Lucidspark Reviews

I'm using it for two purposes. One is internal brainstorming with team members inside of my own organization, and the other is external facilitation, in a consulting capacity, with our clients.

Just yesterday I led a session with some existing team members and some new team members, an onboarding session, to talk about what attributes make for a good client. It was really easy to have team members with more experience contribute more, and have team members with less experience see and learn from those contributions. And when it came to the distillation and sorting and aggregation of those ideas, everyone was able to contribute to those bigger-picture things.

Lucidspark definitely enables you to prioritize ideas and that is extremely important. The prioritization of ideas is one of the most important pieces of decision-making, and decision-making is a central function of any business. If you can't make decisions, you can't move projects forward. We're all trying to figure out how we make those decisions in a virtual space, without sharing an office together. This is a tool that has helped us do that.

It also enables you to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps, and less time organizing them. I had no idea it was important to me until I knew that it was possible. Now that I know that it's possible, it has a lot of value. Any opportunity to get to the most important pieces and parts, such as what is the hardest question and what is the most challenging next obstacle—the sooner you can elevate them—the easier it is to get to the hard conversation.

Overall, Lucidspark is a vast improvement when it comes to the productivity of working and brainstorming sessions. Where we may have previously had folks respond to a static survey, with open-ended responses, it can now be a dynamic, crowd-sourced session with real-time contributions and improvements that may have otherwise never appeared. Or, if they did appear, they would have been in a follow-up meeting after a whole bunch of synthesis of those old survey results.

We also use Lucidchart and that was actually how I became aware of Lucidspark. The overall suite, for helping to visualize each step of the process, from brainstorming initial ideas, to turning those ideas into reality, is very good. I have used a lot of different chart-building tools in the past, in many different forms, but there are a lot of intuitive features in Lucidchart, inclusive of their templates. Those features make standard business process design and modification really easy, and really easy to convey to others who do not contribute to the creation of those documents. The ability to take a chart made with Lucidchart and use it in a Lucidspark environment is a really great opportunity to take what used to be one person writing down and designing a process, and turn it into allowing more people to contribute.

I have really enjoyed Lucidspark's virtual whiteboard. It is a big step up from some of the other tools that I have used. Not to be judgemental, but the Google Suite has a product called Jamboard and that is what we used previously. They are very different in their capabilities. I appreciate the robustness of Lucidspark quite a bit. It adds a lot more functionality when it comes to multiple participants, and I really appreciate that it is an expanding canvas. The limited size and shape of something like a Jamboard is not conducive to new ideas expanding, going further. I really like a lot of those features in the design. 

I certainly have made a lot of use of the template library as well.

I also really enjoy the emoji reaction voting. That is a fun gamification of a pretty common feature for facilitation. 

And the sorting and aggregating by color, or grouping, or contributor, are all also really helpful features. While the Collaborator Colors is a really nice feature to have, I could imagine a way to still use the tool without it.

Absolutely all of the work I've done with Lucidspark has been done when I've been in a different location than the other contributors. It meets the different needs of contributors, who may be less comfortable in an in-person environment, to be at a place where they have more ability to contribute, and I really appreciate that. It's not reliant on somebody speaking up because there are so many ways to contribute, without having to come off of mute on a Zoom call and say something out loud. Not everybody likes that version of contributing. It might make them feel anxious. The ability to just be able to type, or respond, or help with consolidating ideas into groups—any of those things are really easy for anyone in a session to do and to support. I've loved that.

One thing about the template library is that it does seem too focused on folks who develop SaaS products. There might be an opportunity for a little bit of an expansion for other, virtual, business-meeting-facilitation use cases, for folks who are not in the product development space.

In terms of its user interface and intuitiveness, it took a little bit of time to figure out the difference between the selection tool and the move-around tool. When I was able to figure out a few keyboard shortcuts, that helped a whole lot. Having those keyboard shortcuts a little more apparent or visible, in the early setup, as a new user is getting used to the platform, could help.

The one other significant recommendation is because I do work with folks outside of my organization quite regularly. The user experience of having them all have to set up a free account to join me in a workspace is a bit cumbersome. I really would love it if there was a Visitor link that would allow contributors who don't have free logins to join and participate.

