Lucidspark Reviews

I mostly use it to make mind maps and some process charts for the place I work. Sort of like work processes, the flow of things, so everyone knows what you need to do.

I'm pretty sure that in the coming weeks when I start to use it more on a regular basis, maybe every day or a couple of times a week, that's probably when I will figure it out more. But for the time being, it's been really good.

We have started to integrate some stuff on Slack, but individually on its own, and then we've also started Lucidspark. At some point down the road, there will be an integration between the two programs, but we haven't started that yet. We're trying to move everything to Slack.

Now, if we need to have a project on hand, if it's a weekly project, or if it's a one-time project, all the processes are started right there. So instead of having to call the whole team and brief them step-by-step, you just send over the chart. Then from the colors and from the shapes, everyone in the team is quite familiar with the shapes and the colors. Everyone would know it, you wouldn't have to waste time. You could maybe save two hours of a meeting trying to explain everything to everyone.

We have only been using it for a week now but it has already made things so much more convenient. It's easier to see rather than just talking about it and sending each other notes.

It enables us to prioritize ideas. It's extremely important that we can do so because an idea is just an idea unless you actually decide to take the initiative and the effort to execute it and this has helped to do so.

We can also spend more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps and less time organizing them. We spend much less time. It saves hours of trying to explain stuff and back and forth.

If our effectiveness was at around a five or six before this, the process would have definitely helped move it to an eight or nine. There are still some improvements that need to be made, but I think once we actually make use of every single feature on the program, then we would be able to move up better. I have not seen a program like this in my past. And I know for a fact that in any other company, it would have helped, regardless of the field that the company is in, it would've helped definitely.

I like the freedom it gives you, how easily everything flows, and the fact that everything has labels on it, so the different shapes have different things. At first, when you start using it, you probably wouldn't know what every shape means. But as I go through it, I'll see a shape like the diamond and I'll know that a decision has been made and it needs to be sent for approval. So it's either a yes or a no, a pass or a fail. It makes things a little bit easier. 

I also like that you can color code it, so you know which departments are supposed to handle which parts of the process.

The user interface and intuitiveness are pretty good for what I've been using it for. It's pretty good, very easy to use, and very easy to understand. I like that they have a lot of tutorial videos that you can watch, so you're not just stranded there and trying to figure everything out for yourself.

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

You can put anything down, you can add sticky notes, and then you can add certain hotspots. The arrows are easier to match as well because you can draw them from anywhere.

I use the Collaborator Colors feature. I've only just started incorporating that but it has been a blessing. It's very important where I'm working because it lets the whole team know the processes and which department is in charge of which section. So you know how crucial this department is for the next step to carry on and for the whole thing to run smoothly, whether it's a project or whether it's a weekly process.

I have used Lucidspark for remote and virtual brainstorming sessions. It was amazing. I've actually never done anything in person with this particular place that I'm working at, so I don't know if I'll be able to answer that. But it has definitely made virtual things a lot easier to do because otherwise, I'd be stuck doing this chart on Illustrator, which would be a pain.

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

I have only been using Lucidspark aggressively for about a week, but I have been introduced to it for about three weeks, so I've been playing around with it. It is extremely user-friendly. It is one of the most user-friendly tools I've ever used to make a process chart. I've used a lot of other tools before, like MindManager but Lucidspark was really easy to work with. The tools that they have at deciding the shapes, adding arrows, and the fact that you can customize everything was really good.

Stability is pretty good because there were a couple of times where I accidentally, and this was to no fault of the app at all, I accidentally turned off my browser. I sometimes click on the mouse and because of my mouse pad and because my laptop is a touch screen, I would accidentally exit the browser mid-type or while trying to drag an arrow somewhere. And when I open it up, it has automatically saved anything, so I just start off from where I stopped, which is great.

Scalability is pretty good. There's definitely room for improvement, but other than that, I think it's really good.

Everyone is based in management positions and giving out rules to their underlings, and technically everyone uses it. It's mostly to identify what your roles are for different processes.

I'm using it quite frequently. For the past week, I've been using it maybe every day, but that's because I've been trying to build a process. There is a possibility that we'll always be creating new processes, there'll always be new projects to work for. I think we'll be using it quite frequently. It really depends on my superiors and what they decide.

On a scale where five is the highest, I would rate technical support a 4.5 out of five. 

I didn't use another solution before Lucidspark. 

Initially, the setup was very complex, but after watching the videos, actually continuing to use it, studying every inch of it, you're just clicking around, and just running around inside there to see what things mean. It got a lot easier after that.

It took five to six hours.

In terms of the strategy, I had a project to create the process for, and I did, we just went through it one by one. That's where it started to become more user-friendly to me because I started to understand everything more.

We did not use an integrator for the setup.

My advice would be to give it a try, it's actually pretty good. It's really good. It makes things a lot easier.

Watch the tutorials, it helps.

I would rate Lucidspark an 8.5 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.

So far, I have only used it for making flowcharts.

I find it a whole lot easier for making a flowchart process. Previously, I would use PowerPoint and then have to share the file. It's a lot nicer for collaboration.

I like that it saves everything for me in the cloud, and I can go back and change things. 

I also like how it has different shapes for the different actions on flowcharts.

I also found it very intuitive. I opened it up one day and I saw, "Button" and I didn't even have to look up how to use it.

There might be a way to do this in Lucidspark, but if there were a way to leave comments for internal collaborators, that would be good. Let's say we were brainstorming something. It would be helpful to have comments that we could see, but if we were to share a view with someone else, they wouldn't see those behind-the-scenes comments.

Also, it would be nice if they had something that I could share with co-workers, maybe a quick five-minute or something that shows, "Hey, this is the utility. You guys can do this."

I have not used their technical support.

I used PowerPoint, but I don't really find that comparable.

I went to a little webinar and checked out Lucidspark, after I found Lucidchart randomly, one day, when I was working with my Microsoft 365. I needed to make a flowchart for something and Lucidchart worked really great and it was super-easy. Then I got an invite to try out Lucidspark, and it seems really cool. I haven't been able to test it with any of my co-workers, and I don't know if anyone else at our company uses it, but it does look really interesting.

I honestly didn't even know that something like this existed, and I think it could be really helpful.

As far as functionality and usefulness go, it's great. I would rate it an eight out of 10, personally. But in the company I work for, even if it's the most amazing technology solution that will do everything that someone needs, rolling out something new and different is hard sometimes. So the eight isn't really so much about the product itself, it's more about how easy this would actually be to get people onboard with.