Lucidchart vs erwin Evolve comparison

The compared Quest Software and Lucid Software solutions aren't in the same category. Quest Software is ranked #14 in AM , and holds a 3.3% mindshare in the category. Lucid Software is ranked #2 in MMS , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 22.3% mindshare. Additionally, 81% of Quest Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Lucid Software users who would recommend it.

erwin Evolve

Read 19 erwin Evolve reviews

1,706 Views
1,194 Comparison Views

81% willing to recommend

Lucidchart

Read 62 Lucidchart reviews

4,963 Views
794 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

erwin Evolve

Lucidchart

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Lucidchart and erwin Evolve based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about SAP LeanIX, Quest Software, MEGA International and others in Enterprise Architecture Management.

To learn more, read our detailed Enterprise Architecture Management Report (Updated: January 2026).

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Enterprise Architecture Management

January 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

erwin Evolve

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Enterprise Architecture Management (14th), Business Process Design (21st)

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

erwin Evolve and Lucidchart aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. erwin Evolve is designed for Enterprise Architecture Management and holds a mindshare of 3.3%, up 2.9% compared to last year.
Lucidchart, on the other hand, focuses on Mind Mapping Software, holds 22.3% mindshare, down 22.6% since last year.

Enterprise Architecture Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
erwin Evolve	3.3%
LeanIX	9.5%
Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect	8.6%
Other	78.6%

Enterprise Architecture Management

Mind Mapping Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Lucidchart	22.3%
Visio	24.8%
draw.io	13.6%
Other	39.3%

Mind Mapping Software

Featured Reviews

Asish Sahu

SPM at Infosys

The reverse engineering capabilities are quite useful.

Evolve is primarily focused on the entity's licenses diagrams, but it would be nice if erwin could integrate case development, so that it shows the ER diagram plus certain inputs on the use cases and how the data is used. That deviates somewhat from the overall scope, so maybe they could call it a different product.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Support for a broad range of data sources from relational to big data to the Cloud."

"I have not seen capabilities for web-sharing and interaction with the architecture from any other supplier. It's a great capability..."

"Workgroup Repository collection of data models allows research across models without worry about platform incompatibilities and provides easy KPIs about corporate data assets."

"The most valuable features for us are impact analysis, where I can easily visualize the impact of change."

"One of the most valuable features is the website that sits on top of the database. There's a database of objects and how they are related, and you can make views and diagrams and visual elements out of that information on the website. The website is the part that is called Evolve and we use the Evolve Designer and publish the website out to our employees. They can click around and navigate and search, etc."

"By placing the data and the metadata into a model, which is what the tool does, you gain the abilities for linkages between different objects in the model, linkages that you cannot get on paper or with Visio or PowerPoint. That is a huge discriminator."

"The feature that stands out for me is the ease of configuring objects and the screens to show them. It's really easy to add a new type of object in this reference. Creating a new type of object, using it, and evolving it a little bit in terms of what we can document about it are the main features that made us decide to use this provider."

"Evolve is like a tank. You can do whatever you want with the solution, but you need to customize it. I think that it's not very aligned with the framework for enterprise architecture. MEGA is focused on these enterprise architectures, but it's only for that. With Evolve, you can do everything you want with professional services."

More erwin Evolve pros

"The interface is easy for a layperson to use and adapt to."

"The architecture and brainstorming features worked exceptionally well for me; no one in the organization had used it for brainstorming, and my implementation really helped with the visuals and capturing people's opinions and divergent thought processes."

"The ability to have more than one person editing at the same time is the most valuable feature. You can have one diagram and have multiple users on it at the same time. We haven't been able to do that on other software. So that's the main reason we moved to Lucidchart."

"I really like the drag and drop feature because it makes the work easier. It is very easy to use. All the pieces are very good. All the icons and all the fields are available in the left panel. So, I just click, drag, and then edit a piece. When I showed it to my managing director, he was very inspired, and he also got a premium account for himself."