I've been using Lucidspark for just over a month.

I have had no outages, no glitches, or anything that would make me think that something in the solution is unstable.

I would rate its scalability as very strong. I appreciated that when I dropped a link in Slack, it said, "Hey, we think this is a Lucidspark link. Do you want to download the Slack plugin?" I thought that was intuitive and helpful, given that we do so much of our day-to-day work in Slack already. If it talks to Slack nicely, that's a heck of an upgrade.

I have not used technical support for Lucidspark.

We selected Lucidspark because the existing work that we've done in Lucidchart is a huge component. We have a bunch of process and workflow documents that exist there, and team members who already have Lucidchart logins. Adding an additional license to access Lucidspark on top of that was really seamless and easy, once I found the button to start a Lucidspark session. That existing product that we already had was a huge foot in the door.

The distinction between what components were in Lucidspark, such as the virtual white boarding component, and which ones were in Lucidchart, was a little tricky at the onset. Finding that it was truly in the "setup new template," and that that additional link was present, took me longer to find that I expected it to.

I've certainly received a good number of marketing materials and communications that are branded from Lucidspark. While the branding and the coloring allowed me to pretty clearly connect the dots that these two things were associated, when I clicked through on the link, the acknowledgement of what we currently had versus what we could have if we upgraded or added Lucidspark, was more confusing than I had anticipated. The way I overcame that was just a bunch of button-clicking and finding the dropdown that allowed me to start a Lucidspark canvas. Once I did, I said to myself, "Oh, it's here," and I could show my team exactly where it was. But prior to that, I was asking myself, "How do I get from this logo that says 'Lucidspark' and that is clickable, to doing something in Lucidspark?" because it always brought me to up my Lucidchart interface. I didn't know how to get around that.

Overall, the Lucidspark deployment took almost no time at all, except for that little kerfuffle of trying to figure out how to get to it.

I've shared it in our organization and folks have free logins, right now, to act as contributors. We have not done a full company deployment with paid user profiles for all members. I work on our client success team and that team has just over 10 people. In addition to them, I have shared it with our chief creative officer and one of our senior product designers and they are starting to work with the tool in their product teams.

We have absolutely seen return on investment from using Lucidspark because of the time savings.

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

I've used the embedded white boarding feature in both Microsoft Teams and in Zoom. They're rudimentary, but certainly better than nothing. The other product that I have spent the most time in is MURAL.

The connection between existing documents in Lucidchart and Lucidspark is a huge value-add, and I like that that ecosystem allows you to benefit from previous work inside of that suite. That's a great value.

MURAL's biggest thing—and it's actually where I had the inspiration for the recommendation for how Lucidspark could be improved—is that it does have a Visitor link. While working with clients, you don't need them to set up a free account to participate. That's a big thing. I could see a world where we continue to use Lucidspark internally, because it's really easy to have your employees set up logins and pay attention to them, and do client-facing work in MURAL because it's less cumbersome for the client. The teams overlap little enough that it would be very possible for them to do their specific work in each of those different silos. However, it would be another silo and it would be lovely if we did all of it in the same place.

In functionality, MURAL is very similar to Lucidspark. The templates that are available in MURAL are a little more advanced, and they cover a broader cross section of use cases.

My internal resource sharing across our teams was a little silly and delayed. When I saw this solution I said to myself, “Oh, this might be helpful," and that was probably a backward way to go about it. It may make more sense for people to think about all of the possible use cases in their organization, or at least multiple use cases in their organization. I really did come to Lucidspark thinking about just the chair that I sit in, but it has a lot of applications outside of my own role. Ensuring that folks know about it and can benefit from it can take the productivity that you might get from one team doing this kind of collaboration, and spread it to a broader cross section of teams.

The solution has features to tag and automatically group and organize ideas after a brainstorming session, but I need to spend a little bit more time with them. We've primarily done manual sorting at this point. Part of that is a holdover from in-person facilitation. The sorting and aggregating component when you're in an actual conference room is just a part of the process, because there isn't a way to do that with sticky notes. I still rely on that a little bit as a facilitation point, and it means that I've just not leaned on the tools that are built-in, as much.

