Lucidchart vs Visio comparison

Lucid Software and Microsoft are both solutions in the Mind Mapping Software category. Lucid Software is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.1, while Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.0. Lucid Software holds a 22.7% mindshare in MMS, compared to Microsoft’s 26.7% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Lucid Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Lucidchart

Read 62 Lucidchart reviews

4,970 Views
746 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Visio

Read 109 Visio reviews

7,023 Views
1,053 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Lucidchart

Visio

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 9, 2025

Visio and Lucidchart are both widely recognized in the diagramming software market, catering to a range of user needs in technical and collaborative environments. Visio has a competitive edge due to its integration with Microsoft tools, whereas Lucidchart stands out for its ease of use and collaborative features.

Features: Visio integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft Office suite, providing robust diagramming capabilities with a comprehensive library of templates suitable for technical drawings and BPMN diagrams. Lucidchart's user-friendly interface supports flexibility and real-time team collaboration, offering various templates and tools that facilitate process design and workflow visualization.

Room for Improvement: Visio lacks full support for XPDL, and its web publishing features could be enhanced. Its complexity can be a barrier for new users. Lucidchart could improve by offering better layer management and more complex design templates. Both tools should enhance their integration capabilities, with Visio expanding beyond Microsoft products and Lucidchart enriching its template library.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Visio offers both on-premises and cloud deployment options, suitable for enterprise environments, but its customer support is inconsistent. Lucidchart is predominantly cloud-based with simple deployment in collaborative spaces, and it is known for efficient customer service, though it could be more proactive in user education.

Pricing and ROI: Visio's pricing includes standalone licenses and Office 365 plans, which can be expensive for larger teams, but offer good ROI through efficient documentation. Lucidchart offers cost-effective subscriptions with robust collaborative features, although individual license costs might be prohibitive for larger organizations.

To learn more, read our detailed Lucidchart vs. Visio Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Lucidchart vs. Visio

December 2025

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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

Lucidchart

Ranking in Mind Mapping Software

2nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

8.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Visual Collaboration Platforms (3rd)

Visio

Ranking in Mind Mapping Software

1st

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

109

Ranking in other categories

Business Process Design (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Mind Mapping Software category, the mindshare of Lucidchart is 22.7%, up from 22.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Visio is 26.7%, down from 30.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Mind Mapping Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Visio	26.7%
Lucidchart	22.7%
Other	50.6%

Mind Mapping Software

Featured Reviews

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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NitinSharma

Senior Network Specialist at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Created detailed rack and network diagrams that streamline documentation and collaboration

For creating diagrams, I definitely use Visio for HLD, LLD, and traffic flow diagrams. Apart from Visio, I use Jira only if the customer specifically requests it; otherwise, I do not use an in-house version of Jira in my organization. One of the good features of using the Microsoft umbrella product is that if I create a big diagram and then work on the HLD or LLD in Word, I can select everything from Visio and paste it as an image without needing to resize it, which streamlines the process of creating documentation for customers. The main benefits Visio provides me include simplifying processes, saving time on manual work with diagram creation, and delivering a clean architecture, whether it is network architecture or application flow. I have created diagrams for AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises data centers, including rack elevation diagrams and organization charts. Modifications can be made easily and reflected immediately, and I can create PNG images to share with the executive team.

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

"The interface is very good and easy to use. We don't need documentation on how to use it. It is self-explanatory, which is very convenient for a new user."

"The swimlanes feature is one that I use a lot. I have used swimlane diagrams to create business process flows and I think that it does the job pretty well."

"The wireframe and mock-up features have been the most useful so far. It's easy to create the mock-ups and then communicate to our development team what they need to look like. Lucidchart's capabilities for visualizing and understanding process flows or workflows is very good as well. I'm able to easily use any style of box that I need to create on a flowchart, to effectively communicate to our development team."

