The primary use case has mostly been about defining requirements for our next hardware project and giving notes to the business people about the progress and sticking points that we're running into.
Lucidspark offers an innovative platform for real-time collaboration, integrating an intuitive interface with an infinite whiteboard that supports extensive brainstorming and workflow enhancement.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Lucidspark | 3.0% |
| Figma | 39.0% |
| Miro Business - Enterprise | 38.8% |
| Other | 19.200000000000003% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 4 |
| Large Enterprise | 9 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 78 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 24 |
| Large Enterprise | 75 |
Lucidspark is designed to facilitate team interaction, streamline collaboration, and enhance creativity. With a seamless blend of Collaborator Colors, drag-and-drop features, and expansive integrations, it fosters an efficient organization of ideas through diagrams, sticky notes, and exports. While users benefit from its flexibility in remote environments, there is a desire for improvements in internal comment systems, smoother integration with Microsoft apps, and more intuitive onboarding processes. Navigation on large boards and the absence of a dedicated desktop app are recognized challenges, prompting a call for enhanced shape recognition, color options, and time-tracking tools.
What are Lucidspark's key features?In industry-specific contexts, such as education and consultancy, Lucidspark serves as a vital tool for developing flowcharts, conducting strategy workshops, and mapping out processes. Teams in architecture and project management leverage it for diagram creation and idea ideation, while its virtual whiteboard capabilities support remote sessions and workshops, aiding consultants and enterprises in strategic planning and system organization.
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Director of Technology at Spoke AIOT | 4.5 | I use Lucidspark for remote visual brainstorming and project organization. It saves 10-20% time, despite a learning curve and latency. While not ideal for prioritization, I rate it 9/10 for enhancing overall team organization. |
| Executive Assistant with self employed | 3.5 | I found Lucidspark intuitive for personal organization, saving me time with its sticky notes and infinite whiteboard. While I enjoyed its modern interface, advanced features are confusing, and new team members need better tutorials to fully utilize the solution. |
| Software Engineering Intern at a computer software company with 201-500 employees | 4.5 | I find Lucidspark excellent for collaborative, visually appealing flowcharts. It significantly aids team organization, integrates well, and simplifies work. My only wish is for more background and border color customization options. |
| Director Product Management at a tech services company with 11-50 employees | 4.0 | I'm exploring Lucidspark for brainstorming and appreciate its templates, but find it unintuitive with a significant learning curve compared to Miro. I'm hesitant about pricing and team adoption, though I see potential for visual communication once I master it. |
| Solution Architect at a tech services company with 1-10 employees | 4.5 | Lucidspark greatly streamlines our collaborative database design, cutting implementation time by 80-85% with SQL exports. Its real-time collaboration, ease of use, and scalability are excellent. However, video call integration and a desktop app are minor issues. |
| Customer Success Manager at a media company with 501-1,000 employees | 3.5 | As a CSM, Lucidspark significantly boosts client engagement in virtual workshops, acting as an interactive whiteboard. It reduces client "time to value." I value its ease of use and voting features, but desire better in-app user guidance and visual alignment tools. |
| Senior UX Designer at Concentric Sky | 4.5 | I value Lucidspark for project management, research, and brainstorming, especially its intuitive virtual whiteboard, sticky notes, and collaboration features. It greatly helps prioritize ideas. While it's a 9/10, I'd like more automation, layout guides, and grid snapping. |
| Data Scientist at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees | 4.5 | I highly recommend Lucidspark; it's intuitive, flexible, and saves time for brainstorming and organizing visualization ideas. Its drag-and-drop features and templates are great. My minor issue is some empty space. |
| Service Manager at a consumer goods company with 51-200 employees | 5.0 | I found Lucidspark intuitive and easy for coursework, saving significant time on diagrams compared to Draw.io and Visio. It boosted collaboration productivity. While I'd like a dark mode, its efficiency makes it a 10/10 solution. |
| Consultant at a financial services firm with 1-10 employees | 4.0 | I use Lucidspark for process development and brainstorming, valuing its charting features and cross-platform access. However, the iOS interface is clunky, making mobile use frustrating compared to the seamless PC experience, despite improving productivity. |
The primary use case has mostly been about defining requirements for our next hardware project and giving notes to the business people about the progress and sticking points that we're running into.
Our interns are more visual and Jira, being mostly text-based, has been harder for them and me. The visual aspect of Lucidspark is really nice and makes it quicker to understand the ideas sometimes.
The ability to sort stuff based on tags really helps with finding and organization. Instead of having random sticky notes everywhere, it's a more organized approach. The self-organization is really nice. Color coding has been really nice, and I use some of the timer stuff to track my own hours. That said, I don't share that with the company right now.
The solution's virtual whiteboard for brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts makes it easier to keep track of everything as opposed to, for example, a real-life whiteboard. Stuff falls off sometimes. I had a real-life whiteboard that had 600 sticky notes on it at one time. It was hard to organize at that level. Having the digital history of who deleted what and when is nice.
We use the collaboration colors feature, in which we can assign each user a certain color for the cursors, sticky notes, freehand drawings, et cetera. It's one of the best features. On a scale out of ten, it's probably a nine. Otherwise, we have no idea how each person is brainstorming individually. The idea overall isn't that important on who it comes from, however, people like to take ownership of their ideas. It's kind of nice at a high level.
We have used this solution for remote or virtual brainstorming sessions. We're a 100% remote company and therefore having that capability is important.
We use the solution's integrations with Atlassian with Jira. The importance of having those integrations, out of ten, is maybe a seven. I don't love Jira that much, however, it is good to be able to integrate them. We want to keep things organized.
There's a feature that allows us to tag and automatically group ideas to help organize and synthesize ideas after a brainstorming session. It's an amazing aspect and very helpful. It helps us find patterns. It's a ten out of ten feature as typically we're really just throwing a whole bunch of ideas out there, and in real life, sticky notes can get pretty messy. However, this feature really helps us stay organized and get to the best ideas fast. We can automatically group ideas and it makes it easier to divide up the work. That said, it's not great at prioritizing them, however, it is a good way to delegate work.
It saves time if we can organize and group ideas. It likely saves us 20% in terms of time savings. The solution enables us to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps, and less time organizing them. It's just nice organizationally that it can do that, however, the actual time-saving isn't the highest priority. It's more about being able to come back later and look at all the sticky notes that have been organized.
There's been a little bit of a learning curve, however, overall, it's probably, even with the learning curve, still saved us 10% of our time, and, again, the digital piece just makes it really nice to be able to look back weeks later and see everything.
We're looking at six different hardware elements, so computers we might buy, and trying to determine which interfaces. For example, if USB or I2C is best for each one of those computers. With the sticky notes, we were able to sort them based on price and capability, so we tagged them with prices, features, and sorted them that way. With this solution, we've saved a lot of time during the process.
There's a bit of a learning curve.
It's a little bit harder than something like Asana which I have been using for six years. However, overall I'd give it maybe a B-plus. It'll probably take me about another week or so to really get a hang of it.
Due to the fact that you can't force everyone to be in the room to brainstorm, it’s made the process maybe 20% slower. I love remote work, however, remote work is also slower in a couple of ways when you're doing collaborative stuff. You're more productive remote when you're by yourself, and yet, collaboration can be a little slower.
The solution doesn’t make it easier to prioritize ideas. It's more about just getting a bunch of ideas up there quickly, and then we prioritize them in Jira.
There are a few too many sub-menu options under the breakout board and the team tools. While the layout looks good, there are too many options to click through.
There's a little bit of latency with the collaboration bit. Overall it's not quite as fast as Google Docs, however, it's really close.
I've only been using the solution for about two weeks at this point.
In terms of stability, I haven't seen any concerns on that side. It's a great company and is stable overall.
The scalability potential looks good. It seems easy enough to do with other new employees.
The product is not really used very much. Currently, there are no plans to increase the usage. We'll know more after a couple more weeks of using it and learning a little bit more.
Technical support has been great to chat with. I would give them an A+ rating.