But the feature that I like the most in that context is the ability for individual contributors to link associated ideas when somebody else may have had a similar recommendation or suggestion. Having those little legacy trails, where two sticky notes have a line connecting them, is something that you just couldn't do in a physical space without tangling the entire conference room in yarn. This ability to automatically group ideas speeds up the ability to take action, a little bit, and I'm still getting used to whether our team is ready for, and desirous of, that speed. The main focus has not been the speed at which we can execute. It's been the consensus-building along the way. But overall, it does help. Using the tool to group and bundle ideas takes about half the time that it used to take.

Using the Lucidchart suite of products, I actually think of things such as moving ideas from the idea stage to execution as still occurring in other spaces, from an execution standpoint. We leave the sessions in Lucidchart and we're still going to databases and to our product. The groundwork and the alignment and expectation-setting and direction, from the work that's done in Lucidchart and Lucidspark, are incredibly valuable to ensuring the ability to do those other things, but I still do think of those other things as happening outside of the Lucidchart suite.

I really have enjoyed the product. It is filling a valuable gap in the market as we all transition, still nine months later in most places, to remote work. I am happy to have it.

It started out to build flowcharts for organizational structures. It has evolved into more of a project management tool, outlining systems and opportunity flows from the inside of our business. We use these visuals that we create to speak with our software implementation partner so they can build the structure that we need for our systems.

I am the one on my team who uses it 90 percent of the time, as far as creating documents.

The benefit has been that it is a new tool and something else which helps engage my team. 

Another benefit is the ease at which you can create whiteboard pieces to brainstorm together. It's like me writing on a whiteboard, but not asking for collaboration from others when writing on the whiteboard.

Lucidspark has enabled us to prioritize ideas. During a brainstorming session about a launch of a new product, we were able to put all the ideas and color code them in post-it notes. We then categorize them by groups and priorities, respectively. It was easy to move them around so everybody could see what was going on.

We asked for everybody's input on a particular project and their priorities. When we were able to visualize them on a Lucidspark whiteboard, we saw the similarities between everybody's suggestions, then we were able to move those together.

From the brainstorming session where we collected the ideas and grouped them forward, we were able to prioritize those ideas into an action, i.e., what needs to happen next on the product launch. So, it worked well for our team. This is the first time that we had used it this way.

Overall, Lucidchart and Lucidspark helped me as a visual learner to lay out my thoughts and ideas, then arrange them in a succinct manner so I could communicate them effectively to the next person.

Until recently, I was using the document piece where I can create these outlines and stuff based on their shape library. 

I don't use a whole lot of their templates, but the templates give me ideas on how to build my own structures moving forward. 

Recently, when they launched the new piece, which is more of the whiteboard design, it has become a place where we can collaborate together. Especially in these days of virtual meetings, we can show a whiteboard and move things around. I have only been able to use the whiteboard a couple times. I like the ability that it is never-ending, i.e., a very large white space that we can scroll through. It is not limited to the size of a piece of paper. 

With virtual meetings, we are always looking for ways to make sure that people are engaged in the virtual meeting. I think the whiteboard aspect of Lucidspark allows that to happen more efficiently and effectively. There is action taking place on the board, so it is not just someone presenting.

I am a visual person, which is why I like Lucidspark. Its user interface and intuitiveness are pretty good. It is pretty intuitive to understand how we are moving forward and drawing things on the whiteboard. It's very simple, not complicated. The things that I use are mainly the post-it notes and containers, where I can grab a group of post-it notes, then put them in a container and move them around.

It is very efficient to move ideas from the idea stage to execution, using the Lucidspark’s suite of products. When we are sending it to a software designer or implementation partner, I am able to create a visual flow where I might outline everything in a document. Then, I can create a visual flow in Lucidspark so they can see the progression of steps, which makes it easier for them to design because of the software. Because the software of Salesforce is using these same types of visuals when the system is created, there is a great relationship between what I am creating and what the developers are developing inside Salesforce for us.

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.

I have been using it for probably four years.

Lucidspark is very stable. I have had no crashes. I love the functionality as it moves between devices. Even with different Chrome profiles, I can easily log into my Lucidspark account from any Chrome profile or browser profile. 

