Lucidspark Reviews

I started exploring Lucidspark due to the fact that I needed some tools to help during meetings, especially during our brainstorming meetings with our own product teams. That's why I started exploring Lucidspark.

I have not yet used Lucidspark's Virtual Whiteboard for brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts yet. The way I've used Lucidspark is that  I start drawing on my canvas and I screen share what I'm doing. I have not used the Virtual Whiteboards.

I have been trying to use the mind maps and the persona templates. I like the fact that Lucidspark has all these templates that we can use. However, I have not explored it as much as I'd like to. As I continue to use Lucidspark, I am exploring those templates and I'd like to keep going. So far, the variety of templates has been good.

I find that the solution helps me illustrate certain points. Sometimes when we are in a meeting and people are coming up with ideas, it helps to see them visually. For example, we were having a discussion on how our product would work and what really helped was when I put together a timeline view of the user's journey with our product. That immediately gave us perspective and we were able to pivot our meeting around that timeline discussion. Creating that was helpful, however, I probably could have created it quicker on PowerPoint than on Lucidspark.

It's not intuitive. There's the learning curve. That is my barrier to using a tool like this. I come from a background where I have used mind maps extensively, however, even to replicate the usage of a mind map in Lucidspark, I have found it to be quite cumbersome. That's why I believe there is a bit of a learning curve. I'm still trying to figure out which template I should use, whether it was the right one, and things like that.

While I am still exploring, the next thing I would look for is how I could integrate a Lucidspark diagram with Atlassian Confluence. I might also look at integrating Lucidspark with Microsoft Teams. I don't know if it does it already. I haven't looked yet, however, I would want to try those features out, if I continue using it.

I've only used the solution for a few weeks. It's been three weeks so far. 

The solution may extend. 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.

I did not interact with technical support. 

The product is browser-based. In a few clicks, I was able to get going. I was able to see what the product does.

It takes mere minutes to set up. It's not more than that.

I haven't used the solution to collaborate on brainstorming as I'm a little skeptical about the pricing, and I want to make sure that it's a useful software before I start to invest in theme-specific features and get other people also to use it. I am not a hundred percent comfortable with the software myself, however, that might change a few months down the line.

For myself, I don't know if it is worth the price, as I don't know how much I would use it, whatever the pricing might be. What I'm keen to do is keep exploring with the free version. I use it as an individual and then I screen share when I'm working with the team. I can keep doing that with my free plan, even with the number of limitations that I have. I will probably just figure out the pricing at a much later date.

I have tried Lucidchart once upon a time, however, I'm not actively trying that anymore.

The reason I tried Lucidchart was that I was on a Lucidchart page and then I was prompted to try it out. I don't know how I got in, however, I was curious. Also, someone had recommended to me the product, which was quite similar to Lucidspark, a competitor of Lucidspark called Miro. I had been exploring that for a while, and when I got this invitation to try out Lucidspark, I was more than curious to see how they compared.

The main difference I have encountered is usability. There's a way of doing things. For instance, in Lucidspark you have to get into a pan and zoom mode versus an edit mode. You have to specifically toggle between the two. In Miro, it approaches that a little differently. It does more drag and drop, and it creates a minimap for you to navigate your canvas. That's the main usability difference. Both have a lot of templates, which are good to explore. If you can structure your templates correctly, then it can lead to a very productive brainstorming session for the whole team.

We are using a web-based application.

It's good to plan ahead when using Lucidspark. Let's say that you've got a three-hour brainstorming session and you're trying to do a product discovery workshop. You need to have your templates set up beforehand to say that this is what we're going to use. For instance, if you're going to have a persona discussion, you can't hope that Lucidspark has got good persona templates. It's better that you explore everything before the meeting and make sure that you have the right template, which you want to fill up with your team.

I'd advise those considering the solution to go ahead and create something. It's only when you start filling up your canvas with ideas that it actually appears valuable. The blank canvas can be daunting, yet, once you start filling it up with stuff that's relevant to you, it can spark conversations.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

I've been mainly using it to make flow charts and kind of brainstorm ideas for my business. I have not used it for anything else yet. I'm going to expand later into more collaborative forms of using Lucidspark.

I've installed it on my computer.

Something that has helped me a lot is definitely organization and having a visual map of where I've decided to go with everything. It has helped me become more engaged with my colleagues and with my ideas. It is easier to bring something to fruition once I've had everything laid out in front of me. There is such a high level of engagement with the data that we've been using. It is easier to get everything done in a smooth manner during Zoom calls or even in-person sessions.

Its virtual whiteboard is very functional for brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts, and you can use it for this. It creates an easily accessible area where I can just put my ideas. I don't have to worry about having one person to do the job of writing everything down. It saves a lot of time when working collaboratively. I'm not sure how much time I'm saving exactly, but it has definitely been saving a lot of filler time. Probably, it has saved six hours just on working through. You don't have to assign people certain tasks. Everyone can work on the same thing at the same time.

Its Collaborator Colors feature helps in keeping a track of who's doing what and how different ideas are meshing together. It isn't the most important feature of Lucidspark for us. I am in a small business, and I don't necessarily need to scroll on some sort of infinite whiteboard to see everything, but it is very important from the visual aspect of knowing how everything has been organized. You can see a visual thought process on the screen.

One of my favorite things about Lucidspark is that it is very easy to use. It is very intuitive for all users. There is not much time lost in setting up or doing anything else, which makes it different from in-person sessions. In in-person sessions, you have to set up everything on a real whiteboard and spend time erasing it, whereas, in Lucidspark, you can just click, drag, and delete all of your ideas.

It is helpful for prioritizing ideas. I've been using Lucidspark to brainstorm ideas. Anything that I've used on Lucidspark is going to be one of my more prominent ideas. It makes it easy to bring them to fruition. It turns the ideas into more accessible thoughts that can be added and edited by me and my work colleagues.

It helps you see the way everyone is thinking and the way everyone is coming up with these ideas because it is so visual. Everything is in front of you, and you don't have to worry about the organization as much because it is helping you intuitively do that.

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.

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.

I have been using this solution for about three or four months.

It is very stable, and I have never run into any issues where I have to talk to a customer service team. It has been very reliable for me and everyone I've been working with. I wouldn't say that I've had any trouble with it.