I previously used Asana, which I found easier to use. I used that product for about six years. I'm just trying out Lucidspark at my new company. I've probably been with the company for about three weeks. The company uses Lucidspark, which is why I am switching over.
The activity and engagement levels of users during sessions, when compared to in-person are about 20% slower. You can't force everyone to be in the room to brainstorm. I love remote work, however, remote work is also slower in a couple of ways when you're doing collaborative stuff. You're more productive remotely when you're by yourself, however, the collaboration aspect can be a little slower.
The solution does not allow us to effectively prioritize ideas. It's more about just getting a bunch of ideas up there quickly, and then we prioritize them in Jira.
The initial setup was in between straightforward and complex, although when describing the process, I'd probably lean towards more simplicity.
The deployment itself took maybe 45 minutes.
I didn't really have an implementation strategy. The downloading process and the goal of downloading it was to make sure that was spread over the entire system for whoever was supposed to work with Lucidspark could access it.
You only really need one person to deploy and maintain the product.
We individually did the setup on our own. We simply followed the instructions. We didn't need an integrator, reseller, or consultant to help us.
It's too early to calculate a true ROI, however, we have seen a time savings of 10% to 20% so far.
I actually don't know too much of that about the pricing guide. I can't speak to exact costs.
I did not evaluate other options before choosing this product.
Working with the solution has been great so far. I signed up for the free version through my company. I'm not exactly sure which plan I'm on.
We have noticed that the solution does integrate with Slack. We haven't tried that yet. We're actually maxed out on our Slack integration, however, we use the free version of Slack.
I'd advise companies considering the solution to get your young interns involved first and maybe work your way up from the bottom to get buy-in from the older members of the team in the organization. It's the new tool.
I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.
I was developing mostly personal charts. I was using the brainstorming function and mapping my thoughts. I was using the sticky notes and organizing different ideas into categories. I was just manually using all the different tools and functions, drawing arrows. Later, I saw that they also have templates, which I thought was really cool. However, I was just manually using it for creating charts for personal organization and organizational development as well as doing organization for my nonprofit.
I was mostly working on organization, like categorizing, where I would list different projects, as my team had so many different projects that we were working on. I was just listing, then categorizing them, like color coding the different projects. That was the main thing that I was using Lucidspark for.
I was using a web version. I didn't download anything.
It made my operations simpler, clearer, and easier to do what I had to do.
Lucidspark enabled us to spend less time creating charts. I feel like that is the biggest thing: Less time having to create the objects/charts and write stuff. That allows you to discuss topics with your team more easily, if you are working with the solution. It saved us about 20 minutes in time.
I really liked the sticky notes. They made it easy to change the colors, just click and add ideas, move those ideas around, and then connect them. I felt like they were very intuitive and easy to use.
I really liked how the virtual whiteboard can expand, then you can just move around. It is just one whiteboard, but you can make multiple ones. One whiteboard seems infinite; it seems like I could just keep scrolling and using the space however I want. So, I really liked that feature. I also liked zooming in and out, which is really helpful.
You can easily move things around. It's hassle-free. You can expand the whiteboard as much as you want and create more space. You don't have to manually alter the pixels of how big the canvas is. You can just keep scrolling if you want more whiteboard. It made my life so much easier. Zooming in and out of the whiteboard is an awesome feature that stuck out.
There are some things which are kind of complicated to know how to use. I would have to get used to them a bit more, or learn how to use them more, because I feel like there are a lot of features and I don't really know about all of them. I would need more tutorials, and that's one of the biggest things.
It's so nice when you're able to just hop onto a program and intuitively know how to use it. Also, it is so tedious to have to teach new team members how to use the program, especially if they don't collaborate consistently but are hopping on for one meeting. The easier that they could make it for people to learn, like improving the learning curve, the better that Lucidspark could be.
What drew me to Lucidspark was that I hopped on and it was easy and intuitive. It was very nice to look at and use. That caught me. However, there are advanced features that I would have to learn how to use, and if I want my other team members to use them, then I would have to be able to quickly and easily explain them. So, if they could make pop-up tutorials for new team collaborators, e.g., click here to do this and that as a very brief intro tutorial, then that would be helpful. I don't know if they have that already, but that would be helpful for collaborators.
There are still some things that are a little confusing or too advanced, which is why it's not easy to use and hop on. There could be some other features that could be added, like other templates. What I really liked was how there were templates that gave you examples of how you could use Lucidspark. I feel like that is helpful for people to see.
Adding more variety would be helpful for people.
The easier it is to use, the faster someone can just pick it up and start using it. I feel like that will improve the platform and get more people to join it. A lot of small organizations need these sorts of tools, but they don't have time to spend learning about what is good about this solution and how it can help them. I would recommend making it as easy as possible, especially for small organizations.
Today, I attended a Lucidspark tutorial, but it was probably a few weeks ago when I was actually using the solution.
I used it a year ago for a few months. Each time that I was using it, I used it for about an hour, then I would go back to it and use it again for about an hour. I was using it to make some charts. I used it like 10 times.
The stability was pretty good. It didn't glitch or freeze.
I showed my charts to other people, but no one else used Lucidspark.
I feel like Lucidspark would be more useful for smaller teams, like five to seven people, because if there were a lot of team members, then that would get very complicated.
I did not contact their technical support.
Positive
Previously, I was just trying to make charts on my own using various software, even Photoshop, where it is kind of ridiculous to make shapes. I felt like it was so tedious and time consuming. Then, Lucidspark made it so easy to make charts. That was just so helpful. Lucidspark is so fun and eye-catching because of the different colors. Also, you can zoom in and out. Even with the dotted background (the whiteboard), it's easy and fun for the eyes, rather than some boring software that's so tedious where you have to manually draw all the shapes for the charts. It has a fresh user interface that is very modern.
I just Googled "online chart maker", or something like that. That is what I needed at first: To make charts easily. I was using Photoshop, and it was just a ridiculous, tedious process. Manually making circles and adding text was kind of crazy for me, so I thought, "Maybe there's an easier way to do this?" I was searching for a program on Google, then I found Lucidspark. I signed up, and I thought, "Wow, this is perfect. It's better than I expected."
I created an account, saw the whiteboard, and then just started using it. It took a minute or two to get in and start using it. I don't remember seeing any instructions.
Return on investment depends on how much you use it, especially if people collaborate.
I was able to make boxes and objects for charts very easily, because it was just click and drag. That just made it faster. I didn't have to spend time manually making those parts of the chart, like boxes. That saved so much time where I could spend my time creating my ideas and thinking at the same time as I'm drawing it on the whiteboard. It's almost like doing it on paper, but even better. I felt like I was able to think and put it on paper at the same time, as if I were doing it on real hard paper.
I was using the web version. I don't know what I signed up for, but I don't think I paid anything. It was just free.
I have used other visual collaboration platforms, but Lucidspark is definitely the best one I have seen.
This is a great intuitive platform for making charts. I liked how easy to use it was. You should try it.
There are tools that can make your life easier. It's good to invest in them because they will make the productivity and efficiency of your organization better.
I have not collaborated with anyone yet, but I did see that feature in the tutorial today. I thought it was really useful. So, I might try it the next time I can, but I haven't used it yet. However, I thought it was really good when I saw it.
If there are more tutorials in the future, it would be really useful.
The solution does have features to tag and automatically group ideas to help organize and synthesize ideas after a brainstorming session, but I didn't really use that feature yet. I was still manually categorizing my stuff. I didn't actually use that feature.
I actually do plan to increase my usage going forward. I hope they have more tutorials like the one I attended today. These days, I am teaching a lot online. So, I feel like I could use this sort of whiteboard for my teaching my students. I feel like I want to try something new and see how it works.
I was going to start exploring Lucidspark a bit more and trying to use it more to see if it helps me. If so, then I might possibly invest in it. However, that depends on how much I will use it and if it will be useful for what I'm going to need it for. I just tried it a few times, and for various uses, so I will keep trying it a little more.
I would rate Lucidspark as a seven out of 10.
I mainly use it for making flowcharts. I am using their web application.