I love the functionality. It's easy to use, printable, and downloadable as a PDF, if a person does not have Lucidspark or the Lucid suite. I can share those documents that way.

The functionality is there. We have not used it on a larger scale. I am the person who uses it 90 percent of the time. We share documents just for viewing, but not for collaboration. I do see how it could be used that way. You could grab a team license and easily have more than one person working on a document, but we do not use it that way.

There are probably three paid accounts on campus. There are another six or seven users who are just using the free account to view things. These are all directors, director managers, and even C-suite people.

We have not used their technical support.

Previously, I used very cumbersome tools inside Google Suite, Microsoft suite, or even some mind mapping pieces. However, there isn't a solution that really does what Lucidspark does for me.

It is very easy to set up Lucidspark. A couple of clicks, and then you can get something started. It takes minutes to set up.

The ROI is mainly personal. It is just easier for me to communicate thoughts when I can draw them out.

Using Lucidspark saved time, especially in a virtual meeting setting. We can easily collaborate, move things together, and then prioritize the groupings to get a quicker, more successful product launch.

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. 

We have also talked to Lucidchart people about integration with Salesforce. We thought we found a solution that would help us visualize and move some things, but it did not work for us or at the price point that we needed to pay to do it. So, we only use LucidChart inside itself with no integrations to other places.

I did not evaluate other vendors or options.

I have suggested this product to many people because of its ease of use and clarity. You can outline processes, programs, and operations moving forward. So, I have recommended it to others. I would rate the solution as a 10 (out of 10).

We do a lot of whiteboarding.

Since we're in the IT field we have a lot of process maps that we draw and it's easy to collaborate with the team on a live Zoom or any conference call we have going on, where whoever is participating just throws their ideas onto the board.

A benefit is that anybody, across any platform, can collaborate anywhere. They don't need to have software installed, like with Visio.

The solution also enables us to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and less time organizing them. Once we're ready, we take it to our leadership and the leadership might see something that we didn't see. They're able to easily move it around and say, "What if we move the process this way?" They can do it on their own time. We don't have to wait for them to join a call and do it. We just send it over, and then they'll revise it and send it back to us. It has made our working and brainstorming sessions very simple. It has cut down a lot of back-and-forth. We're able to get to the result in less time than we used to. It saves us at least one day per week.

The most valuable feature is the live, interactive whiteboarding. For brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts it's like Visio but much better, because it's online. Collaboration for process is much easier. Everybody else has more of a "sticky-notes" type of solution. But with Lucidspark, you're using visual diagrams and the icons and things that you need that are more like Visio.

In terms of the user interface and intuitiveness, it's easy to use even for a non-technical person. You just throw things on and, for whatever you need, there is drag-and-drop. You don't have to train anybody. Everybody, right off from day-one, knows how to use it and take it forward.

We also use the Collaborator Colors feature and with it we can see who has proposed an idea when we're on a live call. If it's me or if it's my boss who said, "Hey, maybe we should do this," we can say, "Yeah, that looks better than what Joe said," for example. Or we can say "Hey, Joe's ideas kind of make sense," and we can take mine out and put his in place.

In addition, it has ready-to-go boards for process. You convert them into PowerPoint or the like and export them very easily and plug them in. That's what we do, most of the time: We build the process map and, once it's ready, we export it and stick it into PowerPoints. We also build a lot of solution documents for different technologies and processes. We use the Lucid diagrams and put them into the solution documents.

You can also add pages. Once we like something on page one, for example, we drag it and move it to a different page where we're saying, "Hey, this is the final process for this."

And the fact that the suite can be centrally managed by a unified administration console is very good, because then you're not tied down to a per-license model. Instead, it's more of a SaaS model, so if somebody leaves the team you can just reassign the license to their replacement.

We have been using Lucid products for years. We have been using Lucidspark since it was released about four months ago.

The stability is excellent. We haven't had an issue where it was down or we couldn't reach it.

It's easy to scale because it's not on-prem. It's cloud-based, so we just have to add licenses and reach out to our rep for Enterprise.

We have about 10 users of the solution. There's room to grow, obviously, but I don't see us doing so right now.

I have not used technical support.

