Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Lucidchart vs Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect vs Visio comparison

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

Mind Mapping Software
Enterprise Architecture Management
Business Process Design
 

Featured Reviews

MichaelChirinian - PeerSpot reviewer
Intuitive, integrates well, and is a great way to change text into visual ideas
I'm not a super user, and there might be a way of doing it that I haven't explored, but I was looking for some specific icons that are just standard icons, and I found the icon library to be very focused on architecture icons. It didn't have as many standard or generic icons. Another thing that somewhat irritated me is the fact that there is a paste function in the menu, but when you right-click and select paste, it tells you that you can't use paste. You must press Command-V or Apple-V to paste. They give you a menu option to paste, but every time you use that, they say, "We don't accept it." On top of that, normally, you'd have an option for paste or paste values, but when you use the paste function, you don't have that capability. So, to copy text from one place, I have to use Command-V to paste it, but if I don't like the format, I've got to go back and do copy style and then paste style on top of that. It is a small detail, but when you're doing diagrams, it is annoying that they don't support paste values. It is a small irk. I'm not penalizing it, and I still think it is a five-star product. In terms of other bigger things, I don't really have any comments or criticism so far.
Milan Sterba - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient documentation generation through organized model structure with a good price-performance ratio
Whenever I begin a new project with Sparx, I have to spend time training people on how to use it since it is not straightforward. Although it's a powerful product with plenty of features, it's not easy for even experienced users to find their way without guidance. This is not the most user-friendly solution.
Tugrul TASCI - PeerSpot reviewer
We have seen return on investment in the form of time savings but should have more design tools
I am generally using Visio to create some diagrams Visio should implement more complex tools or graphics to facilitate processing and use flexible templates. It should allow users to easily drag and drop some previously created diagrams. The tools supplied or provided are very basic, and there…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Lucidchart enables me to put down on paper what I was visualizing in my head. It makes it more shareable than only using words."
"Ease of use is especially critical because if I am conducting brainstorming sessions with my team, I have to be able to quickly put things on the monitor so that I don't lose their attention and focus. Ease of use is definitely helpful when I do that... The fact that I don't get lost within the software and am able to quickly generate visuals onscreen, so that it doesn't break the momentum, is a huge win."
"Lucidchart's capabilities for visualizing and understanding process flows or workflows is excellent. The way that you put together the parts of charts and edit the chart are all very intuitive and easy to use."
"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."
"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."
"I love the simplicity and how clean all the different boxes, arrows, and charts can be. Especially with something complicated like our sales flow, it could be really easy to be all cluttered and everything like that, but my favorite feature is how clean it is, how straightforward it makes our flow look, and how easy it is to understand. Lucidchart accommodates both Mac and PC users which is important to us because at my company right now, our sales floor and then every other computer we have as a company is a Mac, but a lot of our employees actually have PCs and Android as well. So it's really beneficial because if we're ever on the go or we need to make a change, it's versatile and is open for both Mac and PC."
"The collaboration, hands-down, is the top feature. It is valuable because our company doesn't believe in working in silos... While I may be the one leading the efforts, it's very important that my team gets buy-in on decisions being made when we're designing. It's critical, especially in this virtual environment, when we're not in an office to have a team meeting and able to whiteboard something. Lucidchart is an extremely useful tool for our team."
"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."
"The installation was very easy."
"The system provides powerful tools for obtaining reports and documentation."
"Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is very flexible and it is simple to define the metamodel. Additionally, it is lightweight on resources."
"Sparx offers good flexibility."
"The solution allows us to quickly present designs and concepts to customers and get their feedback, thereby moving the project forward step by step."
"It is simple to build the first model for the solution."
"The company has become more efficient and reduced its budget."
"The most valuable features are the flexibility and adaptability of Sparx Enterprise Architect."
"I think the best part of Visio is that you can import drawings very well into Microsoft Word. For example, if you put the Visio drawing into Word, you can double click on it and it opens in Visio. It is a very useful feature and something which I miss switching to Enterprise Architect. In Enterprise Architect, if I import a drawing into Word it does not open the diagram in Enterprise Architect. This is one of the strongest features and the ability to create your own stencils."
"It's a very flexible solution."
"The diagrams Visio creates are quite impressive in the sense that we can cooperate with more colleagues in one task and see the flow of the process."
"The main reason I choose Visio is that it is easy to use. The user interface is familiar and straightforward. Additionally, it offers a variety of templates, such as those for Cisco solutions, which make it easy to create diagrams for specific use cases. For example, we use a Cisco Meraki switch and we can find the exact template for it, then we can easily drop in the components and connect the cables to create the diagram."
"It's my understanding that the initial setup is straightforward."
"I haven't needed to reach out to technical support the entire time I've used the product. It's very basic and very simple, and therefore I've never run into any issues I haven't been able to deal with personally."
"Very interactive with an intuitive interface."
"What I like best about Visio is that it's flexible. Sometimes, if I need to draw quickly, I use Microsoft PowerPoint, but if I need icons, which Visio has, I use Visio. I also like that the solution gives me a much more powerful range of options."
 