It has helped me in representing all the hard work that I had put into my project in a visually appealing and better way. Without it, all the hard work that I did would not have got noticed properly.
We use Lucidspark's collaborate or colors feature in which we can assign each user a certain color to identify what each person is contributing. It is a really good feature. Our mentor assigned us with those, and with sticky notes, we get to know what we were doing, what we were missing, or what should be improved. It was very helpful, and we could directly improve things then and there.
Its integration with Salesforce was useful. For some of the demos, I was able to integrate the Salesforce platform with it, which was very helpful. I could do that in minimal time with Lucidspark.
It helps us in spending more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps and less time organizing them. It enables us in fine-tuning and improving the ideas and representations and making our flowcharts visually better and accurate. Its virtual whiteboard is also great for collaboration.
The online collaboration with the teammates and being able to represent things in a visually attractive way are the most valuable features. It has been a really nice experience to make such beautiful and visually attractive flowcharts by using Lucidspark. The best thing was that I could collaborate online with my teammates. Overall, it was a nice experience.
It provides different features, and we can also see the flowcharts in the PDF format and different image formats.
Its user interface and intuitiveness are great. It is easy to use, and it makes things easier. If you have experience in making flowcharts on other sites, you will find Lucidspark to be an easier version of those sites.
It has many features similar to what other sites provide. However, when we make flowcharts on any other platform or site, it becomes very difficult to get it synchronized, but with Lucidspark, we can directly synchronize flowcharts. We were a team of three to four, and we collaborated through Lucidspark to create flowcharts. It was a way easier to collaborate and make the best flowcharts with Lucidspark.
There should be a feature for changing the color of the background, borders, etc. Such a feature will make the flowcharts more attractive.
I have been using Lucidspark for one month. My company has been using it for a longer duration.
I didn't find any issue related to its stability.
There were no issues related to its scalability. We have around 500 users, and almost everyone who wishes to make flowcharts for documentation, demo, and presentation can use it. It is available for all. Its future usage will depend on the requirements.
I have not contacted their technical support.
The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that it is important to represent your work in a visually attractive and easy-to-understand way.
I would rate Lucidspark a nine out of 10.
I started exploring Lucidspark due to the fact that I needed some tools to help during meetings, especially during our brainstorming meetings with our own product teams. That's why I started exploring Lucidspark.
I have not yet used Lucidspark's Virtual Whiteboard for brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts yet. The way I've used Lucidspark is that I start drawing on my canvas and I screen share what I'm doing. I have not used the Virtual Whiteboards.
I have been trying to use the mind maps and the persona templates. I like the fact that Lucidspark has all these templates that we can use. However, I have not explored it as much as I'd like to. As I continue to use Lucidspark, I am exploring those templates and I'd like to keep going. So far, the variety of templates has been good.
I find that the solution helps me illustrate certain points. Sometimes when we are in a meeting and people are coming up with ideas, it helps to see them visually. For example, we were having a discussion on how our product would work and what really helped was when I put together a timeline view of the user's journey with our product. That immediately gave us perspective and we were able to pivot our meeting around that timeline discussion. Creating that was helpful, however, I probably could have created it quicker on PowerPoint than on Lucidspark.
It's not intuitive. There's the learning curve. That is my barrier to using a tool like this. I come from a background where I have used mind maps extensively, however, even to replicate the usage of a mind map in Lucidspark, I have found it to be quite cumbersome. That's why I believe there is a bit of a learning curve. I'm still trying to figure out which template I should use, whether it was the right one, and things like that.
While I am still exploring, the next thing I would look for is how I could integrate a Lucidspark diagram with Atlassian Confluence. I might also look at integrating Lucidspark with Microsoft Teams. I don't know if it does it already. I haven't looked yet, however, I would want to try those features out, if I continue using it.
I've only used the solution for a few weeks. It's been three weeks so far.
The solution may extend. The challenge that I always face with a tool like this is how to convince other people to start trying it out. I can't say if Lucidspark does a better job than other such tools.
I did not interact with technical support.
The product is browser-based. In a few clicks, I was able to get going. I was able to see what the product does.
It takes mere minutes to set up. It's not more than that.
I haven't used the solution to collaborate on brainstorming as I'm a little skeptical about the pricing, and I want to make sure that it's a useful software before I start to invest in theme-specific features and get other people also to use it. I am not a hundred percent comfortable with the software myself, however, that might change a few months down the line.
For myself, I don't know if it is worth the price, as I don't know how much I would use it, whatever the pricing might be. What I'm keen to do is keep exploring with the free version. I use it as an individual and then I screen share when I'm working with the team. I can keep doing that with my free plan, even with the number of limitations that I have. I will probably just figure out the pricing at a much later date.
I have tried Lucidchart once upon a time, however, I'm not actively trying that anymore.
The reason I tried Lucidchart was that I was on a Lucidchart page and then I was prompted to try it out. I don't know how I got in, however, I was curious. Also, someone had recommended to me the product, which was quite similar to Lucidspark, a competitor of Lucidspark called Miro. I had been exploring that for a while, and when I got this invitation to try out Lucidspark, I was more than curious to see how they compared.
The main difference I have encountered is usability. There's a way of doing things. For instance, in Lucidspark you have to get into a pan and zoom mode versus an edit mode. You have to specifically toggle between the two. In Miro, it approaches that a little differently. It does more drag and drop, and it creates a minimap for you to navigate your canvas. That's the main usability difference. Both have a lot of templates, which are good to explore. If you can structure your templates correctly, then it can lead to a very productive brainstorming session for the whole team.
We are using a web-based application.
It's good to plan ahead when using Lucidspark. Let's say that you've got a three-hour brainstorming session and you're trying to do a product discovery workshop. You need to have your templates set up beforehand to say that this is what we're going to use. For instance, if you're going to have a persona discussion, you can't hope that Lucidspark has got good persona templates. It's better that you explore everything before the meeting and make sure that you have the right template, which you want to fill up with your team.
I'd advise those considering the solution to go ahead and create something. It's only when you start filling up your canvas with ideas that it actually appears valuable. The blank canvas can be daunting, yet, once you start filling it up with stuff that's relevant to you, it can spark conversations.
I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.
Currently, we are using Lucidspark to design and export database structures. We mostly use it just for that, however, we were using other software for doing mind maps, and we're starting to introduce the use of Lucidspark also for this purpose. We were also using another software for designing infrastructure, the architecture of software, and infrastructure in deployments. We have recently started moving into Lucidspark for that as well.
Last week we had to design and deploy a database really fast. It was for a customer of ours. The thing was that it being July in Italy, a lot of our employees were on holiday. We were on a strict term and therefore we had to gather around our war room to design and implement our database structure. Being able to have an export from working all together on the same document at the same time for the structure was really helpful. We could not only have discussions in real-time and have one point of entry. We could also have multiple points of entry and multiple discussions going on at the same time on the same structure. That was one of the pluses.
Being able to represent the whole database in a really easy-to-use and fast-moving application, having the possibility to export that same database into real code, being able to pass that real code in real-time, really flawlessly, with a couple of clicks, really cut down the amount of time that it usually takes from the designing of our database to putting it into our database engine and being able to test it. The product really cut down our times by quite a bit, and that was a huge improvement in our pipeline.
We design the database and then we have to physically write the structure of each and every table. We still have to make some modifications to the code itself for some specifics, however, I would say that the amount of the time that we use to actually write the code for the SQL has been cut down by 80 to 85%. It's a huge improvement. That's why we stepped up our game from the free version to the paid version. The benefits are enormous.
The ease of use is great. It's far more fluent in the process. Using the software itself is actually a breeze. It works flawlessly. It has no hiccups.
Lucidspark is really fast, even on relatively low-powered computers. It simply needs a good internet connection. It's also really smooth to use. We tried it on big projects and we put a lot of data into our schemas and it still works flawlessly. Zooming in, zooming out, there's no problem.
Presentations come out really good.
The fact that you can have multiple users working at the same time is a really big plus. The fact that we can all collaborate in real-time is a very useful aspect.
We can introduce frameworks inside the application and it exports it in a perfect way. The fact that we can export the database code directly into SQL, for example, is also a really big plus.