I haven't necessarily been in a place where I've needed to use the scalability aspect of Lucidspark, but in the future, I can see that being something that I would look into. Knowing how Lucidspark has been easy to use for me, I'm sure it would be easy for me to scale in the future.

Currently, I'm the main user of Lucidspark, and then I have people who come on to my charts and help me with them. There are probably around 10 or 15 people on it at one time, but I'm the main editor.

It has become my main form of brainstorming and creating ideas before I bring them out into my company. It is just a way to visually see everything before it becomes palatable within the company. In the future, I would end up using it more collaboratively with my colleagues, but for now, it is the personal and visual way of thinking about things.

I have never interacted with their technical support.

I used Jamboard in the past. I switched because Lucidspark was easier in my experience. It was easier for it to become a part of upfront work instead of making it difficult for everyone to be on one document at the same time. Lucidspark doesn't necessarily have the same glitches that the Google Suite apps have. It has this seamless, user-friendly format that does not get in the way of the actual creative process, whereas Jamboard kind of got in the way. It was more focused on setting it up than actually creating the idea.

It is very straightforward. Learning how to set it up is very easy, and it doesn't take away from the process at all. It is easy to navigate, and it has images. Combined with this kind of modern setup, it is very easy for anyone to use. It took about half an hour.

Definitely, just the time saved has been a huge game-changer with everything that I've been doing. There is no time that I have to spend getting everyone into one document or into one file to try and create an idea. It is always there, and everyone is on the same thing contributing at the same time. As an administrator, it is easier to be straightforward and have everything planned out in one space rather than flipping back and forth between different files.

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.

I didn't evaluate other solutions. I just kind of went with it.

It is completely worth it, especially during the time where half of the workers are online. It makes things much more seamless, and it gives us a more collaborative and engaging aspect of working where you feel like everyone is together, especially on the same file. Not overthinking the whole online aspect of Lucidspark would be my advice.

I have not yet used its integration with other products. I have also not used any other product from their suite. I have only used Lucidspark so far.

I would rate Lucidspark a 10 out of 10. I haven't had any issues.

I build iPhone applications, websites, and documents.

I use Lucidspark for presentations with wireframing and brainstorming. When I am creating a new application for our smartphones, I like to create each one of my windows and then figure out the best way to organize them, i.e., the best sequencing. A lot of times, by putting them in a kind of giant mine node like this, I am able to figure out what I am missing and what goes from page one to page two. It is easy for me to figure out what I need. 

I use both Lucidchart and Lucidspark. I was hoping that having both of them would be a combination because there are parts of each that I like. For example, I like Lucidchart, but I like the way that Lucidspark has a larger piece of real estate, i.e., it goes on forever.

Lucidspark enables me to prioritize ideas. That is why I like it. I like the fact that Lucidspark allows me to move forward with my projects in a way that I couldn't do without it. It is a fantastic tool for me. I use this solution every single day. Though, I don't use it the way that a lot of other users use it. 

The whole reason why I use Lucidspark and Lucidchart is because of the way that I collaborate with other people, e.g., if I send somebody a document that it is more difficult to use because I have to convert everything to a PDF. With Lucidspark, I can give them a link. They can open it up, then they can move things around. That is very helpful. That is one of the reasons why I like using it. It's kind of like Basecamp with art.

The containers are really great. I think they are wonderful. I like the containers because they are really the shape of a screen. That makes me happy. Originally, when I was working with the program to build screens, I was drawing my own screen, then copying and pasting it. The containers are fantastic just for that. 

Even though Lucidspark is the only one that I have found that allows me to do what I want to do, the program doesn't have enough to actually make it easy for me. For example, I will create a screen in whatever program, e.g., Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, or a text program, where there is a lot of text that I have to work with. When I place all these screens on my real estate in the program, it's great for me to help sort things out. However, unless I rebuild each screen in Lucidspark, I can't edit anything. So, I have to move things around, then I need to go back into my other program, make the edit, and then bring the image back. That is frustrating. 

It would be really nice if I could just click on it, then it would open up whatever program it was created in. Much like a link in Word or Excel, where you click on the actual file, then everything gets updated. That feature doesn't work with this program. For example, if I bring in images when building, I have to bring them in as a screen grab, JPEG, or something like that. Then, it is just really a piece of artwork in the program. It is not editable, and that makes it difficult going from my original wireframe to their mind map to the next stage.

One of the reasons why I moved to Lucidspark from Lucidchart was because of space. If I am going to rebuild all my screens so I can actually edit them in Lucidspark or Lucidchart, I have to make them almost full size. If I am going to make them full size, then I need to be able to pan out so I can see everything, which is probably like a 100x100 inch document. Now, I can get my whole document in and it is editable, but it is huge. Then, when I want to print it, it's very hard for me to give it to somebody. When I give it to my client, they can play around with it on a screen, but sometimes they like to print out the pages, tape them on a wall, and look at them. They can't do that unless I take the whole thing, make it into a PDF, and cut it into pieces. 

It would be great if Lucidspark and Lucidchart were one program. I find that a lot of the templates that you use in Lucidspark are great, but there is not enough for me to create useful artwork. I would like it if there was a way for me to add a style so I don't have to go in and select a color every single time, "Select the text, go into the color palette, and find the color." It would be nice if I could just say this is not a headline, but a certain style, and then I could just click it to something. Then, when I change that style, it changes everywhere in the document. These things might be there and I just don't know.

I have three screens that are literally just a vertical-oriented rectangle because it's going to be a screen for an iPhone. On the first screen, for example, I have it named as 00login screen. My second screen is 01login. The next one is 03join, or whatever it is. But, if I move these around in a document, I have to then go in and update all my numbers. It would be nice, when I move things around, if all the numbers changed again. I spend a lot of time just renumbering diagrams within the page. Because I have a page that is 100x100 inches, it is huge. That is not even at full size. That is about a quarter size. So, I spend a lot of time just changing the names and colors of things to make everything seem correct. This is really only to show a client and that is very difficult because this whole exercise that I am doing is really only to get somebody else to understand what I have created for them, then let me know if there is something missing.

It is helpful for brainstorming and finding missing pieces, but the build of it is extremely time-consuming. I spend more time doing a Lucidspark exercise than a Lucidchart exercise. I don't really build a lot of flow charts, so I don't really need all the different shapes and things like that. I just need the ability to move things around.

