ARIS BPA vs Lucidchart comparison

The compared Software AG and Lucid Software solutions aren't in the same category. Software AG is ranked #6 in BPD , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 6.7% mindshare in the category. Lucid Software is ranked #2 in MMS , with an average rating of 8.1, and holds a 22.7% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Software AG users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Lucid Software users who would recommend it.

ARIS BPA

Read 69 ARIS BPA reviews

5,300 Views
3,498 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Lucidchart

Read 62 Lucidchart reviews

4,970 Views
746 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

ARIS BPA

Lucidchart

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between ARIS BPA and Lucidchart based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Camunda, Microsoft, Bizagi and others in Business Process Design.

To learn more, read our detailed Business Process Design Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Business Process Design

January 2026

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Helped 881,282 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

ARIS BPA

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Process Design (6th), Business Process Management (BPM) (10th)

Lucidchart

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

8.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Mind Mapping Software (2nd), Visual Collaboration Platforms (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

ARIS BPA and Lucidchart aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. ARIS BPA is designed for Business Process Design and holds a mindshare of 6.7%, down 8.1% compared to last year.
Lucidchart, on the other hand, focuses on Mind Mapping Software, holds 22.7% mindshare, up 22.5% since last year.

Business Process Design Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
ARIS BPA	6.7%
Visio	11.3%
Bizagi	10.3%
Other	71.7%

Business Process Design

Mind Mapping Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Lucidchart	22.7%
Visio	26.7%
draw.io	14.0%
Other	36.6%

Mind Mapping Software

Featured Reviews

BeenishMustafa

Consultant at KAFD DMC

Has improved process modeling and analysis while supporting integration with organizational data

The process design in ARIS BPA does help with our operational efficiency. What we are doing is object library management for various kinds of objects that we are using in ARIS BPA during our process modeling. We are using that to do a lot of analysis on how many times a system is being used in how many processes, who are the major stakeholders, and if we enhance one system, how is it going to impact other processes and integrated processes. This is helping us a lot. Everything related to ARIS BPA is helping us with regards to enhanced processes, strengthened controls, identifying risks, assessing process capabilities, and identifying where the gaps are and what kinds of activities within the processes are automated and manual. We are doing a lot of things with regards to the processes as it is at our heart. Processes are one thing and then we have different kinds of things which are related to it, such as SLAs, guidelines, and policy. We are identifying areas of improvement in other documents as well.

Read full review

Faizuddin Shaik

Principal Application Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Visual planning has improved migration mapping but now needs broader cloud icon support

In my opinion, the best features Lucidchart offers include the toolkits they provide, such as the icons for AWS. These features allow us to use proper service icons rather than simple plain boxes for everything, helping us effectively map out the actual services instead of getting confused. The AWS icons and toolkits make my diagramming process easier and more effective because it is easy to explain and show to my customers which service is being used for a particular component. For instance, when using Amazon S3 for object storage or Amazon RDS for SQL, I can clearly indicate those services. If I need to show containers, I can pick those specific icons to demonstrate that, making it easier than reading it within a box. Lucidchart also offers other specific UML diagrams that I could use, including class diagrams, before I get into the code-level details.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"ARIS has a good collaboration function. You create a portal where any authorized users can work on the models. There are simple flows for making and approving changes."

"The maintenance capabilities of ARIS BPM and the strong underlying database are particularly valuable."

"I like everything about ARIS BPA. I've used it for a long time and it's a fantastic tool. There is a list of things ARIS has that other solutions do not have."

"The most valuable features of ARIS BPA are the centralized repository and the automatic rendering of diagrams."

"The simulation engine and SAP integration are technically very robust."

"It has the ability to scale up, as well as integrate with other systems within the organization to get real-time information from dashboards and reports."

"ARIS provides the basic foundation for any digital transformation an organization decides to take."

"It provides the discovery functionality, and you can have a simulation on top of it to get your design corrected to ensure that it is within the right state of parameters. It is a complete package that you can use from strategy to execution because you have the design layer, and within the design, you can also do analytics."

More ARIS BPA pros

"There is no alternative to Lucidchart if you want to describe a five-step process with bullet points. I believe every person who ever worked with PowerPoint on any type of documentation and then thought about which tool would actually help to describe what they're trying to do but without the words, would come up with Lucidchart."