The initial setup is straightforward because we use the SaaS model; nothing on-prem.

The process took us about four weeks but that was more due to our internal process because we had to get approval from InfoSec and everybody to make sure that there were no vulnerabilities in the software or anything that was getting installed, and that no data—client information, health information—was stored on the cloud.

For the deployment, on our side, there was just one person, but building and getting all the initial approvals involved about four people who are in InfoSec, IT, the leadership, and FP&A for the cost.

Not everybody uses Lucidspark on a daily basis. Some teams just use it when they need to build charts, once in a while. But we have seen a return on investment for people who use it on a daily basis, in terms of time and money savings, because we're not allocating licenses 100 percent. We can transfer a license on-the-fly. With Visio, if a person leaves the team tomorrow, you have already paid upfront.

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 shouldn't need to buy Lucidspark separately and Lucidchart, etc. That model is like what Microsoft does, and it's very annoying.

The only other options were Visio and Visio Online but they are both by Microsoft. They were not compatible with Mac and others. That's why it was easy to make the decision to go with Lucid.

When it comes to prioritizing ideas we use monday.com to prioritize our tasks at hand. Based on that, we use Lucidchart to bounce ideas around.

We have the full Lucidchart, the full Enterprise version, so that we're able to build process maps and everything else. I am mostly on the build side of things. We build the solution and then we hand off the solution document. We design how the process will look, on Lucid, and then we build it out and give it to operations to run. We don't really see when it goes live. But it helps the build side to collaborate and get to that point.

I think it's a great product. It's easy to use and there is not much hand-holding needed from an IT perspective. The SaaS model is great because it's cross-format. We're able to use it from our iPad or phones or from anything. It doesn't matter where we are.

We are using Lucidspark for brainstorms and for meetings.

We have also been using it for our action plan, to plan our strategy steps.

Lucidspark has made my organization more creative and it's easier to do creative techniques.

It enables us to prioritize ideas. It's very important that it has that ability.

It makes the overall productivity of our working and brainstorming sessions better. It increases our productivity. It saves us time and gives us more time to discuss what is more important. We find it causes there to be more engagement and this attitude also helps us be more focused.

In terms of the most valuable features, I like that we can compare a report to our templates. That is really useful. I saw that it has all of these templates that I can use. I also love that I can use my own images.

It's really easy to use and intuitive. It's very understandable, everything is easy to get.

The virtual whiteboard is excellent. It's easy to use. 

With the templates and the work that you do, you can convert it into a template and you can use it later.

I don't use the Collaborator Colors feature in Lucidspark but I have been using the same tool in Lucidchart. I suppose it's the same. We have been using it. We all see the same screen on the computer or we can project it.

It has features to tag and automatically group ideas to help organize and synthesize ideas after a brainstorming session. This ability makes it easier to help find patterns and themes among the ideas. Its ability to automatically group ideas helps save time in organizing ideas rather than having to manually group and bundle ideas. It saves the two hours it takes to get all the materials that we would have to use if it was manual.

It absolutely enables us to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps and less time organizing them. It is very important because time is very valuable.

It doesn't respond instantly and the traces that we make are not that accurate. We have to use it in a slower way. We can't do a quick drawing because it doesn't respond accurately.

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

I have been using Lucidspark for about a month. 

It is very stable. 

It's very scalable. The amount of users who use it depends on what we're working on. 

It doesn't require much staff for maintenance or deployment. It's very easy.

We do have plans to increase usage.

Their technical support is good. 

Positive

This is easier to use than other solutions.

The initial setup is very simple. It took a couple of minutes. We had a quick understanding of how to use it and how it could help us. It was easy to communicate to everyone about how Lucidspark could help us. It was enough to be able to use it.

I didn't use an integrator. 

There are no additional costs to standard licensing. 

I found out about Lucidspark because I was using Lucidchart.

I absolutely recommend it because it increases communication with your team.

My advice would be to just try it because it's amazing and when you start using it you'll see that it is an excellent tool.

I would rate Lucidspark a nine out of ten. 

I mainly use it for making flowcharts. I am using their web application.

It has helped me in representing all the hard work that I had put into my project in a visually appealing and better way. Without it, all the hard work that I did would not have got noticed properly.