It is nice for me to be able to put each page in a document or website visually. However, once I start to go up from a wireframe where I have just a page with its name to a higher level version of it, where I have the data on the page and not just the page name, it starts to become less helpful. Now, I have to actually build the page in Lucidspark instead of bringing my page in and just putting an editable page within the program. I would like it if the program was really just a place for me to put all my stuff. If I could just take my Photoshop pages, bring them in, and then move them all around, that would be so easy and I wouldn't have to rebuild anything in the program. I could just use the program as a place where I keep all my stuff. Then, when clicking on a page, if it brought me back to my original document, I could edit it and then it would update it. That would be the perfect document. That would be wonderful. But if I have to recreate everything in Lucidspark, then that is very frustrating.

The Sticky Notes are great, but it would be nice if I could take all my Sticky Notes and have them merged into a document.

I don't really want Sticky Notes as much as I want to be able to just write on the background layer of the program. If I build a bunch of screens, I want to write little notes on them. I do that with just text, which is fine. I bring in little screen captures and drop them on the side, but it would be nicer if there was almost a small, very simple word processor where I could just click on an image, then my word processing document pops up and I see all my text. For example, my image one would relate to text one, then image two would relate to text two. Then, I can print that out instead of having to go in and copy and paste all the texts from my stickies or little notes around the page, copying and pasting them all into a document. What I am doing is making a big text block. I just write in it, but it's not meant for doing that. So, I'm kind of using it for the wrong thing.

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.

It would be nice if I could add something to the container, so I can make my own. For example, if I had a group of shapes that I use on a regular basis. I could place them into templates and drag from that group. So, if I'm making a screen, I can drag a screen right onto my background, then it would be the way I want it. It would have a text box inside of it and a text box on top of it. It would be very useful for me if I didn't have to do every single thing. Right now, I take a container, which is just an image, and drop a text box on top of it. That is just a very time-consuming way of building. I have a text box on top of the name and a text box that I have to build from the bottom, then I have to copy and paste all the information from each of the boxes into a document later on. It would be nice if one of the images in my document was connected to something else.

I would like to be able to use it through the entire project, but then we're creating a project that does more than most of the user's needs. That makes it not probable that this will be the eventual outcome of the design of the program. However, it would be nice if it did more. It would be nice if I could do more complex designs on top of it.

As a basic program, it's fantastic. It's really great. However, I would like to not have to redraw my entire design or app in another program after I build it. So, I end up building the original program in Illustrator or Photoshop, then I make a new version in Lucidspark. That is very time-consuming because every time I make a change in one I have to go back into the other and make a change. There are a lot of different copies of things. Some things get lost, then you need to have people just checking to make sure that everything is the same in bulk. A lot of editing is really unnecessary. 

The arrows are not very neat. Sometimes, I will spend 20 minutes trying to make all the arrows lineup and go in the direction I want. It would be nicer if they had more tools to make that work. I know they do because there are some of the people that work in my group who don't have any of the problems that I do. However, there are other people who can't make an arrow.

I have been using it for only a few months.

The stability and availability are great. I didn't even know there was a desktop version of it. I originally went to get a desktop version of it and ended up using this web version, which has been fine because I'm very happy with it. 

As far as scalability for my clients and me versus the rest of the company and their clients, this solution works great because I can share this with an unlimited number of people and have an unlimited number of people giving me input. So, scalability in that respect is fantastic. 

Scalability in the project is not as favorable because I can't go to the next step in a project with Lucidspark because it doesn't have the ability to do full screens. It's really just more of the beginning of our projects, the organization of the projects, and the wireframing of the projects. Once we figure out where we want to be, then we move to a different program. 

The larger number of people who are part of a project are at the bottom of the funnel, when you're creating it. As you get closer to the finished product, the number of people involved in it decreases. When I'm at the bottom and starting, I could do this whole thing in Adobe Illustrator because my real state is unlimited. I can move things around the same way. I could actually build all of my screens in Photoshop and they would work perfectly. What I can't do is give a copy of Illustrator to every single person that I need to work with because it is cost prohibitive. With this solution, it's very inexpensive and I can have everybody playing around with the design when I get to the next level. I take this and then move it into Photoshop and Illustrator. That's when their program becomes less capable of handling my needs.

They are very responsive. That is really the most important thing to a software user - if you have a problem with the software, the builders of the software's help department are quick to respond. If I have something that I can't figure out, find on the Internet or in their FAQs, then I can send a note to the developers. They are very quick with a response, which is extremely important. This is one of the things that makes it better than OmniGraffle, who still hasn't responded to some of the things that I wrote. The beauty of this smaller company: As long as they keep responding, I will keep being happy.

Overall, this solution has affected the productivity of my working and brainstorming sessions. It did it in a way that everything else didn't do. It is the only program that I have stuck with. I have used four or five different programs. After building something in them, I left and came back to Lucidspark. Lucidspark is the way that I communicate with my clients.

Lucidspark is really awesome because I can do things that I could not do without it. 

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 started with Lucidchart, then I went to OmniFocus and OmniGraffle. I played with a bunch of other ones too. The problem with evaluating software when you are actually in a project is that you can spend more time evaluating software than actually doing your project. I love to evaluate software. I have a lot of fun rebuilding things in different programs, but it is a lot of back-end time.

My problem with the Omni solution is it's bloated. Lucidspark software is good enough. It could do things better, e.g., working in Illustrator versus MakeDraw. Illustrator has so many things that you don't need. I do a lot of work in just the text editor because Microsoft Word is just so bloated. It's great, but bloated. It is slow and takes a lot of time to get things done. Although the features are wonderful, the features that you don't need are just huge. 

With Lucidspark, it's really great for what I do, but it is a couple of features short of where the perfect program would be. However, I am not using it for what it is supposed to be used for. I'm kind of using it for something that is not really what it was created for.

One of the things that is great about Lucidspark is that it's very simple. It's very simple, yet you can do things that are very complex. Whereas, other programs, like OmniGraffle, are very complex to do things that are very simple. This solution is very simple and allows me to do things that are very complex, which is the way it should be. All those programs have so much bloat that is frustrating. When you are trying to be too many things to too many people, you start to have just way too much going on, then something gets lost because you can't constantly work for the world. You have to work for the main set of people using your program.