"I love the fact that you can just integrate a drawing into Google Slides. I build a lot of visuals in Lucidchart, and then, rather than sharing them directly from Lucidchart, I just build Google Slides decks for senior management, and I link the Lucidchart on the cloud version to a slide image. That makes it easy. This way, I can build in one tool and show in another."

"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."

"The interface is really good and it is very easy to use."

"Documenting things such as processes, systems, and new teams has been my primary use case. Lucidchart is really, really valuable for its ability to create a process chart from start to end. The web app makes it easy because everything is similar to other tools like Visio but Lucidchart feels a little bit more intuitive. It has been easy to use the web app. I definitely have learned a lot about how to bring in my own graphics or images in place of some of the shapes and I'm able to create and use the arrows within the processes, so it definitely has been useful for me."

More Lucidchart pros

Cons

"It could have had a more streamlined navigation. It seemed that when you went to the explorer panel, there were just so many different ways of doing the work that I could not remember, "How did I do this? How did I get to that point in that model to get back to it?" If I wanted to build a new one, where do I start? It just seemed like there was such a smorgasbord of ways of doing it that it was just overwhelming."

"The way that we are using it for application management, we have several KPIs. We want to follow and monitor them regarding a number of solutions. We cannot calculate this today. We would like real-time calculations along with the KPIs in order to improve the user experience. We would like the tool to be able to display this, not only as signals, but as charts."

"I would like to see an improvement in the output of the solution."

"Evolve is primarily focused on the entity's licenses diagrams, but it would be nice if erwin could integrate case development, so that it shows the ER diagram plus certain inputs on the use cases and how the data is used. That deviates somewhat from the overall scope, so maybe they could call it a different product."

"If it had fewer features to model all kinds of architecture, it would be less complicated."

"The solution needs to focus on allowing for more integrations."

"They have improved the search engine a little bit but it can always be improved more. The more data you put inside it, the more you want to use it."

"Add some ability to do conditional Visualization on the models and in reports (some ideas) – maybe as a specialized Theme or Diagram or Display."

More erwin Evolve cons

"What I do find extremely frustrating is that when I've sent the sheet to non-license holders, you have to create an account. You create a username and password. The path taken to create that account is so confusing that everyone thinks that they have to give their credit card number, and then they're reluctant. They don't want to go through the sheet."

"One area for improvement is the fact that I had to create two sheets. I had to create a process flow diagram, and I had to create a timeline. I wasn't able to do that in one sheet. If they could add that kind of feature, where you could input a timeline and different types of templates into one worksheet, that would be really useful. I had to include two and then cut and paste, and that was an extra step for me."

"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..."

"Lucidchart subset their older components or something like that had happened. I don't entirely know the totality of it, but we were forced to upgrade to a different integration with Lucid than what we had. I've had a lot of frustrations with that because I've lost a lot of diagrams. I can't get them back and I'm getting pop-ups that are showing me that our data will be loading and I can't run four or five years of my engineering diagrams"

"Wireframing can be improved. For mock-ups and wireframing, only 10% of what is required is there. If they can develop this feature, it would be much better because it will then provide everything. Currently, we can design network diagrams, processes, etc., but we should also be able to do wireframing."

"This might already be a feature, but I remember sometimes when we're just all viewing, if you accidentally click, then there's an arrow that pops up, and you have to go back and delete it. A lot of times there are accidental arrows being drawn when really we're just trying to present to each other."

"It would be helpful if there were different options available for organizing the folders, such as having a high-level display with pictures."

"They should continue to bring in more shapes. For example, I saw something cool the other day that was a timeline and in between each step, there was a circle. I thought that that was very clean and that's something that I could see myself using. Lucidchart could come up with more visualizations. I'm not a designer so I would like to have more visuals. That would make my job easier because it would make my job much more professional looking but without having to be a designer myself."

More Lucidchart cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Unless you are a one person shop – always go with the Workgroup edition and Concurrent licensing."

"Yearly, our cost is €100,000."