We use Lucidspark's collaborate or colors feature in which we can assign each user a certain color to identify what each person is contributing. It is a really good feature. Our mentor assigned us with those, and with sticky notes, we get to know what we were doing, what we were missing, or what should be improved. It was very helpful, and we could directly improve things then and there.

Its integration with Salesforce was useful. For some of the demos, I was able to integrate the Salesforce platform with it, which was very helpful. I could do that in minimal time with Lucidspark. 

It helps us in spending more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps and less time organizing them. It enables us in fine-tuning and improving the ideas and representations and making our flowcharts visually better and accurate. Its virtual whiteboard is also great for collaboration.

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

It provides different features, and we can also see the flowcharts in the PDF format and different image formats.

Its user interface and intuitiveness are great. It is easy to use, and it makes things easier. If you have experience in making flowcharts on other sites, you will find Lucidspark to be an easier version of those sites.

It has many features similar to what other sites provide. However, when we make flowcharts on any other platform or site, it becomes very difficult to get it synchronized, but with Lucidspark, we can directly synchronize flowcharts. We were a team of three to four, and we collaborated through Lucidspark to create flowcharts. It was a way easier to collaborate and make the best flowcharts with Lucidspark. 

There should be a feature for changing the color of the background, borders, etc. Such a feature will make the flowcharts more attractive.

I have been using Lucidspark for one month. My company has been using it for a longer duration.

I didn't find any issue related to its stability.

There were no issues related to its scalability. We have around 500 users, and almost everyone who wishes to make flowcharts for documentation, demo, and presentation can use it. It is available for all. Its future usage will depend on the requirements.

I have not contacted their technical support.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that it is important to represent your work in a visually attractive and easy-to-understand way. 

I would rate Lucidspark a nine out of 10.

I'm a private tutor. I run my own tutoring business. I use Lucidspark for my teaching purposes.

I use the free version.

When I have an online class in our school, on Zoho Meeting or Zoom, I sometimes share writings and use the whiteboard. It's easy to use and it has a lot of tools in it. So I use it as a whiteboard for my students.

I use it for remote sessions. 

Lucidspark is just like being in an actual physical classroom, there's a whiteboard in the classroom. I use the Lucidspark whiteboard similarly to the way it's used in a classroom. I share my screen through Zoho Meeting and all my students can then see the whiteboard from Lucidspark. I use that to present my concept.

It's a really good whiteboard, it's not simple. It's like any other whiteboard. 

Lucidspark has other facilities and other tools, but I haven't explored any of those. I've stuck to using the whiteboard.

I only use the whiteboard and I'm not sure what other features are available. I haven't gone so deep and delved into the other features. 

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.

It's easy to use. 

The activity and engagement levels of users during sessions, when compared to in-person sessions, depends on who is engaging them. I find my students to be very engaged. They give their 100% to it. So it's been good. 

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

This would help when I'm teaching concepts and move on to something else if I want to go back to what I had shown earlier. It would help me to have a way to reach that.

I have been using Lucidspark for around a month. 

It's always available. I've never had any issues with that. 

It has served me well. It's been good. 

The setup was simple. I remember that it wasn't complicated, but I don't remember what they did for it. It took around five minutes to set up. 

I didn't evaluate other solutions. 

My advice would be to let it work. If you want something to stay, and you don't want it to be erased, take a screenshot, and save it. Many whiteboards have the ability to go back to what you already had.

I would rate Lucidspark a nine out of ten. 

I use Lucidspark to brainstorm ideas. Suppose I want to create a new dashboard or new visualization in Power BI or Tableau. Before doing that, I want to brainstorm how I want my visualization to be. For that purpose, I am using Lucidspark.

I usually brainstorm my ideas, e.g., what do I want to create? Once you have a certain view in your mind and if you can put that into a document or something else, then it helps when you try to create the visualization or any dashboards in the real world. You can create any visualization that you want. It definitely helps in that way.

It is quite flexible. It is simply drag and drop. It saves a lot of time. One of the good things is you can export whatever you are creating into a PDF or something else. Also, you can share your work with others so they can collaborate and make any changes, if they wish to.