"Lucidchart is a 10 out of 10 when it comes to documenting things such as processes, systems, and new teams. It's just so user-friendly. The fact that even if you've never used Lucidchart, if you take a template and adapt it, you'll inevitably find something to fit your needs, but it's also perfect for building from scratch. It's the ease of use, clarity, and the different functionalities that make it incredibly useful."

"Creating flowcharts and documentation is easy to do and the results are very nice."

"Lucidchart helped us to realize efficiencies in the projects we use it for. I can show people pictures, and I can change things in a meeting and then email it by the end of the meeting. Because most places we go, especially now with everybody in-home office, I'm going to have great internet access, and that just makes it easier to be able to change things quickly while we're in a meeting and go, "Oh, you changed this. Oh, okay.", and then send it to them as a proof and send it as a PDF or send them a link. That works great. That saves time and accelerates a sale."

"It is important to me that the solution accommodates both Mac and PC users because the developers in our company use Mac, then the business people use Windows. The technical people create the technical architecture using Lucidchart. So, it is important that it is compatible with both the systems."

"The ability for Lucidchart to create database schemas or modify existing data structures is strong. That's what I initially introduced it for in our organization. The script that Lucidchart provides works with other systems like Oracle, SQL Server, and Postgres that I can copy-paste, and get a quick dump of metadata and import into has saved me a ton of steps that I didn't have to manually create these tables. I had a lot of things where I still had to put in the linkages between tables, but I didn't have to type in every field name, every data type, and everything else that came in. That saved me tons of time."

More Lucidchart pros

"It works really well for flowcharting, it can label."

"Visio makes it easy to communicate your ideas from several areas of your imagination across several domains."

"I like the solution's ease of use and its the integration with different templates from a variety of manufacturers."

"It is easy to use."

"It's my understanding that the initial setup is straightforward."

"We are all familiar with it, and it is easy to use. There is a lot of flexibility, and you can add shapes if you want."

"We can easily add templates to SharePoint for collaboration."

"It's a very flexible solution."

More Visio pros

Cons

"When I download a flowchart as a PDF file, it breaks it up. I would like to see the continuous display of flow charts, even if they are larger than one page."

"In terms of improvement, there can be more templates. There are good templates but there could still be more."

"The flowcharting feature would be improved if it had some kind of prediction capability that helped to create the diagrams, such as the ability to automatically join components with my database."

"As far as I know, LucidChart can’t be automated with Visual Basic .Net like Visio."

"Perhaps it already exists, but if there were software to install the solution on a Mac, that would be helpful. I see that it's not in the App Store, so that's something that could be improved."

"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."

"It might already exist and I haven't used it, but in terms of improvement, I would like a hot-key system for some of the diagrams to auto-generate things a bit quicker to be able to produce charts a lot faster, or have more standard templates that you can just go to if you're trying to generate something quickly."

"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."

More Lucidchart cons

"Its integration with other vendors can be better and support for other formats. For example, when we import a JPEG, we cannot customize it. Similarly, we can't utilize the BPML kind of diagrams."

"The Auto-Align has improved significantly from the previous release; however, it still jumbles the model if your process diagram has a fair degree of complexity."

"Visio is not as scalable as other tools due to the proprietary restriction. You cannot customize it or scale it up like the way you do with Trello or Jira. Microsoft places restrictions on things that you can do with Visio."

"To be able to extract a report for business project management notations would be ideal."

"When you use a BPA solution you can open an end-to-end process in one window, go down, or go up between layers to different places. You should be able to see descriptions of the steps of the process."

"Microsoft should include Visio as part of their Office 365 offering."

"I would like to see the project planning element improved, although it won't happen because Microsoft deliberately made it worse."

"The database modeling has deteriorated significantly in the more current versions."

More Visio cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"The price was low enough to make me think that it was fine, I'll go for it. I think it's $80 or so. It's not too expensive."

"The price of this product is a little bit high. It is probably 20% higher than what I expected to pay for such a solution."

"I have a subscription as an individual user for one year, and it is not expensive."

"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 licensing is pretty cost-effective but I haven't considered it on an enterprise level."