"The licensing enables you to differentiate between people who edit the content and the people who consume it. We are able to keep the licensing costs down by keeping the "contributor" licenses to a minimum, and we then just roll out the content in a read-only version for the rest of our users."

"I think erwin is quite expensive. I have difficulty selling the portal, in fact."

"I estimate that we pay between $40,000 and $50,000 a year for the solution, not including the upfront costs to buy things the first time."

"The cost is something like $15,000, per license. But I haven't looked at those numbers in three years. It was over $100,000 to initially set everything up and get it all configured."

"On a yearly basis, our licensing costs are 50,000 euro. There are no additional costs because we are on a SaaS model."

"At €167 per user per year, the pricing is slightly higher than Visio, but it's worth it."

"I was using the free version of Lucidchart, which was very helpful."

"I was using the paid version, but at $12 USD per month, I canceled the plan because it was a little bit too expensive for me."

"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."

"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."

"I pay $95 a year for it. It seems like a reasonable price."

"Lucidchart's pricing model is not excessive, as compared to similar products. It is pretty much in line with everyone else."

"The pricing is very competitive. It is more cost-effective than some competing products, such as Visio."

More Lucidchart pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Performing Arts

10%

Government

Manufacturing Company

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	7
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	12

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

Questions from the Community

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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 ...

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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...

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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...

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Comparisons

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect vs erwin Evolve

Compared 12% of the time

SAP PowerDesigner vs erwin Evolve

Compared 8% of the time

IDERA ER/Studio vs erwin Evolve

Compared 7% of the time

erwin Data Modeler vs erwin Evolve

Compared 6% of the time

SAP Signavio Process Manager vs erwin Evolve

Compared 6% of the time

More erwin Evolve 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

Visual Paradigm vs Lucidchart

Compared 6% of the time

More Lucidchart Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

erwin Evolve

January 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Lucidchart

January 2026

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Also Known As

erwin EA, erwin Business Process, erwin Enterprise Architecture

No data available

Overview

erwin Evolve provides comprehensive graphical support for handling large data models. It offers features such as metadata access, version control, and model comparison, enhancing operational reports and system analytics through its collaborative web-driven design.

erwin Evolve facilitates reverse engineering and database integration, fostering collaboration and process exploration through its web interface. Customizable and easy to configure, it supports workflow configuration and architectural modeling. Users can utilize its capabilities for developing industry models, managing transformation programs, and presenting standard operating procedures. Despite its strengths, there are demands for improved integration, enhanced UML support, and a more modern user experience. Users also express challenges with legacy system updates and call for better connectors and collaborative features.

What are the key features of erwin Evolve?

Graphical Support for Large Data Models: Provides visualization capabilities for complex data structures.
Metadata Access via API: Allows integration and management of metadata across platforms.
Version Control and Model Comparison: Enhances tracking and analysis of model changes.
Collaborative Web Interface: Facilitates teamwork and process exploration remotely.
Architectural Modeling: Supports the design and configuration of enterprise architecture.

What are the benefits and ROI of using erwin Evolve?

Customization and Ease of Configuration: Reduces setup time and adapts to specific organizational workflows.
Enhanced Accessibility and Mobile Usability: Offers access to critical information on the go.
Operational Reports Creation: Generates insights and facilitates informed decision-making.
System Analytics Handling: Provides robust tools for analyzing system performance and integration.

Data-driven organizations in sectors like finance and healthcare implement erwin Evolve for data warehousing, enterprise architecture, and business process modeling. They leverage its capabilities for cataloging architectural elements, linking to CMDBs, analyzing system interfaces, and describing business processes. Utilization extends to IT solution registration, business capability planning, and strategic modeling, with frequent deployments on cloud platforms to support transformation initiatives.

Quest Software

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

AT&T, Bank of America, Chevron, Duke University, ESPN, Fidelity, GE, JP Morgan Chase, KPMG, McGraw Hill, NASA, Pfizer, Royal Bank of Scotland, Teradata, Union Pacific, Vodafone, Wells Fargo.

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

Buyer's Guide

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January 2026

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