I really like Lucidspark's user interface and intuitiveness. It is simple and flexible.

It has so many things. You can insert images, screenshots, etc. There are also a lot of templates for our use, which is a good thing. For example, if I have a particular plan and can find a new template relevant, then I base it on that. I just need to edit the text, etc.

It definitely helps when prioritizing things. For a business problem, you can create many different documents and easily compare them, then you can decide which one that you want to go forward with.

There are so many features that you can do. There is also a presentation builder where you can use the documents that you are creating as a presentation. 

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.

Recently, I requested a license from my company for this software. I have been using the tool for the past week.

In the last week, I haven't faced any kinds of issues or difficulties.

I haven't found any limitations or downsides. It provides you with everything that you need to brainstorm your ideas. 

There are many data scientists using this particular software in our company. Some are using Lucidspark, while some are also using Lucidchart,

I have not contacted the technical support.

I used to simply use PowerPoint, Paint, or something like that previously. This is the first time that I am using this kind of software.

In PowerPoint, you need a lot of effort if you want to create even a simple text box or insert images. So, it takes a lot of effort and is also very time-consuming. Whereas, with Lucidspark's interfaces, you can simply drag and drop whatever you want and quickly create anything that you want to create. This saves time and makes it easy to use.

The initial setup is very straightforward. You need to log into it, then you can simply start creating anything you want. There is no complexity.

I would definitely give it a nine out of 10. I really like it. I would recommend others to use this particular software, since it is intuitive, flexible, time-saving, and easy to use. It has a lot of features that definitely help.

I have not used the Collaborator Colors feature, but we will use it in the future.

We use Lucidspark as a tool to collaborate on organizing our platform architecture. The company I work for has a lot of different platforms and backend systems and we've used Lucidspark a lot to document what those platforms are, share it amongst our teams, and make sure everything looks correct. If there's feedback or changes, it's really easy to use this app to have that shared with everybody.

An example of the use case would be a request to show the entire structure of our company, data structure, and platform structure. I would create a chart with all that information. Usually, it would be from a sketch or a whiteboard drawing, and then I would use Lucidspark to make it that much more clean, clear, and editable.

It's easy to collaborate and it's easy to share amongst various team members. I myself am a product designer, and I found that in the past, as a project designer it's hard to work with engineers in terms of finding a product that satisfies what I need and want to do with the project designer and what they need and want as engineers. This tool is a good combination of both, and I feel like it's super easy to use. It makes a lot of sense. It's simple enough, but also has enough complicated features to make it what we want it to be.  

The usability is overall super straightforward and it makes a lot of sense after you spend some time in it.

The user interface is not intuitive because I have used other applications previously, and Lucidspark took a little bit more time. Once I figured out how to save shapes, that was super helpful, but it did take probably one or two times to get there. Once I understood it, it made a lot of sense. I did watch a quick tutorial, which was helpful just to get a sense of how to make some changes and update everything. 

I've only been using it for a very short amount of time. It's pretty new to me. I've used other products similar to it before, but I'm on a new team and so we're using this product to check it out and see how it would work from a collaborative perspective.

It seems very stable. I haven't heard of any issues with it. I know it's been tried and true with our team.

It seems to scale really well. It seems to be really easy to modify, expand on, and add on to. Currently, we have about 60 users and their roles range from data analysts, backend engineers, front-end engineers, platforms engineers, and one product designer. 

I've never had to engage with their tech support but there seems to be a lot of resources.

We were using Overflow and were using it mostly just because it was familiar to us and it was pretty simple. But we switched over because Lucid is far more robust in terms of what it could do and is more geared towards the engineering team. It was also more affordable for our team.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was really easy to jump right in and figure things out. It took a little bit of time to find out some more specific things that I wanted to do, but it was pretty easy to understand and figure out.

Our engineering team does the deployment, if necessary.

We needed about three members that have access to deploy. All of their roles are various types of engineers.

Lucidspark is being used within a small portion of our team relatively extensively, but we do have plans to expand on it and provide more access to more teammates at my company. The growth will be slow over time but it surely has been growing.