"The price and licensing are good."

More Lucidchart pricing and cost advice

"Visio is expensive."

"We pay annually for the Visio license and it is expensive."

"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."

"I haven't looked at the prices lately. We have an older copy, and it was a couple of hundred dollars for this software. That's a huge expense."

"The solution could be less expensive."

"Visio is about a $180 dollars to purchase. It is a one-time licensing fee."

"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."

"There are some cheaper as well as free solutions."

More Visio pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	36
Midsize Enterprise	19
Large Enterprise	61

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. 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...

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What needs improvement with Lucidchart?

I wish Lucidchart would add dark mode to improve the user experience.

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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 straightforward to load in files that are BPMN 2.0 compliant. The option to load V...

See all answers

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 and see the flow of the process.

See all answers

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 the price with a Microsoft representative. If asked to rate the price, I would gi...

See all answers

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Compared 7% of the time

SAP Signavio Process Manager vs Lucidchart

Compared 6% of the time

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Bizagi vs Visio

Compared 30% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect vs Visio

Compared 7% of the time

Visual Paradigm vs Visio

Compared 5% of the time

Camunda vs Visio

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Lucidchart

January 2026

Download Lucidchart product report

Buyer's Guide

Visio

December 2025

Download Visio product report

Also Known As

No data available

Microsoft Visio

Overview

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

Visio is an innovative collaborative solution that enables users to quickly visualize data-connected business process flows with a host of integrated intuitive features that bring the power of Microsoft 365 to Visio. Visio allows users to easily create professional diagrams, graphs, and other visual data, easily anywhere, anytime, and with anyone. Users are able to confidently and easily transform data into creative powerful visuals. Visio provides dozens of easy-to-use templates along with thousands of customizable colorful shapes that bring a user's best ideas to life. Visio is available for all Microsoft 365 commercial users and is available on desktop and Web applications.

Visio Features

Visio can easily create visual data for today’s business needs. Some of its most useful visual data include:

Flowcharts: Users can easily bring business concepts to fruition with Visio’s robust flowchart features. Visio provides a huge library of shapes, stencils, and templates to transform numbers and data into impactful, easy-to-understand business stories.
Organizational charts: Visio makes it easy to design articulate org charts to better visualize team, reporting, and hierarchy structures. Users are then able to seamlessly share the charts with stakeholders, teams, and employees.
Network diagrams: Users are able to creatively display how a system design processes function and visually illustrate how devices and networks interact with each other using a variety of network shapes, templates, and connector tools.
Brainstorming: Visio makes brainstorming simple and actionable with a wide range of templates designed specifically for interpreting problems and mapping out solutions, including fishbone and Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) diagrams.
Floor plans: Users can design ergonomic workspaces, retail store layouts, new homes, and more with accurate, scalable templates and tools to help them better visualize function, flow, and overall aesthetic appeal.
Accessible: Visio is able to integrate with a wide variety of accessibility tools, such as Narrator, Accessibility Checker, and high-contrast support, to ensure Visio diagrams are available to your entire team.

Reviews from Real Users

“Visio has improved my workflow by making it easy to create charts, diagrams, and essential illustrations to use in my client reports and proposals. It has saved me a lot of time I would otherwise spend creating visuals for clients manually.” - Michael B., Principal Consultant at Lexington Consulting

“I use it for diagramming networks, racks, data centers, data flow applications, etc. It is a useful tool to map data flows, network objects, and computer science technology and to show to clients. It does what I need it to do. It's a tool I've used the longest, so I know it the best, and that's probably the claim to fame.” - Greg S., Director of Solution Architecture at Winslow Technology Group

“We use Visio for architecture modeling. We also use it to facilitate communication with other people. The feature I like most about Visio is that it acts as a facilitator of communication, as it displays information in a way that's easier to understand.” - Guy M., IT/Business Architect at a financial services firm

Microsoft

Sample Customers

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

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

Buyer's Guide

Lucidchart vs. Visio

December 2025

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