Cons

"When you want to add text to a connector arrow, I have not figured out how to position the text vertically. It always wants the text to stay horizontal."
"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'm not a super user, and there might be a way of doing it that I haven't explored, but I was looking for some specific icons that are just standard icons, and I found the icon library to be very focused on architecture icons. It didn't have as many standard or generic icons."
"I would like to have access to more colorful and more vibrant icons."
"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."
"It would be nice to be able to import not just contacts from Salesforce but also leads. In the beginning, when I was still learning the ropes and my way around it, I couldn't find such an option. There might be an option, but I just don't know about it."
"When my colleague initially tried to edit the file that I shared with him, he had some trouble. This is something that should be improved."
"Although it comes with a lot of pre-existing tools, it would help if it had some more design templates. By now, they must know what kinds of things people are trying out, and that should help them create more templates. I would also like to see a little more automation."
"Whenever I begin a new project with Sparx, I have to spend time training people on how to use it since it is not straightforward."
"It would be nice to have it supported on the Linux operating system."
"Whenever I begin a new project with Sparx, I have to spend time training people on how to use it since it is not straightforward."
"Their technical support is not good in India. I wrote to them because I had a question, but I never got an answer. So, I just left it behind."
"What should be improved are the integration capabilities of the solution with Bizagi."
"Because its easy to create diagrams one needs to be vigilant on the housekeeping of orphaned fragments - I have written my own scripts to do this, maybe they are available now."
"I would like the system to more "intellectually" build a scheme, place icons, and connect lines on the schemes."
"The integration could be improved."
"Visio's scalability could be improved. I had a license through my school and it would have been great to be able to collaborate with more people."
"It's not the easiest software to use. It's not user-friendly out-of-the-box."
"The solution could improve by making it more modern."
"It would be nice if there is a database behind it. We have looked into this functionality, but all of the other solutions that have a database are very locked down, and you have to use them their way. You can't define your own stuff. For example, we have a system X, and I want to define system X myself and have it available. If I am ever going to make a change to system X, I want to pull up all the drawings that are associated with system X. I want to be able to search and pull all those drawings. Visio should have the ability to capture metrics associated with each step in the process. For example, based on a specific time, I should be able to link the data to a spreadsheet, which is kind of like the data analysis on the process."
"I think that it feels a bit outside with respect to the icons that are available."
"Its support team could be well-equipped with the required information."
"To be able to extract a report for business project management notations would be ideal."
"One issue I've noticed is that when working on a shared video link with a friend for Visio, there can be a delay in changes reflecting on their screen after I've made them. This also occurs when we're working on the same document. It would be beneficial if changes could be reflected in real-time. Additionally, I've experienced some text size issues with the flow task feature. Sometimes when I enter text, it appears very small, and increasing the size causes it to extend beyond the diagram, creating formatting issues. It would be helpful if these text and formatting issues could be addressed."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The price and licensing are good."
"Its pricing is very affordable and reasonable for the features that it provides. I am using its basic plan, and for my usage, it is perfectly reasonable. It suits perfectly."
"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."
"I'm happy with the pricing of Lucidchart but I can't say I'm completely happy with it. It could be cheaper for what it offers, about $5 cheaper, or Lucid could charge $5 more and add more features, like automation. Right now, it's $15 per user per month... On the other hand, they have made their billing super-easy for users, such as for people who have to do expense reports. It is probably the easiest platform I'm using when it comes to billing for software as a service."
"I have only used the trial version and have not yet paid for it, or explored the pricing options."
"The licensing is pretty cost-effective but I haven't considered it on an enterprise level."
"Lucidchart's pricing model is not excessive, as compared to similar products. It is pretty much in line with everyone else."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten."
"It's reasonably priced for large organizations."
"We had a yearly license."
"The licensing is not as expensive as some of the other data modeling tools such as Erwin."
"It's affordable. The only additional cost that we haven't yet figured out is the floating license. If you buy a floating license, you have to have a license management server, which comes at an additional cost that's not discussed. So, we haven't yet used the floating license. That’s because I haven't had a chance to figure that out."
"There is a license for this solution. When comparing this solution to others it is priced well."
"This product has a paid license, with a yearly subscription option."
"There is a licensing fee, but it is fairly priced."
"There are some cheaper as well as free solutions."
"We're in a Visio plan that is like $15 a month per user. At the moment, it is just the standard licensing fees that I'm aware of."
"You can purchase a corporate license for more users to use the solution. We have purchased a stand-alone license and which could be cheaper."
"While I don't recall the exact price I do recall that it was quite high."
"The solution could be less expensive."
"I think costs are on a per user basis."
"The licensing process is actually a breeze. Simply buy the license and download it from Microsoft, enter the license key in Visio to activate the software, and you're done."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Mind Mapping Software solutions are best for your needs.
857,585 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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. ...
Do you recommend Lucidchart?
I definitely recommend Lucidchart. I feel it is one of the top visual collaboration platforms that’s available on the...
What do you like most about Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect?
The stability has been good and satisfactory. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect?
One of the reasons many public sector institutions in the Czech Republic use it is that it provides a very good price...
What needs improvement with Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect?
Whenever I begin a new project with Sparx, I have to spend time training people on how to use it since it is not stra...
How easy is it to migrate process flow charts (modeled using tools like Visio) into Bizagi?
I have been using Bizagi with a major project for a state government agency for about four years now. It is pretty st...
What do you like most about Visio?
The diagrams Visio creates are quite impressive in the sense that we can cooperate with more colleagues in one task a...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Visio?
One of the main problems with Visio is its licensing options and associated issues, which lead to discussions about t...
 

Also Known As

No data available
No data available
Microsoft Visio
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Salesforce, Adobe, Whirlpool, Uber, Wal Mart, Pearson, Twitch, Riot Games, Western Union, Trimble, Starbucks
OmniLink
Thomas College, Hamburg Port Authority, Portigon AG, Conseil G_n_ral du d_partement des Hautes-Alpes, AAA Auto a. s., Commonwealth Financial Network, ICA, Abu Dhabi National Energy Company