The interface and intuitiveness are actually really good. It's really pleasant to use. It feels fresh and new. Our UX department said that it's actually really competitive with what is out there, and probably a step further, meaning that it's actually really good in comparison to other options. It's easy to use, and it's good to look at. It feels natural, as it should. There has been really great work put into the design.
We've tried the virtual whiteboard for brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts, however, not for too much. If I recall, we did two sprints with that. It looked really interesting and it looked like an opportunity to expand into something that we already did, given the fact that we became remote for a lot of our tasks.
For whiteboards, you can assign each user a certain color for their cursor, sticky note, et cetera (although not for the whiteboard). This is during database planning. We could actually see who was handling which part. That was a really nice part of being able to work all at the same time. We could recognize who was doing what and take into account that we might have different timetables. With this feature, we know who made which change. That was actually useful.
Having an infinite whiteboard has its pros. We all can develop something in our small corner while everybody's working on the same thing, and then we can just copy and paste and stick together whatever we've been working on. You can get visibility on an entire project. This isn't the case with a physical whiteboard, where someone presents infinite space, and someone else's work is on the back of the board, for example.
During specific scenarios, we can prioritize ideas. Being able to have a whiteboard actually helps us with prioritizing which tasks we can work on. We use an agile methodology, and therefore we can have voting systems on ideas which helps us in our meetings. We can decide which goes into sprint planning first.
Lucidspark may have features to tag and automatically group ideas to help organize and synthesize ideas after a brainstorming session, however, I don't think we actually have been into that space at this point. It is something that we want to use in connection with our Confluence and Jira activities so that we can actually prioritize, make sprints, decide the sprints inside that, and then have them organized into Confluence as documentation and in Jira as tasks themselves, or actual sprint stories, et cetera. I've seen from the documentation that this is something that is possible, however, we haven't tested it yet.
One thing that I actually found difficult to do was to introduce video calls. Managing calls and the whiteboards and being all remote is difficult. Apart from that, it works pretty well.
Sometimes the whiteboard can be distracting if someone is presenting. For example, if one person is building and wants to have the attention of others, it can become a bit hard to focus the sharing only on that specific part, or following that specific part and not having a call at the same time, which is something that actually works in-person. It's easier to focus in-person on a person just talking in front of a whiteboard and presenting whatever he's working on.
Right now, we're using the web-based version. If there could be a desktop application or a specific OS application that would render faster times with lower lag, under the benefits of having a desktop application, that would probably be in our best interest. A browser is going to have its limitations in terms of how much computing power it can deliver from that standpoint. Therefore, if we could use our own machine to render our schemas, that would probably be an even faster render and offer a smoother interaction between the schema and the user. That would be something that I would like to use.
At this point, from what we were using in Lucid so far, I don't actually have any suggestions in terms of extra features. I'm really happy with what I have so far, and we're probably going to have to use it a little bit more in order to dream of something better.
We started using it in our company two or three months ago with the free version, and then we upgraded to the paid version less than a month ago.
Living in Northern Italy, as long as we have a good connection to the internet, the software works flawlessly. We haven't had any downtime. It always responds with the same access speed. Even as our schemas and our whiteboards were growing in size, the access time to the data was always the same. That was actually one of the reasons that we moved from the old software. The old software didn't guarantee this speed and access to our working environment and the data that we worked on, even as the data was growing. This accessibility was a huge plus. It was just like switching between HDD and SSD. Randomizing access time was really useful.
Working together at the same time was also a really big plus. Independent of how many people are working on the platform, we maintain the same level of proficiency. Everyone could actually access the same amount of resources at the same speed at the same time. In that sense, it scales well. Even with a growing number of users, it didn't actually lose any speed. The user experience stayed the same no matter how many people were working on the same schema or whiteboard.
In terms of expanding the capabilities of the platform itself, scaling the platform itself, my perspective is that it works flawlessly. We've been using it for a couple of months, three months now, and we actually haven't had the time to really stress it to a point in which we could see the scalability features stretched. That said, it looks really good so far.
Currently, we have seven people working on the same project at the same time, and we have multiple boards. Probably the highest usage that we've had is four people working on the same board at the same time. We have a wide variety of positions, ranging from data scientists to front and backend developers to UI and UX designers.
Right now we are using it on a daily basis. Being able to use it for planning and for the daily work of the company itself, we can actually use it for a lot of different tasks. We started from the database design and architecture infrastructure, which was more development-related, and then we introduced it also to the UI/UX team, and now they are using it as well. The company is using it daily now and pretty extensively.
I had a weird experience at first with technical support. Meaning, that at the beginning when I asked their support team if they could help me with the setup of the premium account, the paid version, they were unavailable when I asked for them, and then I forgot about it. For the rest of the week, I kept receiving emails, which I thought were just commercial emails.
Then I read them last week and I found out that it was actually their customer support team writing me direct emails, asking me if I resolved the issue. I am actually to blame for not answering them right away, however, they were really, really helpful, they actually care, and they follow up on a daily basis to see if my issue was resolved. It was my mistake completely that I thought the emails were commercial messaging.
That incident aside, from what I've seen, I would say that they are actually pretty attentive and they want to follow up closely with the client. That was something that made me appreciate that they went the extra mile to help me resolve my issue.
In our recent sprint, due to the fact that we use Atlassian as software for handling tasks and for documentation with Confluence, it is our goal to connect it. It's my understanding that it has been connected, however, we haven't tested it so far. VTT is something that we want to do, and it is one of the reasons that we chose Lucidspark - due to the integration capabilities with tools that we already use.
Integrations are important to our operation - if they work as they are advertised. If they do, they will be a huge boost in our productivity, due to the fact that being able to just share data between our applications, our tools, is something that is invaluable in terms of time management. That way, we can focus on having everything inside one container and then share down the pipeline of production, for example, from mind maps to documentation, adding them into Confluence and from Confluence into tasks in Jira and from Jira into actual production. That's actually a pipeline that we're trying to build, and it's something really, really important to us.
The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The fact that we were going for something really specific made it a little bit harder to find inside Lucid, such as making Lucid usable for a wide range of applications with the same tool, we were going for something really specific, which was database designing, and finding out how to implement database designing into that required some work outside of the platform itself. That said, we found really good documentation on the Lucid website. Once we found that, it was straightforward to implement.
The deployment took less than a day. In the morning we had the accounts set up and shared and the rest of the afternoon was spent just working on it, to find out how we can actually export what we were working on into actual code, et cetera. That was it.
We have witnessed an ROI. Just the fact that we can actually cut the database deployment time by so much is a huge return on investment. We can spend the time that we would be using on the implementation of the database to do something else.
The pricing is pretty fair for what it does and for the performance that you get. We are in the lowest tier right now as that's more than enough for what we need, and I'd say that it's a fair price. You get a good bang for the buck. It's actually really good.
Before this and concurrently with Lucidspark, we are using Draw.io, which is the platform that we were using for database design before. However, it had really bad concurrent working between users and no export feature that would allow us to actually use it without working heavily on the export.
We also are using Miro and Figma. We're mostly Miro for the whiteboard. I could say that Miro is the closest competitor in terms of the whiteboard feature. Miro has more or less the same speed. It does have a desktop application, which is faster using the render on the computer itself, and it also does have a really nice video conferencing feature between team members. It doesn't have the database capability that Lucid has. Apart from that, Lucid is way better. We started using it instead of using Miro.
We're using their web-based application.
We do not yet use other products in the Lucid suite, such as Lucidchart.
I'd advise other organizations to really try it. If you use any other applications similar to this one, you would see the benefits really quickly. It is worth mentioning that most of the features are actually worth switching from one application to another area in the paid plan. The free plan doesn't actually cover most of the things that we were looking for in a platform. That said, if a company makes a product, it's okay for them to ask for payment for their hard work. If I have to give one suggestion to other users, I would say don't stop at the free version. Try out the paid version and you will see the benefits.
I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten, simply due to the lack of a desktop application and the lower-quality web-conferencing feature, however, for everything else, it's been smooth sailing, from my perspective.
