Reviews

MichaelChirinian

Data Engineer at Mindmap

Mar 2, 2022

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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Doug Strickland

Senior UX Designer at Concentric Sky

Jul 8, 2021

Facilitates a lot of the productivity of our working and brainstorming sessions

Some of the text layout and text formatting of these shapes is useful. Drawing slow diagrams is pretty useful. The user interface and intuitiveness are pretty good. Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. A little bit more automation, some grid snapping, and some layout options would make it a perfect ten. I like to use the templates. The virtual whiteboard for brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts is great. It's ideal for things like moving around sticky notes and having an infinite whiteboard. I like that you can double click on the whiteboard, on the canvas and it just creates a sticky note. That's very convenient. Formatting of stickies is also intuitive and easy. That's what stands out. I see Collaborator Colors on our team. You can add a color to each collaboration in the document. That's a very cool feature. Compared to in-person sessions, remote or virtual brainstorming sessions are good. It has its trade-offs. I think that sometimes it's easier to motivate and direct a group in person because you really don't know what people are doing sitting in their office at home. I still find it effective to do it virtually, you just have to be a little bit more attentive. This collaboration feature would be a good way to see who is doing what. Previously, I would have to click on a person's name and follow them around the board. I integrate Lucidspark with Atlassian, JIRA, and G Suite. These integrations are pretty important because I find adding the step of stashing these things in a shared drive is burdensome. It saves a lot of steps that are often overlooked. It puts those documents in the cloud where others can collaborate on them. I find it's an appropriate place to put them. I haven't yet used the features to tag and automatically group ideas but I know it exists. I'm not at that stage of research. It enables us to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps, and less time organizing them. A lot of that analysis is done by the team in real-time. Having the ability to automate the organization would be something to look at but I don't know that it's so critical at this stage. It's built into our process. Lucidspark facilitates a lot of the productivity of our working and brainstorming sessions. It supports shared thinking. Brainstorming is very difficult to do virtually relying on one's imagination alone. Having Lucidspark allows us to hear the thinking of a blurb and we can put elements like branding elements and colors and build a mood board to help ideate. We can have key phrases on cards that are easier to duplicate so there's not so much creation. We use the integration with Slack in Lucidchart not with Spark.

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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 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."

"Lucidchart's ability to create a visualization that people prefer to look at, over reading written documents, has definitely saved me a lot of time. Moreover, it has helped to make my code bug-free because I no longer have broken endpoints."

"Lucidchart helped us to realize efficiencies in the projects we use it for. I can show people pictures, and I can change things in a meeting and then email it by the end of the meeting. Because most places we go, especially now with everybody in-home office, I'm going to have great internet access, and that just makes it easier to be able to change things quickly while we're in a meeting and go, "Oh, you changed this. Oh, okay.", and then send it to them as a proof and send it as a PDF or send them a link. That works great. That saves time and accelerates a sale."

"I like the panel on the left of the screen that has all of the shapes that are available to use in the charts. It's easy to use because you can just drag and drop."

"The collaboration, hands-down, is the top feature. It is valuable because our company doesn't believe in working in silos... While I may be the one leading the efforts, it's very important that my team gets buy-in on decisions being made when we're designing. It's critical, especially in this virtual environment, when we're not in an office to have a team meeting and able to whiteboard something. Lucidchart is an extremely useful tool for our team."

"The wireframe and mock-up features have been the most useful so far. It's easy to create the mock-ups and then communicate to our development team what they need to look like. Lucidchart's capabilities for visualizing and understanding process flows or workflows is very good as well. I'm able to easily use any style of box that I need to create on a flowchart, to effectively communicate to our development team."

"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 flow chart is most valuable. It is a very user-friendly and simple-to-use product. Quite quickly, I was able to understand how to use it and just get on with my process flow."

More Lucidchart pros

"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."

"My workshops have seen a much higher engagement. In the past, maybe ten or twenty percent of my clients would normally participate. With Lucidspark being involved, I see almost 90% engagement of everyone in the room, because they're required to add something."

"The most valuable feature is the live, interactive whiteboarding. For brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts it's like Visio but much better, because it's online. Collaboration for process is much easier."

"The online collaboration with the teammates and being able to represent things in a visually attractive way are the most valuable features. It has been a really nice experience to make such beautiful and visually attractive flowcharts by using Lucidspark. The best thing was that I could collaborate online with my teammates. Overall, it was a nice experience."

"The fact that you can have multiple users working at the same time is a really big plus. The fact that we can all collaborate in real-time is a very useful aspect."

"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 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."

"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."

More Lucidspark pros

Cons

"This might already be a feature, but I remember sometimes when we're just all viewing, if you accidentally click, then there's an arrow that pops up, and you have to go back and delete it. A lot of times there are accidental arrows being drawn when really we're just trying to present to each other."

"I would like to have more text boxes to write more comments so I can write a small note below a picture. I would like some flexibility."

"There is a basic function that I struggle with, in the interface, which is having to switch between the editing and navigation modes. A lot of clicks are required when switching between edit and navigation modes and I think that many could potentially be avoided by handling the tasks at the same time."

"It would be really helpful if we could create a process flow based on a Word Document or a PPT file."

"When you log in the first time, they ask you a lot of questions, such as what are you going to use it for. Half of the things weren't applicable to me. I couldn't see the skip button, so I picked random things because none of the given options was applicable to me. It is a tech startup, and I am in a consultant role. I use it for a variety of things, but the questions were tailored for HR professionals who are creating org structures or IT professionals who are doing data flow diagrams. What if I do both of them depending on the project I'm working on? I just felt that I am wasting time with those questions and just wanted them to stop asking me these questions and get into charting."