"For documenting processes and systems, I would rate the solution a nine out of 10. I'm not aware of any other software that is as usable as this, because of the templates. They make documenting these things really easy."

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

"In general, the usability is great. You have a ton of customization options with different colors, different borders, different thicknesses of lines, different types of arrows, et cetera. There's so much variety. You can really make a chart with all sorts of color-coding, and color charts in different colors, link them together, for example, or use different types of arrows for different types of links between the chart elements. That variety, while not a specific feature, is really useful. If you want to make a chart, you can basically do anything."

"Documenting complicated workflows and technology integrations so that we can go back to it has also been a benefit. And without having to dig into a lot of technical, the codes, the documents, I can simply understand on a high level what's happening."

"It is a very effective tool for documenting processes and using it has improved our efficiency significantly."

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

"It gives information about the roles and responsibilities of any architecture system and the exact system flow, business flow, or process flow. It also gives information about how the development team should take it forward. It shows the gap analysis in the flow charts and makes it easy to define the actor and his roles and responsibilities in the organization."

More Lucidchart pros

Cons

"I had this decentralization mission where I had some friendly fights with the consultants of Software AG. My opinion was the business department should be able to publish their processes and do all their evaluation stuff in ARCM themselves. It has to be a one stop shop. I want a one stop shop to go from ARIS BPM to ARIS ARCM, because having everything go through that would be an improvement due to the inputs that we made with Software AG. They will make it possible that the trigger sent from BPM to ARCM will start their object generation."

"There are some things in the collaboration module that could be improved a little, such as the functionality which dynamically pushes notifications to interested people when a process changes during the Release Cycle Management workflow."

"Migration to the next release is very tricky. You can't do it without support from ARIS or from a software kit. And it takes a lot of time and a lot of money to migrate. My impression is that a lot of companies do not migrate regularly because of that issue."

"The product is difficult to use for someone without prior knowledge of working with it. It requires a certain level of administration training."

"I had a hard time with ARIS's access and licensing policy. It requires you to pay for each step you want to take forward with the solution."

"Integration with third-party tools should be improved (e.g. based on APIs)."

"Simulation is one area that is a bit complex."

"I find it difficult to access the database as I want with direct querying."

More ARIS BPA cons

"I don't know if I will be able to add some animations if I want to. I believe the problem may be the program's process flows but if I want to transfer it into a PPP or any other document, I can only do image transfer."

"Sometimes, I have created charts with a lot of layers, which locks down parts of the chart and hides parts of the chart to edit it. If they have a better way to deal with specific layers when it gets complex, then that would be helpful. I would like to see something like an illustrator program, where they have a pallet of these layers that I want and don't want as well as being able to see each layer individually. That is the one thing that could be helpful."

"They should make it more user-friendly. The only option is either to use the existing template with already existing colors and gradients. If you want to do custom colors and gradients, then it's too complicated to use and should be simplified."

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

"I would like an on-premises version of the software that I can just download and use. I think that it's easier that way."

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

"The main improvement I would like to see is for them to improve the help section on the flow charts or on the formatting."

"I would like to have access to more colorful and more vibrant icons."

More Lucidchart cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a concurrent license system."

"Their license model is really difficult to understand, and licenses are quite expensive."

"ARIS Express is free."

"The setup cost and pricing depend on the license (Modeler, Viewer, Administrator)."

"Prices are high. However, they are worth it if the organization utilizes the tool to its full potential."

"It is well worth the investment in the enterprise."

"The price could be better."

"This is absolutely not the cheapest solution in the market, but for large companies, the price is fine."

More ARIS BPA pricing and cost advice

"Pricing-wise, it is pretty fair. I don't really know what group pricing looks like, but right now, I pay $10 a month for my Lucid subscription. One thing I would say is that I do worry about my bosses being okay with paying $10 a month for every single employee because we would have around 20 people. It makes me a little nervous about whether they are going to pay $200 a month for people to be able to use this software. At the same time, from where I'm sitting, it's totally worth it. We save a thousand dollars from using this software. It's still a no-brainer."

"I had a quick glimpse of it. It was about 100 Canadian Dollars a year for just me. I don't know if there are any additional costs."

"The price and licensing are good."

"The pricing and licensing are fine. It has a lot of features that I prefer over some of the other programs, which is good. Being that it is web-based, I feel that it is acceptable that it's on a monthly pay basis. However, I think I pay on an annual basis, which is fine with me."