This is a product that is really useful in my role as a customer success manager. Our company develops marketing automation tools that Fortune 500, enterprise companies use with their internal marketing channels.
We use both Lucidspark and Lucidchart. With Lucidspark, we use it for workshops that we plan with our clients. These are strategy workshops that help them map out what they will ultimately do in our product before they actually touch it. They have to map out what the different messages are that they're going to send, what channels they're going to send them to, and what the strategy is for who receives those messages. They decide how are they going to target, personalize, et cetera.
For this use case, Lucidspark becomes a virtual whiteboard for our clients during these workshops because we've not been able to go in person since the pandemic started. Normally, we would do these works at the client site but now, we can bring it to a virtual environment and make it a really interactive experience. The client actually walks away with something really visual and really clear that shows them what they are going to use to build their system.
I use both Lucidspark and Lucidchart for two different types of workshops. The first type is a simple session that we call an effort impact workshop. This is where our clients will use post-it notes to post their ideas for different campaign types and different channels, and we'll then chart that on an effort impact graph. It's super interactive and it's really beautiful and easy to do when we're using Lucidspark.
We use Lucidchart for our user journey workshop that we run. It uses the flowchart method to build a user journey, such as an onboarding journey, or lapsing user journey, that then translates really easily into something that they would build using our product. The difference is that they would fill it with real campaigns.
The client does not have access to our Lucidchart directly. Rather, we present the charts that we design for them. It makes it easy to demonstrate something that we can't easily demonstrate on our own platform.
When I use this platform, things that would be really difficult to make interactive or make really visual can be done a lot easier. For example, when I am doing a user journey workshop, my goal at the end of it is to ensure that my client adopts the use of one of our products. It is essentially a user journey-building tool, but our clients have a really hard time knowing where to start. However, when you map the flow chart out and build it in Lucidchart, they get to see exactly what they need to build. Afterward, they get access to what we come up with together, and then they just have to use that logic to build what they need to build in our main product.
If they didn't have this pre-work done, then they would have a really challenging time, and run into a lot of issues using our product to build out this journey. A lot of what our clients do requires a little bit of pre-work because they're building out these user journeys that target really specific clients, and their audience requires them to think through the logic of when users will receive messages, et cetera. We found that for us, as CSMs, we have a much higher rate of success with clients being able to enable themselves to use our platform when we can do these workshops and actually demonstrate what they need to do in this virtual whiteboard space.
For instance, using Lucidspark and the post-it note method, we have a brainstorming workshop. It provides a really good foundation for something that they're going to go on to do on our platform. Also, because we are strategic partners with our clients, oftentimes, they'll come to us for things that they need. Perhaps they will ask for advice on what a new type of campaign is that they can run, or maybe they would like to do something different than they are doing today. It helps us with enabling them to adopt our platform more.
We really want to make sure that they're getting this opportunity to brainstorm with their team and come up with new ideas. We have clients like restaurants and retail clients that want to find new things that they can do, and this becomes a really nice whiteboard for saving all of those ideas in one place. We can share it with them afterward, making sure that they have something that they've taken away from this meeting and can actually apply when they're using our platform.
We've been conducting remote sessions since March of last year, and this really came in as a solution to us not being able to conduct our workshops in person. We're very collaborative on this team and also as a company. This is true not only with our clients but also internally. We really value being in person with each other and it's hard to quantify what the delta is of having to do this virtually versus in-person.
I think there's a lot of value to using something like this in person, but where I see the value of how this works for us virtually is that it was meant to replace whiteboarding in person. I really like that it's digital and that you can create what you need to on your own time. You don't have to be in the same room as your colleague to both collaborate on a document.
The same is true for your client, where you don't have to be in the room with them at the same time. Even if they are, it makes it a lot more inviting for the clients to add their brainstorm ideas because oftentimes, it seems when we go in person, it can be hard when you're sitting in a room with so many people. It is hard to speak up and be the person who offers an idea versus here, where you don't have to necessarily speak up to get your thoughts on the board. You can just put it there, and that creates a much more inviting environment for a lot of our clients.
It is more inviting even for a lot of our people internally, who don't have to raise their hand to say something or add something. It's simply that we're all working on this document, you can add your thoughts to the document, and that has created a really effective way for us to work while we've been remote.
The biggest way that Lucidspark has improved the way our organization functions is with the workshops that we have with our direct clients. The way that we quantify our own success is time to value for our clients, so we want to make sure that in the least amount of time, they get the most value out of our platform.
That value comes from them adopting more and more of our platform, handling more mature use cases, and doing what we consider best-in-class marketing. They can achieve it with our platform but it takes more time. The overall time to value has been greatly reduced, and using a platform like this enables us to enable our clients to achieve some of the goals that we have for them.
A reduction in time to value is a positive metric but also, having a higher engagement with our clients is also a benefit. It is difficult to become remote when you're used to hosting these workshops, or doing what we call executive business reviews with clients in person. Now that we've moved them into our remote environment, we've lost a lot of engagement. This is the reason that we've had to invest in tools like this, which have enabled us to get those clients to participate more.
Essentially, using this platform increases participation, which equates to an increase in engagement, which for us, is relatable to higher NPS scores from our clients for our product.
The productivity of our brainstorming sessions has definitely increased with the use of Lucidchart. My workshops have seen a much higher engagement. In the past, maybe ten or twenty percent of my clients would normally participate. With Lucidspark being involved, I see almost 90% engagement of everyone in the room, because they're required to add something. They want their thoughts on the board and it's not requiring them to speak up necessarily. Rather, it's allowing space and flexibility for them to add what they need to add, and they see that it's interactive, which has been a really quantifiable way for me to see the value in this and why I continue to use it.
The user interface is great. It has a very modern and clean look. One of the things that I appreciate about Lucidspark is that it's very easy to start working in it. I think there are features that I'm not aware of that I could have used, and probably some features that I don't know exist. It might take more exploration from my end to understand the breadth of what I can do. My use case feels pretty simple because I can just put squares on a board and get votes, and that satisfies what I need to use it for. But, I think that knowing all of the functionalities would potentially allow me to gain more value from it.
As it is, it's very intuitive to use, it feels very simple, and it does have that informality. I love that the space is infinite, which is something that's not true of MURAL, or if I were to delve into PowerPoint, Excel, or another application that is a more dated form of creating what I need to create. The infinite amount of space to work in is very clean and clear, and I think it just takes a little more effort to make it look like something that is presentable or shareable because it can get a little bit messy if you're not really being intentional about where you place things, and how you're creating the visual. For the purposes of why we use the tool, it's not something that we have to worry about.
The post-it notes can be very agile. We can link out to other things, and we can make these post-its into something that has a real, thought-out idea. It's not just a brainstorm, but it's actually linking up to an example of what it is we're creating.
I have used the Collaborator Colors feature one time, and I had no issues with it. It made it a lot easier to know who edited what, and I think a really great use case would be internal collaboration. This would be where a lot of people's input was coming in, rather than just me and a colleague building something together. This is where I can see the value in it, and it's something that makes me almost want to use Lucidspark more for some of our internal use cases. These would be situations where we need to create something, and it helps us brainstorm for what we're working on from an internal strategy perspective. We really like this feature, although we just didn't have much of a need for it. Our most common uses of the platform do not benefit from it.
If we did invite clients into our space then using the Collaborator Colors feature would be a great way to get them adding to what we're building. We could use those colors to assign how our clients are getting involved and using the platform. The most challenging part was learning that the feature was there.
One of our clients had fast-food delivery as part of their business model, and we wanted them to think about geofencing as a potential campaign idea. We used the space to show an example of what that looks like, so if anyone is coming back to review the board at a later time, they have that example. They can clearly see what we voted on, what we decided to do, and how they can start building it. We can also put a link into our own product using the integration, or we can put a link to an example from one of our other clients. This is another example of a valuable resource for them that is available, even after the workshop is over.
