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 9.0% mindshare in VCP, compared to Lucidspark’s 6.9% 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

6,172 Views
5,314 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Lucidspark

Read 33 Lucidspark reviews

5,280 Views
4,754 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

Reviews Sentiment

8.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Mind Mapping Software (2nd)

Lucidspark

Ranking in Visual Collaboration Platforms

4th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Visual Collaboration Platforms category, the mindshare of Lucidchart is 9.0%, down from 14.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Lucidspark is 6.9%, down from 13.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Visual Collaboration Platforms

Featured Reviews

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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Doug Strickland

Senior UX Designer at Concentric Sky

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 ease of creating some of the maps and diagrams is most valuable. Lucidchart is just simpler and works more intuitively than other solutions that I have used in the past, such as Microsoft Visio. I am not in a creative role, but I know how to use Adobe Illustrator and other solutions like that. If I need to map out something that I've never mapped out before, and it is going to need a totally custom graphic, eight times out of 10, I'm going to go to Lucidchart rather than trying to build it in Illustrator. Its intuition and flexibility are really big features for me."

"When it comes to documenting things like processes, systems, and new teams, I'd give it an eight or nine out of ten. It's very high because it's fairly intuitive, there's a low learning curve, and it's easy to get immediate output. You can get results very quickly without a lot of direct effort. You don't usually take a week-long series of training. You don't need to go through a lot of hoops to make it work."

"One of the features that I really like is the collaboration aspect of it. During the pandemic, it's very important that we're able to collaborate virtually."

"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."

"In general, this product has improved our organization because it makes accessing up-to-date processes and planning a lot easier."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Lucidchart pros

"I like the fact that Lucidspark has got all these templates that we can use."

"The most valuable feature is the different ways that you can build out the charting and the mind maps. There are various different templates that are included in the program."

"It helps with our brainstorming sessions when we are working from home. It is like having a whiteboard in the office."

"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 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."

"The user interface is easy to use. There were other things that I was expected to make work like other people had done and they were expected to make things like I had done. Even though we had a template, there were times when we couldn't access each other's template and it was very easy to just go ahead and make it just like they had it. It's very intuitive. It's very easy to figure out where things are and how to use things."

"The solution’s virtual whiteboard for brainstorming is great. It feels like I have an endless board where I can zoom out and draw everybody to what I'm looking at. It's invaluable, especially right now when most people work remotely."

"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."

More Lucidspark pros

Cons

"I wish there were a lot more automations. For instance, if I'm using a project management software to list out all my WBS [work breakdown structure] I wish Lucidchart had the functionality where it would take all the numbering and generate a tree diagram. Something like that would help so much, but right now it's still a manual task..."

"There were some things I wish were a little bit more user-friendly. For instance, when you're putting all the stuff onto a document or PDF, there's a set limit of width and height. It would have been very nice in certain situations to be able to drag people on the far edges and move them back up so that everything fits nicely onto the page."

"Perhaps it already exists, but if there were software to install the solution on a Mac, that would be helpful. I see that it's not in the App Store, so that's something that could be improved."

"As far as I know, LucidChart can’t be automated with Visual Basic .Net like Visio."

"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."

"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."

"In terms of improvement, there can be more templates. There are good templates but there could still be more."

"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."

More Lucidchart cons

"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."

"I hope that one of the updates will be a zoom-in/zoom-out function that's a little different than what they currently have, just to make it flow better when you're trying to move in and out of the board. I know they're working on it and that would be great, once they get that together."

"One challenge we ran into while collaborating on Lucidspark was tracking time. We would, for example, set aside 90 minutes for a particular task but end up spending a lot more time on it. It would be great to see if Lucidspark could also help us keep track of time. That feedback would be beneficial."

"Sometimes, editing text can be confusing. Changing different fonts and subtitles and the shapes that you're trying to use can be confusing. There isn't that much that I would improve other than just nitpicky user differences."

"They have a grid system for snapping too, and they've done a lot to try to line things up so that the lines don't squiggle when you draw a line between one item and another. Everything has to be lined up. Everything has to be 90 degrees exact. But a lot of other people on the team just throw something together really quickly and the lines are not straight. And so it would be nice to have some feature that eliminates that problem."

"It would be really helpful if more features and templates would be added to the product."

"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 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."

More Lucidspark cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"I'm happy with the pricing of Lucidchart but I can't say I'm completely happy with it. It could be cheaper for what it offers, about $5 cheaper, or Lucid could charge $5 more and add more features, like automation. Right now, it's $15 per user per month... On the other hand, they have made their billing super-easy for users, such as for people who have to do expense reports. It is probably the easiest platform I'm using when it comes to billing for software as a service."

"The pricing is very reasonable, and they have a free trial available that you can play with."

"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."

"I was using the free version of Lucidchart, which was very helpful."

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

"The price and licensing are good."

More Lucidchart pricing and cost advice

"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."

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

"One must pay extra if he wishes to have a higher level product."

"There is room for improvement in terms of the cost. It should all be bundled together. It's becoming like a Microsoft, where you have to buy all the different version features separately. It should just all be bundled with one price."

"The pricing is in line with everything else out there, and you get what you pay for."

"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 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."

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

December 2024

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Buyer's Guide

Lucidspark

December 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

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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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