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

"We signed up for the month-to-month and it charged us all at once for the whole year. I believe we signed up for the $7.99 one. I think that was the price."

"There is a nominal charge for the paid version of the product. They have a free version available and from what I could see, there was not much difference between it and the pro version."

"Pricing comes in at about $100 for a year's subscription, which is very reasonable if this is a tool that you will use more than once."

More Lucidchart pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Business Process Design solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	32
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	47

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	26
Midsize Enterprise	14
Large Enterprise	25

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ARIS BPA?

The most valuable features of ARIS BPA are its flexibility and reporting.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ARIS BPA?

It is a bit expensive regarding ARIS BPA. However, ARIS BPA does save a lot of effort because this is one tool which can be used for multiple purposes and the viewers have the capability to perform...

See all answers

What needs improvement with ARIS BPA?

We are not using any what-if scenario features in ARIS BPA. Currently, we are not using the performance monitoring and compliance checks features in ARIS BPA. We have plans to use them, but current...

See all answers

LucidChart vs LucidSpark for brainstorming sessions over Zoom

Hi @Krista Thompson - Yes, LucidSpark is a much more nimble and, in some ways, user-friendly tool than LucidChart. LucidSpark is designed to do a better job managing multiple users participating ...

See all answers

Do you recommend Lucidchart?

I definitely recommend Lucidchart. I feel it is one of the top visual collaboration platforms that’s available on the market. Out of all the solutions I have tried, it is by far the best for diagra...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Lucidchart?

In terms of pricing, setup cost, and licensing, I feel that Lucidchart has provided us with good plans, as we have purchased it through AWS Marketplace. We got team plans that run around nine to te...

See all answers

Comparisons

SAP Signavio Process Manager vs ARIS BPA

Compared 19% of the time

Camunda vs ARIS BPA

Compared 8% of the time

ADONIS vs ARIS BPA

Compared 6% of the time

Bizagi vs ARIS BPA

Compared 5% of the time

BiZZdesign HoriZZon vs ARIS BPA

Compared 2% of the time

More ARIS BPA Competitors

Figma vs Lucidchart

Compared 16% of the time

Visio vs Lucidchart

Compared 14% of the time

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect vs Lucidchart

Compared 10% of the time

Bizagi vs Lucidchart

Compared 7% of the time

Miro Business - Enterprise vs Lucidchart

Compared 2% of the time

More Lucidchart Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ARIS BPA

January 2026

Download ARIS BPA product report

Buyer's Guide

Lucidchart

January 2026

Download Lucidchart product report

Also Known As

ARIS, ARIS BPM

No data available

Overview

ARIS is the market-leading solution for professional business process management and modeling. Whether you want to document the "as-is" state of your operations for quality or certification reasons or design the "to-be" in terms of continuous improvement in your transformation program, ARIS is the best choice for establishing a single source of truth regarding all process excellence topics in your organization. It is for any organization looking to digitally transform their business, increase operational excellence and customer experience and ensure compliance in execution. ARIS helps you to make the most out of your processes with Process Mining, Risk & Compliance Management, RPA and much more.

What makes the difference?

The most comprehensive platform for process excellence in the market
Easy to use
Covers business & IT architecture from all angles
Full flexibility and >100 diagram types
Customer-driven development based on best practices
Strong partner ecosystem

ARIS is the market-leading solution for any organization and ideally suited to digitally transform the organization, increase operational excellence and customer experience and ensure compliance in execution.

Software AG

Our online diagram application makes it easy to sketch and share professional flowchart diagrams. From brainstorming to project management, we support all of your communication needs. That’s why millions of users choose Lucidchart.

Lucid Software

Sample Customers

Tesco, Weifu, Airbus, Siemens, Proximus, Alicorp, Sekerbank, Bancor, Philips,Sky, Emirates NBD, Dubai Municipality, Suva, U.S. Army, Australia Post, Westfalen Weser Energie - ARIS serves customers across all industries and of every size worldwide. Companies trust ARIS as the market leader for process excellence with more than 30 years of experience in the market, 10 million users worldwide, from 1 user companies to the Fortune 500.

Google, Salesforce, Adobe, Whirlpool, Uber, Wal Mart, Pearson, Twitch, Riot Games, Western Union, Trimble, Starbucks

Buyer's Guide

Business Process Design

January 2026

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