One of the features that I really like is that you can add reactions. Because we use this as a brainstorming space, we get a bunch of people in a room and get their reactions to things. It starts with getting their thoughts on paper, and in a workshop environment where we're hoping to have take-aways, the fact that you can add reactions is really valuable because we used it as a voting tool.
It is helpful because once we have perhaps 20 ideas, all on post-its on the board, what I want to do is then hear from my clients which ideas stand out. These may be the ones that they're most excited about, or what idea they find the most feasible, or which ones have the most long-term gains or short-term gains. Once we post a question, we'll use the reaction feature to kind of get these votes.
The reaction feature helps a lot from a brainstorming perspective, as it tells you what ideas to prioritize. The voting and reactions capability is one of the biggest features that we use, so it's very important to us.
Lucidspark enables us to spend more time discussing and revising ideas' next steps and less time organizing them because we use the voting feature. It means that we're able to figure out what is a priority versus what is not, and then translate those ideas into other things. For example, I've created a priority list in Excel using what we've come up with in Lucidspark. It not only means that we spend less time organizing ideas but without some of these features, it would be a lot harder for us to take a plot of ideas and make them actionable.
The fact that you can physically present and see what you've created, is another really valuable feature for us.
This is a feature-rich product and I would like to see more opportunities for teaching new users how to learn and use the breadth of the platform. Ideally, it would be nice if there were a set of guidelines to explain what it is capable of. I know that there are videos online, and I've watched a few. But, I know that when I first started, just playing around, there were things I didn't discover that I could do until much later. This is why I get surprised by certain integrations I learn that they have.
It would have been great to know right from the start, with a guided tutorial on how to use the various options. As it is now, we have invested internally in the educational resources needed to learn how to use it. A tool that can be very self-serving in that way, and enable its users to use it to the breadth of what it is capable of doing, is always a great thing.
Whatever they can do to help make the visual look a little cleaner would be great because it can get a bit messy, or inconsistent. If there were automations to do things like making sure that elements are of the same size and correct alignment, it would help to make the visual more presentable. This is important because, at the end of what you create, it can have a very positive impact on what is ultimately shared with the client.
I have been using Lucidspark since I joined this company, eight months ago.
I'm not sure how long the company has been using it for but my team has always had a license for Lucidspark. I discovered it when I was a new hire and thought it would be really effective for my role. Not everybody in my team uses it, as we're not required to, but it is a tool that we have in our toolbelt if we ever want to use it.
I have not experienced any glitches or ever lost any work.
We have not experienced issues with scalability but I can't say whether or not it will be a pain point in the future.
Our main users are the customer success team, and we are a customer-facing group. We have approximately 45 people across different locations, although not everyone uses this as regularly as some do. Perhaps you can say that 50% of us use it more regularly.
I believe that our product team and some of our growth teams also have access to the platform. We're an 800-person company and there are probably about 100 of our employees that have a license to this platform.
In our situation, it's going to be these client-facing teams like mine, and product teams that are brainstorming for product purposes. The growth marketing teams are brainstorming for growth marketing purposes.
Including our clients, the largest number of participants that we have had in a single session is 12 or 13.
This solution is highly adopted across my team but not across my entire company, so it is not yet used very extensively. I did a workshop with our internal tech team a week and a half ago, and this was in order to encourage the usage of Lucid. This is necessary because we have licenses to a lot of software tools, and not everyone uses all of them all the time.
One of the problems is that people don't know what they have access to, so one of my goals is to roll this out more broadly, or at least inform more people that they have this tool available to them because it has served such a great purpose for me.
I know they've not made it easily discoverable or super prominent for people at my company coming into this role. I am happy that I stumbled upon it, but I think there's a lot more room for people at my company to realize that we have access to this and that it can serve a great purpose.
Overall, I estimate that between 5% and 10% of the people in our company regularly use it. I hope to grow that number to at least 15% or 20%.
I have not been in contact with technical support.
I have used MURAL in the past and I think that it's the closest solution that I have used, in terms of the interface. Compared to MURAL, Lucidspark is easier to use and I don't feel constricted when using it. MURAL felt a lot more challenging to get started with and I had to watch a lot more tutorials.
Visually, MURAL creates something that is more presentable to a client. I think that Lucidspark has a very brainstorm-like look and feel to it and it's not necessarily going to look beautiful at the end. MURAL, on the other hand, makes something look very put together, presentable, and ready to share with executives. Lucidspark has much more casualness or informality to it, but at the same time, it is very easy to use and it gets the job done.
We do still have MURAL at the company, although we have fewer licenses and they are available on a request basis only. The Lucid implementation predated it and I don't know if we have used MURAL for a specific use case. Rather, it is something that we are testing the effectiveness of. In fact, I don't think that we had used anything for this specific use case before. The reason is that a big part of why we use these tools now is that we're in a remote and virtual environment.
Lucid Suite is my favorite in terms of the options I have available for how I can create a foundation, begin brainstorming, create a flowchart, or whatever it is that becomes a really critical visual that I'm going to then use with my clients.
Using it only involves logging in. We already had a license and I didn't have to download a web app. It's all done on the website.
I had no hoops to jump through in order to get a license. All I had to do was login using my SSO and I had one. I'm not sure if my entire team or my entire company has access. We are an 800-person company and there is a suite of tools that we have access to without needing to ask, or raise a support ticket for.
I have never had to do anything in terms of maintenance, such as updates. All that I've had to do is log into the website.
I would say that in aggregate, it's possible that we haven't seen ROI, given that it's not something that is widely used. From an individual standpoint, I see a return on investment for me using it, and in me improving my role and my relationship with my clients.
In general, my company's ROI is harder to quantify.
Lucidspark has features for tagging and automatically grouping ideas to help organize them after a brainstorming session, although I don't take advantage of them. I think that it would be helpful but it feels like a little bit of extra work, for what we're using it for.
Lucidspark has integration with Slack, although I haven't looked into how it works yet. This is something that I plan to do in the future.
The Lucid Suite can be managed by a unified administration console, although that functionality is not particularly important for us at my company. We do things in an ad-hoc fashion and I use this for different needs that we have. We don't necessarily need a centrally managed administrator because of how we use it.
Overall, the Lucid Suite feels like a very user-friendly and easy way to make that first step, brainstorming, happen. We haven't moved to the next step where we take the charts that we make and bring them into action outside of Lucidchart and Lucidspark. This is because that action is actually taken by our clients in the ways that we use the platforms.
For our clients' sake, it helps them to visualize each step of the process and it becomes a point of reference to take a look at what we built together, and then use it to expand their platform. Internally, using the suite in this way is not something we've taken advantage of yet.
For me, the suite represents a foundational step for a very specific use case.
For anybody who is implementing this product, I would encourage them to think out of the box in terms of ways that the tool can be used by them. We're definitely an example of a company that probably doesn't use it for its intended use case, but it really solves a big gap for us that was brought on by being in a remote environment.
MURAL has a much more pronounced use case that involves creating something that you can share with clients, that can be very visual, and also really interactive. Lucidspark has the same potential, even though it's not always clear that this is something you can use it for.
The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Lucidspark is that brainstorming in a digital space is much more flexible than how we're used to doing it in person. Not only is it flexible, but you get to create something that persists. It can be used and shared and made so much more agile, and it's great to have a record of that.
It changed my perspective of how we brainstorm in the digital age, in general. It's awesome to me because in the past, using a whiteboard in the conference room didn't feel as productive because whatever we white boarded on, we took a photo of, and it wouldn't persist in the same way when we built it in this tool.
In summary, this is a good product that has very much fulfilled my use case. There are other tools out there that might be better for some of the things that we do, and at the same time, I think that there's a lot more this product offers that I haven't explored yet. I would like the tool, itself, to introduce me to those opportunities in use cases without me having to wonder what else I can do on the platform. This is a big reason why I haven't used it for some of those other purposes.
I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.
My use cases for Lucidspark are for:
I'm doing some generative research on some task analysis for our product. It's going to be distributed at some pretty high levels. So the simplicity of layout and organizability of it is really helpful in working with executives. I like that I'm going to be sending it out to about eight people and I can simply customize and date a document with a username and see whose document is what. It makes the synthesis of it much simpler.