I haven't found another program that I really like as much as this solution. There are a lot of programs that I use on a regular basis where the company doesn't do anything other than work to the lowest common denominator, not for the people who really use it all the time.

It is a fantastic program. It is just limited.

Lucidspark's interface and intuitiveness are great. It is sometimes frustrating because things aren't where you think they would be, and then you find them. One of the problems I have is that you look in one area for all the things that you need, then when you're going through one of the help documents, you find out that, "Okay, the reason why you couldn't find that was because you were looking in the wrong place." While it is great, it would be nice if everything was in one place and I could move it to where I wanted it so I could make it easier for myself to use. Aside from that, I think it's a great program. 

I have looked at a lot of the videos, and I always find it amazing that I have done things in very complicated ways when I find out that there are people who are doing something similar but they are doing it in a completely different way. I guess this means that you have to read, and most people don't read. They just jump in, then they look for help later.

They are doing a great job. I really like their software and will continue to use it. I would just like some things to work a little bit better. 

Read before you use it. There is a lot of information out there that is very helpful and saves a lot of time. People like to jump into programs and play around with them. When you have a program with a simple interface, and all Lucid's programs are very simple in their interfaces, but they do a lot of complex things. If you don't know what the text tool can do, then it is really just for making words. You won't get all of the wonderful things that are built into a lot of these tools unless you read, and people don't read.

I spoke to some people while I was working on this project right now, and they were like, "You know what? This program is really great because I can type things, but I can't format anything." I said, "What do you mean you can't format anything?" I was like, "What's the point of having a text tool if you can't format your text? Of course, it's there. It's right on top of your text." They are like, "Really, I didn't see that." 

There are a lot of people who work with us that don't have any idea about what any of the tools do. That is very frustrating because people just don't read. I would suggest that users take a course. There is so much on Lucid's website. There are so many things available. They are not always easy to understand, but there is a tremendous amount there. I don't think they need to do anything they are not doing already. I think they're already doing everything, which is great. I think that you really can't train your customers. You have to just give them what they don't know so they know the right questions to ask.

I would rate Lucidspark as an eight out of 10. If I didn't have to rebuild everything, I would give it 10. Because I do, that is hugely annoying. 

Currently, we are using Lucidspark to design and export database structures. We mostly use it just for that, however, we were using other software for doing mind maps, and we're starting to introduce the use of Lucidspark also for this purpose. We were also using another software for designing infrastructure, the architecture of software, and infrastructure in deployments. We have recently started moving into Lucidspark for that as well.

Last week we had to design and deploy a database really fast. It was for a customer of ours. The thing was that it being July in Italy, a lot of our employees were on holiday. We were on a strict term and therefore we had to gather around our war room to design and implement our database structure. Being able to have an export from working all together on the same document at the same time for the structure was really helpful. We could not only have discussions in real-time and have one point of entry. We could also have multiple points of entry and multiple discussions going on at the same time on the same structure. That was one of the pluses.

Being able to represent the whole database in a really easy-to-use and fast-moving application, having the possibility to export that same database into real code, being able to pass that real code in real-time, really flawlessly, with a couple of clicks, really cut down the amount of time that it usually takes from the designing of our database to putting it into our database engine and being able to test it. The product really cut down our times by quite a bit, and that was a huge improvement in our pipeline.

We design the database and then we have to physically write the structure of each and every table. We still have to make some modifications to the code itself for some specifics, however, I would say that the amount of the time that we use to actually write the code for the SQL has been cut down by 80 to 85%. It's a huge improvement. That's why we stepped up our game from the free version to the paid version. The benefits are enormous.

The ease of use is great. It's far more fluent in the process. Using the software itself is actually a breeze. It works flawlessly. It has no hiccups. 

Lucidspark is really fast, even on relatively low-powered computers. It simply needs a good internet connection. It's also really smooth to use. We tried it on big projects and we put a lot of data into our schemas and it still works flawlessly. Zooming in, zooming out, there's no problem. 

Presentations come out really good. 

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 can introduce frameworks inside the application and it exports it in a perfect way. The fact that we can export the database code directly into SQL, for example, is also a really big plus.

The interface and intuitiveness are actually really good. It's really pleasant to use. It feels fresh and new. Our UX department said that it's actually really competitive with what is out there, and probably a step further, meaning that it's actually really good in comparison to other options. It's easy to use, and it's good to look at. It feels natural, as it should. There has been really great work put into the design.

We've tried the virtual whiteboard for brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts, however, not for too much. If I recall, we did two sprints with that. It looked really interesting and it looked like an opportunity to expand into something that we already did, given the fact that we became remote for a lot of our tasks. 

For whiteboards, you can assign each user a certain color for their cursor, sticky note, et cetera (although not for the whiteboard). This is during database planning. We could actually see who was handling which part. That was a really nice part of being able to work all at the same time. We could recognize who was doing what and take into account that we might have different timetables. With this feature, we know who made which change. That was actually useful.

Having an infinite whiteboard has its pros. We all can develop something in our small corner while everybody's working on the same thing, and then we can just copy and paste and stick together whatever we've been working on. You can get visibility on an entire project. This isn't the case with a physical whiteboard, where someone presents infinite space, and someone else's work is on the back of the board, for example. 

During specific scenarios, we can prioritize ideas. Being able to have a whiteboard actually helps us with prioritizing which tasks we can work on. We use an agile methodology, and therefore we can have voting systems on ideas which helps us in our meetings. We can decide which goes into sprint planning first. 

Lucidspark may have features to tag and automatically group ideas to help organize and synthesize ideas after a brainstorming session, however, I don't think we actually have been into that space at this point. It is something that we want to use in connection with our Confluence and Jira activities so that we can actually prioritize, make sprints, decide the sprints inside that, and then have them organized into Confluence as documentation and in Jira as tasks themselves, or actual sprint stories, et cetera. I've seen from the documentation that this is something that is possible, however, we haven't tested it yet.

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. Apart from that, it works pretty well.

Sometimes the whiteboard can be distracting if someone is presenting. For example, if one person is building and wants to have the attention of others, it can become a bit hard to focus the sharing only on that specific part, or following that specific part and not having a call at the same time, which is something that actually works in-person. It's easier to focus in-person on a person just talking in front of a whiteboard and presenting whatever he's working on. 

