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 10.3% mindshare in VCP, compared to Lucidspark’s 8.0% 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

5,398 Views
4,712 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Lucidspark

Read 33 Lucidspark reviews

4,635 Views
4,167 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Lucidchart

Lucidspark

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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: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Lucidchart vs. Lucidspark

December 2024

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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

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 January 2025, in the Visual Collaboration Platforms category, the mindshare of Lucidchart is 10.3%, down from 13.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Lucidspark is 8.0%, down from 12.6% 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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Maryam S Waris

Customer Success Manager at Braze

Encourages collaboration with our clients, and reactions help to prioritize ideas, but automation to make things more consistent would be helpful

This is a feature-rich product and I would like to see more opportunities for teaching new users how to learn and use the breadth of the platform. Ideally, it would be nice if there were a set of guidelines to explain what it is capable of. I know that there are videos online, and I've watched a few. But, I know that when I first started, just playing around, there were things I didn't discover that I could do until much later. This is why I get surprised by certain integrations I learn that they have. It would have been great to know right from the start, with a guided tutorial on how to use the various options. As it is now, we have invested internally in the educational resources needed to learn how to use it. A tool that can be very self-serving in that way, and enable its users to use it to the breadth of what it is capable of doing, is always a great thing. 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. This is important because, at the end of what you create, it can have a very positive impact on what is ultimately shared with the client.

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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

"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 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."

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

"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."

"Using Lucidchart for documenting processes is great. The elements are ready to use and it is quick to do."

"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."

"We are using Lucidchart a lot for documenting things, such as processes, systems, new teams, etc. Its ability to document processes is great. Some of the major pluses are the sheer number of templates and the flexibility in the types of things that you can document. This is a benefit because we are able to structure it in whatever format we want. So, we can take a template that maybe was designed for something different and not have to create it from scratch. We just modify it for our purposes."

"The usability is very nice in terms of flowchart components that are available."

More Lucidchart pros

"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."

"The virtual whiteboard board is amazing. That is something that we've all needed, and I wish I knew about this back when I was focusing on my master's in university. That would have made things so easy. I struggled with MindManager and all these other free programs that you can use to make your mind maps and share your process with your supervisors and your classmates. Lucidspark would have been a lot easier to use and would've been a really good thing to have back then."

"How easy it is to use is the best feature."

"The solution enables me to prioritize ideas."

"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."

"It positively affected the productivity of our working and brainstorming sessions. It was definitely a saver for us because we wanted the agenda to be addressed as soon as possible. We were able to do that, and this solution was pretty useful for us."

"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."

More Lucidspark pros

Cons

"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"

"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..."

"One downside is that you can only modify things online, but when you download work, you download it as an image. It would be useful to have an option to modify it locally."

"It might already exist and I haven't used it, but in terms of improvement, I would like a hot-key system for some of the diagrams to auto-generate things a bit quicker to be able to produce charts a lot faster, or have more standard templates that you can just go to if you're trying to generate something quickly."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Lucidchart cons

"Some parts where the arrows flow tend to flow in a strange direction where you want to drag it to, and it requires a lot of adjusting here and there. It's just the flow of the arrow sometimes it gets a little tricky, and then when you move something else, it gets wonky, and then you have to go back and fix it up. That's the only thing that needs improvement."

"It has not affected the productivity of our working and brainstorming sessions too much."

"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."

"One thing that I actually found difficult to do was to introduce video calls. Managing calls and the whiteboards and being all remote is difficult."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The only thing that is a little cumbersome for me is trying to use a mouse as a stylist somehow. I would like it if there was a different way to do that."

More Lucidspark cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its pricing is very affordable and reasonable for the features that it provides. I am using its basic plan, and for my usage, it is perfectly reasonable. It suits perfectly."

"We chose Lucid based on the price comparison between it and draw.io... Lucidchart was about 15 percent cheaper per user... I was surprised to learn that it came with a separate subscription model and was not included in my existing Lucidchart subscription."

"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."

"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."

"The price and licensing are good."

"The price of this product is a little bit high. It is probably 20% higher than what I expected to pay for such a solution."

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

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

More Lucidchart pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"The licensing is a fair price. We mainly have single users. We chose not to do the team user because of the cost. We didn't see a need for that at this point. We have talked to Lucidchart and Lucidspark salesmen often about that."

"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."

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...

See 2 answers

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

Read full answer

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

11%

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...

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

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Compared 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Lucidchart

January 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Lucidspark

January 2025

Download Lucidspark product report

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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

December 2024

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