Lucidspark enables us to prioritize ideas. That's exactly what we use it for. It's very important to us. The company has roadmap constraints that need to be addressed through this research. There's a large number of initiatives that are waiting for the output of this research and Lucidspak is making it happen.
Some of the text layout and text formatting of these shapes is useful. Drawing slow diagrams is pretty useful.
The user interface and intuitiveness are pretty good. Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. A little bit more automation, some grid snapping, and some layout options would make it a perfect ten. I like to use the templates.
The virtual whiteboard for brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts is great. It's ideal for things like moving around sticky notes and having an infinite whiteboard.
I like that you can double click on the whiteboard, on the canvas and it just creates a sticky note. That's very convenient. Formatting of stickies is also intuitive and easy. That's what stands out.
I see Collaborator Colors on our team. You can add a color to each collaboration in the document. That's a very cool feature.
Compared to in-person sessions, remote or virtual brainstorming sessions are good. It has its trade-offs. I think that sometimes it's easier to motivate and direct a group in person because you really don't know what people are doing sitting in their office at home. I still find it effective to do it virtually, you just have to be a little bit more attentive. This collaboration feature would be a good way to see who is doing what. Previously, I would have to click on a person's name and follow them around the board.
I integrate Lucidspark with Atlassian, JIRA, and G Suite. These integrations are pretty important because I find adding the step of stashing these things in a shared drive is burdensome. It saves a lot of steps that are often overlooked. It puts those documents in the cloud where others can collaborate on them. I find it's an appropriate place to put them.
I haven't yet used the features to tag and automatically group ideas but I know it exists. I'm not at that stage of research.
It enables us to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps, and less time organizing them. A lot of that analysis is done by the team in real-time. Having the ability to automate the organization would be something to look at but I don't know that it's so critical at this stage. It's built into our process.
Lucidspark facilitates a lot of the productivity of our working and brainstorming sessions. It supports shared thinking. Brainstorming is very difficult to do virtually relying on one's imagination alone. Having Lucidspark allows us to hear the thinking of a blurb and we can put elements like branding elements and colors and build a mood board to help ideate. We can have key phrases on cards that are easier to duplicate so there's not so much creation.
We use the integration with Slack in Lucidchart not with Spark.
In terms of improvement, having layout guides would be nice.
I would also like to have the ability to paginate, create a frame around some content other than a rectangle.
I have been using Lucidspark for around three weeks.
Stability seems fine. I haven't noticed any problems. It can be a little slow to start, but we haven't had stability issues.
I haven't stressed it yet. I'm just using it mostly on one-on-ones, but there'll be an opportunity in about a week that I'll be opening it up to a group of about seven or eight.
There are four users who use it. Their roles are user researcher, copywriter, sales, and UX. There are one or two staff members who maintain it. They are IT Ops support.
Lucidspark is our default tool for this. As the company starts focusing more on product evolution we'll see it being utilized more. I hope to be driving a lot of that.
I haven't yet needed to contact technical support.
I was previously using Miro. I switched because my new company wasn't using it.
There's a lot of similarity between Lucidspark and Miro.
The initial setup was simple and straightforward.
I know that licensing took a little while, but I believe a lot of that had to do with sales getting back to us.
I know that to get 10 seats for Spark is $2000 a year, which struck me as a little high.
My advice would be to do your due diligence, make sure it fits your use cases, and test your integrations.
I would rate Lucidspark a nine out of ten.
I use Lucidspark to brainstorm ideas. Suppose I want to create a new dashboard or new visualization in Power BI or Tableau. Before doing that, I want to brainstorm how I want my visualization to be. For that purpose, I am using Lucidspark.
I usually brainstorm my ideas, e.g., what do I want to create? Once you have a certain view in your mind and if you can put that into a document or something else, then it helps when you try to create the visualization or any dashboards in the real world. You can create any visualization that you want. It definitely helps in that way.
It is quite flexible. It is simply drag and drop. It saves a lot of time. One of the good things is you can export whatever you are creating into a PDF or something else. Also, you can share your work with others so they can collaborate and make any changes, if they wish to.
I really like Lucidspark's user interface and intuitiveness. It is simple and flexible.
It has so many things. You can insert images, screenshots, etc. There are also a lot of templates for our use, which is a good thing. For example, if I have a particular plan and can find a new template relevant, then I base it on that. I just need to edit the text, etc.
It definitely helps when prioritizing things. For a business problem, you can create many different documents and easily compare them, then you can decide which one that you want to go forward with.
There are so many features that you can do. There is also a presentation builder where you can use the documents that you are creating as a presentation.
One thing that I noticed, when I was creating a document or something else, is a lot of empty space. If I am creating from a particular position, there is a lot of empty space above it. I am not sure why this happens. If there is a solution for this, then it would help.
Recently, I requested a license from my company for this software. I have been using the tool for the past week.
In the last week, I haven't faced any kinds of issues or difficulties.
I haven't found any limitations or downsides. It provides you with everything that you need to brainstorm your ideas.
There are many data scientists using this particular software in our company. Some are using Lucidspark, while some are also using Lucidchart,
I have not contacted the technical support.
I used to simply use PowerPoint, Paint, or something like that previously. This is the first time that I am using this kind of software.
In PowerPoint, you need a lot of effort if you want to create even a simple text box or insert images. So, it takes a lot of effort and is also very time-consuming. Whereas, with Lucidspark's interfaces, you can simply drag and drop whatever you want and quickly create anything that you want to create. This saves time and makes it easy to use.
The initial setup is very straightforward. You need to log into it, then you can simply start creating anything you want. There is no complexity.
I would definitely give it a nine out of 10. I really like it. I would recommend others to use this particular software, since it is intuitive, flexible, time-saving, and easy to use. It has a lot of features that definitely help.
I have not used the Collaborator Colors feature, but we will use it in the future.
I used this product for coursework in a design class as a university student. It was primarily for UML diagrams, activity diagrams, and several other diagrams that are typically used in IT.
I find the intuitiveness of the user interface to be very good. The main benefit to using this product was how much more quickly I could get things done, and this is because it was more intuitive than the other options. It is also responsive, and I've actually saved a lot of time using it compared to a few other options that I tried.
For example, I tried for approximately four hours to get one particular diagram working using Draw.io and Visio. I finally gave up when I couldn't get it working, then it took me about five minutes to complete it with Lucidspark.
I have used the Lucidspark whiteboard to brainstorm ideas with group members for group activities, albeit the collaboration was not always virtual. We were together in the same room. However, it is good because it helps to keep everything organized and it's easier to distribute if you've got an electronic copy.
It is important to point out that we did use it for collaboration, although it was more of a visual tool to help us get everything in front of the group. After that, we moved our points to a more organized spreadsheet. We would use it as a tool to keep it on task while we were talking over Discord.
As part of our work, we used it during remote sessions. I found that it's always a bit harder to keep people on the same page when it's not in person, but everybody was paying attention.
We used both Lucidspark and Lucidchart. Lucidspark was used primarily for group work, whereas Lucidchart was used for generating reports and whatnot. The combination of the products was helpful in terms of visualizing each step of the process. Overall, the suite is easy to use and there are no really annoying idiosyncrasies that I had to learn.
Using this product helped to boost the productivity of our working sessions. We were doing some front-end design of an app, and there were times when we couldn't meet in person. Being able to quickly draw something up so that everybody could see it, made the process much easier.
I enjoy being able to just use an endless canvas because I tried using some other apps and they were a bit fiddly to deal with. For example, I had a lot of arrows and Draw.io was very annoying. I also used a different, industry-based application, Visio, and that was just hopeless.
How easy it is to use is the best feature.
Initially, I was a little confused about how to get to the different projects.
I would like to have a dark mode, but the option is not available.
When I was making some of the charts, some anchors were a bit annoying. I had trouble keeping everything lined up where if I moved a section over to add to a chart, it became a bit more difficult to get everything back into line. I had to go through each element that I'd moved because sometimes it would end off by a few pixels, which really annoyed me.
I used Lucidspark for approximately three months, over the course of a semester at university.