Right now, we're using the web-based version. If there could be a desktop application or a specific OS application that would render faster times with lower lag, under the benefits of having a desktop application, that would probably be in our best interest. A browser is going to have its limitations in terms of how much computing power it can deliver from that standpoint. Therefore, if we could use our own machine to render our schemas, that would probably be an even faster render and offer a smoother interaction between the schema and the user. That would be something that I would like to use. 

At this point, from what we were using in Lucid so far, I don't actually have any suggestions in terms of extra features. I'm really happy with what I have so far, and we're probably going to have to use it a little bit more in order to dream of something better.

We started using it in our company two or three months ago with the free version, and then we upgraded to the paid version less than a month ago.

Living in Northern Italy, as long as we have a good connection to the internet, the software works flawlessly. We haven't had any downtime. It always responds with the same access speed. Even as our schemas and our whiteboards were growing in size, the access time to the data was always the same. That was actually one of the reasons that we moved from the old software. The old software didn't guarantee this speed and access to our working environment and the data that we worked on, even as the data was growing. This accessibility was a huge plus. It was just like switching between HDD and SSD. Randomizing access time was really useful.

Working together at the same time was also a really big plus. Independent of how many people are working on the platform, we maintain the same level of proficiency. Everyone could actually access the same amount of resources at the same speed at the same time. In that sense, it scales well. Even with a growing number of users, it didn't actually lose any speed. The user experience stayed the same no matter how many people were working on the same schema or whiteboard.

In terms of expanding the capabilities of the platform itself, scaling the platform itself, my perspective is that it works flawlessly. We've been using it for a couple of months, three months now, and we actually haven't had the time to really stress it to a point in which we could see the scalability features stretched. That said, it looks really good so far.

Currently, we have seven people working on the same project at the same time, and we have multiple boards. Probably the highest usage that we've had is four people working on the same board at the same time. We have a wide variety of positions, ranging from data scientists to front and backend developers to UI and UX designers.

Right now we are using it on a daily basis. Being able to use it for planning and for the daily work of the company itself, we can actually use it for a lot of different tasks. We started from the database design and architecture infrastructure, which was more development-related, and then we introduced it also to the UI/UX team, and now they are using it as well. The company is using it daily now and pretty extensively.

I had a weird experience at first with technical support. Meaning, that at the beginning when I asked their support team if they could help me with the setup of the premium account, the paid version, they were unavailable when I asked for them, and then I forgot about it. For the rest of the week, I kept receiving emails, which I thought were just commercial emails.

Then I read them last week and I found out that it was actually their customer support team writing me direct emails, asking me if I resolved the issue. I am actually to blame for not answering them right away, however, they were really, really helpful, they actually care, and they follow up on a daily basis to see if my issue was resolved. It was my mistake completely that I thought the emails were commercial messaging.

That incident aside, from what I've seen, I would say that they are actually pretty attentive and they want to follow up closely with the client. That was something that made me appreciate that they went the extra mile to help me resolve my issue.

In our recent sprint, due to the fact that we use Atlassian as software for handling tasks and for documentation with Confluence, it is our goal to connect it. It's my understanding that it has been connected, however, we haven't tested it so far. VTT is something that we want to do, and it is one of the reasons that we chose Lucidspark - due to the integration capabilities with tools that we already use.

Integrations are important to our operation - if they work as they are advertised. If they do, they will be a huge boost in our productivity, due to the fact that being able to just share data between our applications, our tools, is something that is invaluable in terms of time management. That way, we can focus on having everything inside one container and then share down the pipeline of production, for example, from mind maps to documentation, adding them into Confluence and from Confluence into tasks in Jira and from Jira into actual production. That's actually a pipeline that we're trying to build, and it's something really, really important to us.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The fact that we were going for something really specific made it a little bit harder to find inside Lucid, such as making Lucid usable for a wide range of applications with the same tool, we were going for something really specific, which was database designing, and finding out how to implement database designing into that required some work outside of the platform itself. That said, we found really good documentation on the Lucid website. Once we found that, it was straightforward to implement.

The deployment took less than a day. In the morning we had the accounts set up and shared and the rest of the afternoon was spent just working on it, to find out how we can actually export what we were working on into actual code, et cetera. That was it. 

We have witnessed an ROI. Just the fact that we can actually cut the database deployment time by so much is a huge return on investment. We can spend the time that we would be using on the implementation of the database to do something else. 

The pricing is pretty fair for what it does and for the performance that you get. We are in the lowest tier right now as that's more than enough for what we need, and I'd say that it's a fair price. You get a good bang for the buck. It's actually really good.

Before this and concurrently with Lucidspark, we are using Draw.io, which is the platform that we were using for database design before. However, it had really bad concurrent working between users and no export feature that would allow us to actually use it without working heavily on the export. 

We also are using Miro and Figma. We're mostly Miro for the whiteboard. I could say that Miro is the closest competitor in terms of the whiteboard feature. Miro has more or less the same speed. It does have a desktop application, which is faster using the render on the computer itself, and it also does have a really nice video conferencing feature between team members. It doesn't have the database capability that Lucid has. Apart from that, Lucid is way better. We started using it instead of using Miro.

We're using their web-based application.

We do not yet use other products in the Lucid suite, such as Lucidchart.

I'd advise other organizations to really try it. If you use any other applications similar to this one, you would see the benefits really quickly. It is worth mentioning that most of the features are actually worth switching from one application to another area in the paid plan. The free plan doesn't actually cover most of the things that we were looking for in a platform. That said, if a company makes a product, it's okay for them to ask for payment for their hard work. If I have to give one suggestion to other users, I would say don't stop at the free version. Try out the paid version and you will see the benefits.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten, simply due to the lack of a desktop application and the lower-quality web-conferencing feature, however, for everything else, it's been smooth sailing, from my perspective.

Our primary use case was to put together a presentation for spelling and demonstrating our product and process charts for processes in the insurance industry.

Everyone was involved in doing a remote brainstorming session. Everyone felt like they needed to be involved. We have a great team. Everyone was involved and had ideas. Instead of everyone drawing everyone said, "Hey, we could do this." And the reason why is because of the nature of who the boss is. She wants to have more control. If we have a different organizational structure, then it would have been easier for everyone to say, "Hey, here's my idea." But you have to throw it out there and see if the boss likes it first. If the boss likes it then we draw it so everybody can see what it is. So it wasn't a true brainstorming session.