It has enabled us to have the ability to ramp people up more quickly and educate employees more effectively. Even though we only have five or six of us using Lucid, we have a lot of our teammates still viewing and engaging with it. That has been extremely valuable to better document and educate our teammates on various topics and information.

My advice would be to really check out all the features, see all that I can do. Understand that it's a really powerful tool and it could really add a lot of value to what your team does and how they structure everything.

I learned how important it is to have tools that allow my teammates to be able to see what's going on, make comments, make improvements, and to do it in a way that doesn't bottleneck. It has been eye-opening to see how those tools enabled that without having a ton of back and forth. It makes my job a lot easier.

I would rate Lucidspark an eight out of ten. It's a really great product. I do think that there are still possibilities for improvement and extension, or just overall ad-ons to make the user experience a little bit cleaner. But in terms of what it can do and all the additions it has, I think there's a ton of potential.

My primary use case for this solution was educational. I used Lucidspark to practice design thinking with several other students. It's a good place for collaborative work. 

Some of the students I collaborated with were interested in product management, a big part of which entails thinking from the customer's perspective and figuring out what the solutions to a problem should be.

As a group, we used Lucidspark to collaborate and share our thoughts on potential problems and solutions. Think of it like a human design-thinking workshop.

Lucidspark helped us prioritize ideas, which was very important for us. We did a workshop and, as part of that, we were trying to act as product managers and figure out which solutions should be implemented, so idea prioritization played a major role.

The ability to group ideas automatically does save time. For example, four people can put their thoughts down and Lucidspark will help them see the commonalities and patterns among their entries.

Lucidspark's ability to automatically group ideas saves time and helps users prioritize. This Lucidspark feature quickly distills the entire group's ideas into different buckets. The group can then make a call on what to first solve for. This is how we used Lucidspark. We knew that we would come up with multiple ideas but we wanted to see which buckets most people would fall into. 

This feature is helpful if, for example, you are trying to identify the problems associated with a particular product and prioritize which to work on first.

With Lucidspark, you really don't have to keep track of everything because so much is automated. The solution enables you to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and less time organizing. This was important for us. Had we been using some other solution, like Notepad, for example, a lot more time would have been spent in writing things down. With Lucidspark, we spent very little time doing that. It definitely improved our productivity.

Lucidspark is very customizable. We spent more time in ideation rather than making sure we were writing in a way that is clear and that nothing was lost.

Overall, I found it very intuitive and easy to use. I didn't find it difficult at all. I appreciated Lucidspark's integration with Lucidchart. 

I found the whiteboard very customizable. You can create different stages of a flow chart, for example. You can play around with a lot of variables. Initially, the default structure of the whiteboard was not useful for us. However, we were quickly able to change the structure. I found the whiteboard easy to use and change. It’s easy to collaborate using this product. Also, multiple people can use the whiteboard at the same time. For example, I can be filling in something while my classmates fill in something else. This is helpful.

We used Lucidspark’s Collaborator Colors feature. I've never come across anything like it. It's a good solution for collaborative brainstorming. I don't think there is any other solution where I could do collaborative brainstorming this well.

We also used the sticky notes quite often. We would write our thoughts on a sticky note and then circle back in five minutes to discuss what we put together.

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

I've used Lucidspark a couple of times as part of some group activities. 

I did not run into any issues with stability. 

Lucidspark seems scalable; like any number of people could use it. We've used it in groups of five to six people. I plan to increase my usage.

I have not used their tech support yet. 

I never knew something like Lucidspark existed before. For previous brainstorming sessions, I would just use a projector and open up Notepad. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It only took a few minutes. 

Initially, it was straightforward to use and play around with the whiteboard. I was immediately able to start working on it. It didn't take me more than two or three minutes to get started.

We implemented it ourselves. 

I am still using a free trial. 

I did not evaluate other options. 

Lucidspark is a great product. I would definitely recommend it to anybody who's thinking of doing some collaborative brainstorming work. The solution can also be used by individuals working on big projects. 

I didn't notice a difference between remote and in-person sessions. Using Lucidspark, it felt like all of us were working in-person on a huge whiteboard. You could see in real-time what everyone else was doing.

I haven’t used Lucidspark’s Slack integration, but it seems useful and natural.

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.