"I'm not sure if this feature is already there, but it would be good if we can import a cloud database in the web version."

"Although it comes with a lot of pre-existing tools, it would help if it had some more design templates. By now, they must know what kinds of things people are trying out, and that should help them create more templates. I would also like to see a little more automation."

"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."

More Lucidchart cons

"The tracing is inaccurate and we have to do the drawing ourselves."

"I would like for the whiteboard to have the ability to be expanded. It doesn't have the ability to be a continuous page so that you don't have to erase things."

"One thing I wish it had is, if I draw a square or a rectangle freehand, that it would actually just draw a nice rectangle; or similarly with a circle. Some sort of automatic shape recognition and formatting would be helpful."

"There's a little bit of latency with the collaboration bit. Overall it's not quite as fast as Google docs, however, it's really close."

"The challenge that I always face with a tool like this is how to convince other people to start trying it out. I can't say if Lucidspark does a better job than other such tools."

"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."

"There is room for improvement with the user interface. It almost feels "uncooked." It sometimes feels like a prototype rather than the real thing."

"One of the things that I struggled with a little bit was navigating around the board. Because it's so big that when you want to find certain sections, it can be a little bit challenging to move the little box in the corner around to find where you are. If there could be more options to move around the board, that might make it easier. It can have a joystick version or something like that so that you could just manually move around, or there should be an option for a picture in the corner on which you click around to locate different items on the board."

More Lucidspark cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"At €167 per user per year, the pricing is slightly higher than Visio, but it's worth it."

"I had a quick glimpse of it. It was about 100 Canadian Dollars a year for just me. I don't know if there are any additional costs."

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

"I have only used the trial version and have not yet paid for it, or explored the pricing options."

"Pricing-wise, it is pretty fair. I don't really know what group pricing looks like, but right now, I pay $10 a month for my Lucid subscription. One thing I would say is that I do worry about my bosses being okay with paying $10 a month for every single employee because we would have around 20 people. It makes me a little nervous about whether they are going to pay $200 a month for people to be able to use this software. At the same time, from where I'm sitting, it's totally worth it. We save a thousand dollars from using this software. It's still a no-brainer."

"The pricing and licensing are fine. It has a lot of features that I prefer over some of the other programs, which is good. Being that it is web-based, I feel that it is acceptable that it's on a monthly pay basis. However, I think I pay on an annual basis, which is fine with me."

"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."

"The pricing and licensing are fine, though I wish they didn't require you to buy the licenses in batches of five."

More Lucidchart pricing and cost advice

"I know that to get 10 seats for Spark is $2000 a year, which struck me as a little high."

"It's a very reasonable $8 a month. That makes it really accessible and helps it fill a pretty significant need for virtual collaboration. Just about every leadership team member that I've talked to said, 'Oh, well, that's cheap, just go buy it.'"

"I was using the web version. I don't know what I signed up for, but I don't think I paid anything. It was just free."

"It would be better if I didn't use Lucidspark at all and just used Illustrator and Photoshop, but it doesn't make sense for my projects to do that. It would remove a tremendous amount of steps, but it would cost a tremendous amount of money."

"I personally had a hard time getting the licenses sorted out. In the organizational license, the whole process took a lot of time. Personally, I feel that the licensing could be done much better on that front."

"The pricing is very reasonable. It is more expensive than some of the free options out there but much cheaper than Visio, and it works much better."

"I don't think that the cost is ever something that I considered. It has always been worth it to pay a small payment and help everyone with their tasks. It has definitely helped me become more organized. I don't think that the cost has been a barrier at all, and it is worth it to be able to pay for it."

"It is not cost-prohibitive. It is well worth it, but we are also a small team. We are definitely planning on having it as part of our onboarding for everyone, but I haven't looked at the pricing for an enterprise level or large set of employees."

More Lucidspark pricing and cost advice

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Answers from the Community

Krista Thompson

Principal | Executive Coach at CrossCut

Jul 8, 2021

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 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...

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Evgeny Belenky

Director of Community at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)

Jul 7, 2021

Hi @Emilia Maria D'Anzica , @Kevin Heires , @Sankalp Nigam, @Kevin Replinger, @Scott Rogers, @Mayank Thakur and @MichaelSmith2. Would you mind sharing your professional experience with these tools? Tnx

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Kevin Replinger

Client Success Manager at ThankView

Jul 8, 2021

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

12%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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...

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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...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Lucidchart

November 2024

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Buyer's Guide

Lucidspark

November 2024

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Lucid Software

Overview

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.

Lucidspark is a virtual whiteboard where teams can bring their best ideas to light. Collaborate in real time, no matter where you are. Lucidspark helps people organize notes and scribbles and turn them into presentation-ready concepts. When it’s time for next steps, teams can develop workflows and process documents to turn ideas into reality. Features include: integrations, infinite canvas, sticky notes, freehand drawing, chat, templates, timer, voting, and more.

With Lucidspark, you can not only brainstorm ideas as a team but then refine and organize those ideas to drive action. Features like assisted grouping and Lucidchart import/export help users turn ideas into plans and strategies.

Lucidspark is part of the Lucid suite, the only visual collaboration suite that helps teams see and build the future from idea to reality. Users can start ideating in Lucidspark and then seamlessly move to Lucidchart and Lucidchart Cloud Insights to complete the full project lifecycle and make their ideas a reality.

Sample Customers

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

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Lucidchart vs. Lucidspark

October 2024

Free Report: Lucidchart vs. Lucidspark

Find out what your peers are saying about Lucidchart vs. Lucidspark and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.

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