Lucidspark has made us very productive. If we didn't have Lucidspark and I had to use Visio, I really wouldn't have used Visio. I would've used another tool like Adobe publisher or something like that. I wouldn't have used process charts. My boss really wasn't asking for that to begin with but once she saw it, she loved it. And so we went that way, but some of the illustrations that we were preparing for the presentation did not lend themselves well at all to process charts. So I used Adobe products to put those together, but once we started using the process charts, that's what she was excited about. And that's what we went with. 

It made us very productive because it was very easy to make the changes once we had our brainstorming session. We were able to scale quickly to make those changes.

We're a startup company and so our goal with Lucidspark is to get more people aware of it. And so the presentation at this point is just for an outside consultant so that they can tell us how we can fine-tune it so that we can actually go to larger people in the insurance industry and get more buy-in. It's too early to tell how successful that will be or how we haven't had the big presentation yet. That will be coming soon. That feedback and input will be coming soon. If it's successful, then Lucidspark will make us look good. It's worth a lot of money to us.

Some of the basic process features like the circles and squares for texts and the arrows are the most valuable features. One of the most important features that we used was inserting images and resizing them. I don't think we could have used it if we didn't have the smart snapping system for snapping the lines to objects.

We use basic features like object fill and line color. 

It's very intuitive. There were other features that another team member described as the go-to standard for the industry for making process charts. And so they recommended it. They developed a template with it and shared the template with me. It was very easy for me to just create the same thing. 

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.

We used the virtual whiteboard for brainstorming high-level ideas a couple of times. There were a couple of meetings where it was really hard to describe on the phone what we wanted to do. So there are times when we circle things and say, "Okay, we need to move this over, put this over there." 

It's not really better than some of the other things out there, but it worked. It was entertaining for the guy that had to draw with it, but there are several things about whiteboards that I just don't like. But it's really not worse than anything else out there, it's just not better.

They have a nice color palette and the color palette is intuitive. What I mean by intuitive is that the colors chosen work really well with the text. If you put text over an object with color behind it, then the text is very visible. So that's very nice. But we worked with the owner of the company to make presentations and she wanted colors that did not make sense but we went ahead and used those anyway. It might be nice to have just a few more default colors set up even if they were the colors that you would have to reverse the text out. Maybe if they were dark and you'd have to use white text on them.

It would be nice to have some of those because everything that we started out with, the boss said, "All of those are pastel colors. So I don't like those. We need something bolder and brighter." That's what we had to go find. If there were some default colors that were bolder and brighter, even though they don't work with texts so well, then we could reverse out the text and make it whiter or something like that. 

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.

I write software, so I know that's probably a very complex issue and they look like they spent a lot of time working on it that still doesn't quite work. That's the only thing that I can think of that might make it better.

I have been using Lucidspark for three weeks.

It's very available. It's very easy to get started and very easy to use. We didn't have to wait on it to update and didn't have to wait on the server or anything. It was very available and very easy to use. There were no problems at all using it.

There were only three of us using it and so I don't know how big it can scale. I'm sure it is scalable.

We don't have plans to increase usage in the future. Since we've used it in the past and it worked well, I'm sure we'll use it again. But I really don't know how much longer or more we will use it.

I have used Visio and I like Visio. I know how to use it. When you're asked to do something quickly and you already know a tool that you can use well, the tendency is to use the tool that you already know. Someone else convinced the boss that this was the best tool. I jumped into this which is a plus for the intuitiveness of their user interface. We were able to get going quickly. It's just as easy, if not easier to use than Visio.

Visio is not really software as a service. It's more of something you install on your system. And so if you're getting started and you have to use it, you would have to install it. Compared with Lucidspark and what we were doing, there are more tools and templates. There is more of an opportunity to get confused and lost. It's a little bit less intuitive. What we were doing with Lucidspark was truly easy and fast and it's online. So you really don't have to do anything to get started or get it going. I really liked that it was very frictionless.

The initial setup was very easy. It was frictionless. Nobody was setting this up for us. And so once the decision was made to go to Lucidspark, we all went out, created accounts, and got started. It was very easy to use.

It's too early to see ROI but the boss was very happy with what we produced and I get paid for that. So I have certainly experienced a return on investment from using it. It's $9.99 a month and I get paid well for that. So I've gotten paid for my investment in it.

They have a good pricing model. I'm an independent contractor and so I don't mind paying $9.99 a month for that when I'm getting paid well to use it and get results with it. So I think that's a good model. If it was $39.99 a month, I certainly wouldn't have chosen to use it.

There are no additional costs to the standard licensing. 

It's the easiest flowcharting process software out there. I would have chosen Visio but since somebody suggested Lucidspark, I decided to try it and it was in fact much easier than Visio to use if you're making process charts or diagrams. I'm thinking about using it for planning and creating process charts of my own, not just for my work. I would recommend it.

I would rate Lucidspark an eight out of ten. I like to give room for improvement to things. The snap and grid system still needs to be fixed so that people are less careful about how they make things look.

I have used it primarily during conference calls to share things and to use it as a whiteboard tool, so that I am able to draw block diagrams with remote people, just like I would on a whiteboard in person.

Lucidspark has allowed my team to better communicate visually when it comes to explaining how different things work and then how they go together. We do hardware design, primarily, so being able to show how a system goes together structurally is helpful.

It also enables you to prioritize ideas, which is important. When we are having a meeting and want to assign tasks to people, being able to prioritize what people work on first is important to us.

Overall, our brainstorming productivity has been about the same with Lucidspark as when we were in the office. But because we are working remotely, it has been a time-saver and allowed us to be more productive while being in different locations.

In combination with Lucidchart, it is helpful when it comes to moving your ideas from the idea stage to execution. It definitely helps get everybody on the same page and working in the same direction. It keeps everybody going.

It provides that functionality of being able to draw freehand. That is one of the strong points. The block diagramming and being able to draw and then erase is helpful. And then I can save a copy of it. It's great.

The user interface is good. I have used Lucidchart longer than Lucidspark, so I was used to the way their drawing tool works, and that translated well to using this.

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.

It's also helpful that the Lucid suite can be centrally managed by a unified administration console. Although it is not critically important, it's helpful that one person can control it.