The stability was good. I didn't have any particular issues with availability or performance.
For the scope of the work that I had to do, and the level of collaboration involved, I did not have any issues with scalability. I didn't really have to consider how much further it would need to expand.
I tried using Draw.io and Visio. What I really liked about Lucidspark is that all of the specific icons were available and easy to find. Each kind of UML diagram that I wanted to work on was already included. I didn't have to go hunting around for those and that they also work seamlessly.
For example, I had to do some curved arrows to and from certain boxes and it was really difficult to make those symmetrical using Draw.io. However, I could do this pretty easily in Lucidspark.
The initial setup was very simple. I just had to sign up and then it was available in the browser, so there was very little setup. All of the things that I needed were just modules I had to open. I skipped the tutorial, so I didn't need that. It was very easy.
I have definitely seen a return on my investment. For the amount of time that I saved, even for just one sticking point, in particular, I felt it was a good ROI. The reality is that it saved me a lot of time and I'm pretty busy, so that was very important.
As some of the charts that I was using had a couple of hundred elements, I needed to use a paid version of Lucidspark. The pricing is very reasonable. It is more expensive than some of the free options out there but much cheaper than Visio, and it works much better.
My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to just give it a try. It has basically the same interface as Draw.io, which I know a lot of people are using, so they may already be familiar with it. The difference is that some of the annoying factors of working in that system were eliminated.
For example, with Draw.io, you really have to manage what's in front of what. Whereas in Lucidchart and Lucidspark, it was much easier to keep people organized, especially as an interactive task when collaborating.
One of the features available is the Collaborator Colors, where users can be assigned certain colors for their notes and other contributions. We did not use this feature extensively. Rather, we all got our thoughts out, transferred the dot points, and kept track of who is assigned tasks by using the collaborator colors. Essentially, it was our tracking mechanism.
I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.
I am a consultant to the financial services industry. I use Lucidspark for process development for the different contracts that I've got.
I run it on all of my devices including my desktop, iPhone, and iPad.
In terms of intuitiveness, the web-based interface is great. For iOS, I do not find it as easy to use. Trying to update documents on my phone, the screen is very small and that presents a problem. I've used it a couple of times on the iPad and I've accomplished what I wanted to accomplish, but it's taken longer than if I were to do it on the computer.
Lucidspark allows me to prioritize ideas, which is important to me. It is my main charting and documenting tool that I'm using for ideas that I have.
The product allows me to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps, rather than organizing them. This is something that is very important because I'm using documentation to help clients visualize the process that they have to go through.
Although I have only been using Lucidspark for a short time, I believe it's enhanced my brainstorming sessions and made them more productive.
The most valuable feature is the different ways that you can build out the charting and the mind maps. There are various different templates that are included in the program.
It's nice to have the ability to go cross-platform. I use both iOS devices and PC devices, so that's really important to me. It's nice that I can do stuff from a mobile perspective because when I'm out of the office, I can still work on it. I'm not always working in my office location, so it's a nice function.
It takes me longer to complete the same task on mobile devices than it does on the desktop. It's not as big as a computer screen but it isn't just related to the screen size. It could be the operating system, which is the interface between the program and iOS. The computer I'm using is a PC-based computer, and it is seamless and efficient.
I woke up in the middle of the night a couple of nights ago and I wanted to do something. Using my iPad, it seems clunky and isn't as responsive as my PC. It was between 2 am and 3 am, and I was thinking about something that was noteworthy. I went to Lucid on my iOS device, the iPad, and I tried to put the information in. I couldn't get it in the way I wanted it to, and so I flipped over to another application and wrote the information down and then went back later in the day and got on the PC and put it back into Lucid that way. So, I did get some of the stuff into Lucid on the iPad in the middle of the night, but not a lot. Ultimately, I got frustrated and I thought that it was taking far too long. That is why I switched to the other application.
It would be nice if you could import things into Lucid and then manipulate them from there. For example, when I did work in the middle of the night, it was a text-based application. I had to re-type the stuff in the morning into Lucid. It would have been nice to be able to import it and then use the Lucid functions to manipulate the data.
One thing that might be beneficial to future potential users is for the vendor to extend the trial to like a two-week period instead of a one-week period. I started creating documents immediately because I had an immediate need, but if you don't have an immediate need, you might not be able to use it within that week. So, I would say extend the trial for two weeks to give the user a greater opportunity to test it.
I have been using Lucidspark for approximately two weeks.
On the PC, it works wonderfully. On the iOS piece, not so much. I don't use an Apple computer, so it might integrate better in that case, but it seems clunky. It's hard to manipulate on my iPhone, and it's easier, but not as easy on an iPad.
I've started using the scalability features, meaning my documents are getting much larger than they could ever get in the previous applications I was using. Now I've got documents with multiple pages and multiple processes on multiple pages. From that standpoint, it's fantastic because now the client can start by looking at the overview from a high level, then drill down into a particular section of the process, then down into the different steps involved in the process.
From this standpoint, scalability is great.
At this point, I'm the only person in the company using it. Within the next month, I'm probably going to introduce it to one of the organizations that I deal with.
I have not had a need to contact technical support.
I have tried four different solutions for this type of work, including Mind Map, Draw.io, and Visio. Of the few that I have gone through, Lucid is the one I'm using right now the most. The other ones didn't provide what I was looking for, just from a functionality standpoint and a documentation standpoint.
Visio is one that I used years ago and I just wasn't satisfied with the process to get things accomplished. It seemed that you had to read a manual and get training in order to effectively use it.
I have also used iOS-based applications including SimpleMind and Simple.io. These were iOS applications that could not work across different platforms and because I've got a PC desktop, I couldn't go back and forth between it and my mobile devices. These products were easy to use but I couldn't cross the interfaces.
Essentially, I've got four other programs out there that are becoming obsolete because of Lucid.
The initial setup is straightforward.
I've been using these types of products for probably six or seven years, or maybe more than that. From an intuitive standpoint, I knew what I was looking for and what I was going to do. It was fairly easy to set up the documents I wanted to set up, and then it was an intuitive process to go through and manipulate them the way I needed them to.
There's no special training and there's no need to read a manual before you use it. From that standpoint, it was nice.
From a communications standpoint, and from an ease of communicating with clients standpoint, I'd say that I have seen a return on my investment.
The pricing is in line with everything else out there, and you get what you pay for. I haven't looked at the enterprise-level pricing, as I'm subscribed with the individual or the small team pricing. That's comparable to what I've seen elsewhere.
It'd be great to have it cheaper, but once again, if you lose some of the functionality, it's not really worth being cheaper for that.
There was a list of perhaps 10 products that I evaluated. I printed them out, went to the websites, and looked at them. These were all of the big products and one of them that I recall is either Edraw or Draw.io. That is the one that I came closest to, but I chose Lucid over it.
I needed a robust charting, process, documenting program and that's why I chose Lucid. I looked online, I did a bunch of different comparisons of the stuff out there in the marketplace. When I looked at Lucidspark I thought that it looked to be the most robust for what I want to do.
The feature set that was documented on the Lucid website was what prompted me to start a trial. I didn't go into the trial of the Draw.io product. When I compared the features that were explained on the websites between Lucid versus Draw.io, it really motivated me to do the trial and then to become a subscriber.
I am using this product for high-level ideas right now but I haven't yet turned on the virtual whiteboard features. I've only been using it for a couple of weeks and I'm still getting comfortable with it. I can envision virtual whiteboards, which would be fantastic because right now I'm using Google Meetings and their virtual whiteboard while I'm in meetings.
I haven't yet looked at the virtual whiteboard, but I am hoping that there is a drawing feature embedded into Lucid. That would be fantastic.
I use it for brainstorming but not over the PC. I've basically done mind mapping and brainstorming for myself but I haven't used it in a collaborative environment yet.
I know that there is integration with Google available because it has come up on my screen, although I haven't used it yet.
My advice for anybody who is considering Lucidspark is to definitely give it a try and do the analysis. Overall, I think that this is a good product and my biggest complaint is because of the iOS interface.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.