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.

I also wish I had a pen and tablet so I could draw better. I have a hard time drawing freehand with my mouse.

I have been using Lucidspark since it was first announced in September or October, so it has been a few months.

My impression, so far, of the stability and performance of Lucidspark has been that it's great. I use it just about every day.

In terms of the scalability, I understand you can get whole teams of people working on it and that is great. We don't necessarily need to do that at the moment. At any given time there are four to six people working in Lucidspark in our company, all engineers.

As we grow our business, we will increase the number of seats that we have, for sure.

I have not needed to use their technical support.

The initial setup was very simple and very quick. There were no problems whatsoever setting it up since we use it online. There was no install. It was just a matter of logging in and reading through the instructions and getting to work.

We have definitely seen ROI. It has saved a lot of time and frustration in just doing diagramming. Things come out much easier on Lucidchart than on other tools. Lucidspark has been helpful in remote meetings. If we were all in the office, I would possibly not be using Lucidspark, but its biggest appeal is for remote access.

The pricing seems reasonable. Lower would always be good.

As far as drawing tools go, it has been my favorite. I was previously a Visio user and I find Lucidchart to be much more useful than Visio.

I have also evaluated a lot of tools that compete with Lucidchart, and I have liked Lucidchart better than all of them. It's a personal preference. It is just the way one's mind works. Lucidchart draws things intuitively, the way I would like them to be drawn, without having to figure too many different things out. I have a real problem with the Visio works, and I used to use OmniGraffle on the Mac, and Lucidchart is superior in most ways for me.

For me, the Collaborator Colors feature is only moderately important. And when using the solution for remote or virtual brainstorming sessions the activity and engagement levels of users during such sessions, when compared to in-person sessions, is about the same.

I don't think it provides more time to discuss ideas, rather than organizing them. It's about the same as if we were all in the office and doing it in front of a whiteboard. But especially for remote working environments, it has been really handy. I like being able to export the drawing to a PDF and save it for future reference.

Overall, Lucidspark is a useful tool.

I am making use of Lucidspark as an architectural design tool for my final year project. 

While I have tried other solutions, I have found Lucidspark to be very helpful with my use case. 

The solution offers many features that I find to be beneficial with my architectural design.  

The user interface is pretty easy for me to use... and I haven't faced any kind of issues with it.

The virtual whiteboard for brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts... is good.

The solution enables me to prioritize ideas. This is basically why I use Lucidspark. When I started out on my project I had planned to design my final architecture with the help of some online tool from a white sheet on which I had drawn. When I found out about Lucidspark I realized that it helps me with the design.

The solution has features to tag and automatically group ideas to help organize and synthesize them after a brainstorming session. This ability helps me to find patterns and things among the ideas. It really helps me to share ideas with my friends.

The solution allows me to automatically group ideas so that I can take action and move them forward. It allows me to repeatedly download my ideas, share them with my friends and get their feedback.

The solution allows me to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps and less time organizing them. It really helps me to decrease the need for manual effort. I feel very positive about this feature. It is good enough to help me.

The copying and pasting features need to be improved as they gave me trouble when I tried to copy and paste from one end to the other. This proved especially problematic for students who are working on disparate projects. 

It would be really helpful if more features and templates would be added to the product. This would also result in a decrease of manual effort. 

I have been using Lucidspark for the past month. 

The solution is quite effective and insures against any problem or challenge one may encounter. 

We have not made use of the solution's technical support. 

While I cannot recall their exact names, I do know that I tried several online whiteboard tools but found their use to be difficult. Lucidspark, by contrast, turned out to be straightforward.

The initial setup took several minutes. I do not have any specific implementation strategy of which to speak. 

We did not use an integrator, reseller or consultant for the deployment.

I have not seen a return on my investment.

One must pay extra if he wishes to have a higher level product. Most students such as myself will opt for a paid version. 

In my experience I have found the solution to be quite easy to use. 

I rate Lucidspark as a 7.5 out of ten. 

It's a faster process. Time comes at a premium. A lot of what I do is less long-term project planning, and much more a subset of longer-term projects and a lot of very fluid, short-term tasks to be accomplished with medium-term goals. It's a lot more like a series of sprints and a couple of longer-term races. The choices I have are that I can put it on a whiteboard, I can put it on a pad of paper, or I can put it on Post-it notes. In some cases, it works keeping track of that stuff that way. But I end up crossing things off, moving them to another pad or another page, and rewriting the things that are still open, to make things clearer in my head. Whereas if I'm using Lucidspark, I can keep all that stuff there. I can reprioritize. Nothing is permanent like it is when crossing something out. I can take a group of tasks, I can move them up, I can group them and highlight them, as the things that I have to do today. It's just much more fluid.

I can't tell you that I've taken a large energy project from beginning to end on one of the Lucid products, but I've used those in conjunction with such projects. In the past, when I was doing development work for energy projects, there were areas where you had to worry about certain things such as procuring land, getting the right permits, doing public and government relations. Within those, there are always a garden-variety of tasks, plus a lot of things that are unique to the project. A lot of times, I've used Lucid products to put together those thoughts, get them in one place.

The alternative that a lot of people use are bullet-points or checklists. Those make it hard to visualize things. If I'm working in Word or in Excel, and I'm typing in entries or things that I'm thinking about, they're in a line and I've got to go through three or four or five keystrokes to move a line to a different place, to reorder them. On the other hand, if I'm working in Lucidspark, I can keep generating items. I can mind-map them out. I can move something up, highlight it and move it up to a different place. I love the fact that the connections automatically move around. There's a freedom to the way that it allows structuring of your diagrams that makes it a lot easier.

Lucidspark is very powerful and it's far more intuitive. It's not clunky. I confess, I love it. I played around with it and the Templates library is very robust compared to a lot of other platforms. Other solutions do things that look funky and colorful and they give you options to change the color, but not much more. That's not what I really need. I really am trying to use this for work and so far I've been very successful.

The package of the two apps together, Lucidchart and Lucidspark, completely covers the waterfront. It's a great platform. I use Lucidchart all the time. I'm starting to use Lucidspark regularly, and the fact of the matter is that the output looks great. One of the things that I found and that I really hated regarding a number of these mapping apps is that they looked great on the screen, but when you printed them out they never quite looked like what you wanted. I've had really good luck with the output coming out of Lucidspark. A lot of times I'm reducing it to a PDF and emailing it around.

I love the SVG with the transparent background format. You just take one of those things, drop it into a document, scale it and it works, especially when I'm doing presentations to investment committees.

The combination of Lucidchart and Lucidspark in helping to visualize each step of the process from brainstorming initial ideas to turning those ideas into reality is absolutely fantastic. There's something to be said for the expression, "A picture is worth a thousand words." If you can reduce what you're doing into a picture, people will have a tendency to understand it better, and it's more concise. If you can reduce your thought process into a format where you can rearrange it freely and easily in real time, without a lot of interruption from having to use five keystrokes, the chances of your being able to get your thoughts down on paper quickly, and move them around and move them a different way, and move them again, and come to a coherent thought process and solution, are a lot better. It's a great tool.

One of the things that I had trouble with, and it may be due to the fact that we're a Microsoft Teams environment, and it may be that I just have not been able to get the permissions to integrate my versions of the apps with Lucidspark because of the security measures, but I have not been as successful in integrating my desktop apps with Lucidspark and Lucidchart, which is something I would like to be able to do better.

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.

I was looking at the Kanban Board template and it's great. You bring it in, the grid is set up, and then you can add sticky notes. I would like to be able to lock the structure in place so that I could just move sticky notes. Maybe that's just something that I haven't figured out yet, but that would be amazing.

I've used Lucidspark since it came out. I've used the free version. I wanted to test-drive it to see what it was like.

Since they integrate together, I wish they offered a special deal for people who subscribed to both Lucidchart and Lucidspark.

By way of background I have, as a general matter, looked at a number of mind-mapping and project management software platforms. I've actually been really keen on trying to go from just white-boarding to something a little more tangible. My background is as a lawyer, but I worked in the energy space and spent time in tech as well. I did a lot of Agile project management and Kanbans, trying to manage project tracking and ideation related to strategic planning and the like.

I started out years ago with MindManager. They have, perhaps, the worst support for Macs. I tried to stick with that for a little bit. Not only did they provide terrible support, but it was also a question of how clunky the interface and the whole environment was. I've done a variety of work in conjunction with projects where I've used Redbooth, LeanKit, Project Plan, and Pivotal Tracker for Agile project management. Those are okay.

But between the ability to diagram in Lucidchart, white-boarding or mind mapping, like Lucidspark and, somewhere in between there is the realm of project planning and being able to move things around, I feel that the industry has been all over the place. I don't think there has been a particularly good solution in the past. Some have done some of these things well, and they work for a limited purpose, but I'm idealistic and I've been looking for the Holy Grail in this area. I've worked with a lot of these and I haven't really stuck with any of them.

On the diagramming side I used to use Visio. I discovered over time, after going through Visio and OmniGraffle, that when I started to use Lucidchart it was vastly superior. It is just so much more intuitive, so much more smooth. It works, it doesn't crash. It's just perfect. 

Enter Lucidspark which was trying to break into that somewhat related field, which is the mind mapping. As I said, I've used MindManager. I've used SimpleMind. I've test-driven some of the other stuff out there but Lucidspark brings together all of the ability to customize mind-maps and diagrams that you used to get in MindManager, and more, and that you don't get in a lot of the other apps that are out there.

For a team, Lucidspark makes a lot of sense. For a while we used LeanKit. I was working on a tech startup and we were doing long-term product planning and we had a fairly intricate project-steps chart with swim lanes. I spent a huge amount of time setting it up. It was great when it was there, but I ended being the only one who was keeping it current and it was just too much. It was really too much work to set up. Simple and intuitive and powerful, Lucidspark is fantastic; it has really hit on something. 

Lucidchart solves the Visio problem in a really elegant way. And Lucidspark really solves the mapping question very quickly. You can do pretty much all of your project planning very cleanly in that context. 

I am not a fan of these very clunky, entry-type project planners like JIRA and Atlassian. You ended up having to have someone who manages the platform and does the entries. I just don't think people want to be constantly updating their entries. It's just too much. It takes on a life of its own. Having done traditional project planning in the context of energy projects, and Agile in the context of tech, there are times and places for each, but there are pitfalls. One of the problems is just trying to keep a team organized in a more fluid environment, where there aren't very long lead times and very discreet, concrete steps. Lucid is a fantastic tool.

One of the things that was very valuable about MindManager, although it was very clunky, was the maps library. 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. That's fantastic. I love that.

I have been chasing this Holy Grail; I love the idea of mind-mapping and I've always been an early adopter trying these things. I like this whole area. It's a bit of a hobby. I really have wanted to find that, and to find some way to be more efficient in that process and to deal not only with immediate tasks, but also ideas. How do you break it down?

One of the big problems with planning is how do you go from A to B. You've got to break it down into tasks, then you've got to break it down into subtasks and get more and more granular. It's hard to do that. You can't do that on paper easily. It's very hard and messy. You're always writing and rewriting and breaking it down more. Using an app like Lucidspark makes it really easy to do. 

The idea has been out there, but no one has really done it in a reasonable way. MindManager had a great project 20 years ago and, although I don't really know how successful they've been at this point, they rolled it out to a lot of big companies. But they stopped at a certain point. They focused on the PC world and the result was that they really left the idea in an analog state, and they never brought it meaningfully into the Mac world or into a fully digital, really useful configuration. And that's been the gap. 

There have been a lot of other products where people have tried to solve some of the aspects of this, but I honestly think that Lucidspark has got something pretty amazing. I feel like they've been in my head, seeing the same things that I have, but that they've actually gone ahead and they've fixed these things. These are the things that prevented me from continuing to be a customer of these other companies and apps.

I don't have a good sense of how many people really have the desire to jump into this sort of thing, unless it's imposed by their company. I've tried to implement some solutions in the past and there's inevitably a certain degree of resistance. You don't always have tech-savvy people, and that's an issue. But my understanding is that if I had someone else who had a free account, I could share a link to a board that I had done and they could see it. I might not be able to collaborate in real-time, but I believe that I could provide them with a link that's evergreen, by publishing it. Presumably there are certain things that can be done without having that collaboration feature as part of your membership. I think there's certain limited functionality where you can do some collaboration, it's just not as smooth.