Lucidspark Reviews

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 have a startup. Other members of the leadership team are located across the country in two other places. We do ideation using Lucidspark to have a central repository for our notes, so we have a place to come back and take a look as we move on.

We are a startup. The main thing that we used it for was to develop our go-to-market plan. We used it to talk about and draw our specific customer segment applications, business models, etc. We also used a very low level timeline feature based on where the boxes are held on the chart. We finalized that in Lucidchart and used Lucidspark for go-to-market strategy planning.

Lucidspark makes it easy for all of us to see the same thing at the same time in real-time. It is very easy to move something to the side, then everybody can see it and agree upon it, saying, "Okay, we are not going to deal with this right now." We sort of use containers, putting it in a parking lot for now, then move other things to what we are going to deal with now.

It allows anybody who is active in it to make whatever changes they need to make right then. It doesn't fall on the shoulders of the person who is "taking notes". So, the conversation is able to proceed while people are moving things with containers, adding notes, etc. Everybody can do this at the same time.

Lucidspark has probably changed the way that we conduct meetings. Previously, there were a lot of documents being sent, people having to review them, and sending them back and forth. With Lucidspark, we have been able to just have a very simple outline or a few containers setup in a location, and people know where that location is. When it's time for the meeting, we can just jump into it with the same level of understanding, then proceed to have a conversation with everybody, who have the same knowledge and understanding immediately.

It is pretty easy to move our ideas from the idea stage to execution, using the vendor’s suite of products. Right now, we use Lucidspark. We keep things in it for a while. As those things sort of solidify, they are moved into Lucidchart when it becomes more of a process and less of an ideation or high level idea. We then use Lucidchart for as long as possible. For now, because we are just a startup, there is not much that needs to happen after Lucidchart because we are still developing high-level processes, etc. It works very well for us because there are really just a few steps: a brainstorm of the thought, then putting it into Lucidspark, and ultimately moving that into Lucidchart. 

The most valuable feature is the real-time aspect, being able to know when a particular person is collaborating. It has colors and associations within it, which make it easily visible. So, if I go to something that we created, I can very quickly tell when and who made changes or added notes, at a quick glance. That has probably been the biggest help so far.

The solution’s user interface and intuitiveness are great. I signed in and didn't need to use any tools. I didn't have any questions. Understanding-wise, the interface has the same feel as Google Docs; it is very easy to move in.

Lucidspark's virtual whiteboard for brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts is my favorite part. I was excited when I found out the solution would have this capability. Our company tried other sorts of things to create a similar sort of tool, so it is good that this is within Lucid. You can kind of flip back and forth with the charts that are already created if you have a Lucid account, which we do. Therefore, it is good that it is all held in the same place and things can be transferred, if needed. It has worked out really well for us.

The solution’s Collaborator Colors feature makes it very easy to quickly look to see when and who has made changes since the last time the whiteboard has been updated. The feature is very helpful. This is one of the most important features because of its ease of use. If your team has had a meeting and you have a mental image of what the whiteboard looked like before, and you come back and someone has gone to it in the interim, then you can very quickly identify what has changed and who has made the change. If there are things that need to happen based upon that, it's a very short jump, as opposed to needing separate notes. It is intuitive, making it a lot easier.

I like the Sticky Notes and texts.

Depending on how much Lucidspark wants to emulate a true whiteboard experience, there could be other ways to do things. For instance, we have to create the container when we do it. In a typical sort of whiteboard situation, it could be helpful if there were templated containers, like a parking lot, where someone could just click, then it would show up. Most people with a whiteboard process have something like this, but we do it ourselves. However, this is not something that would keep me from choosing the product.

I would like an integration where if I am looking at a chart and immediately recognize that there needs to be a meeting to discuss something, then there should be a way to just click something and say, "Under team tools set up a meeting based on this chart," and it puts a link to the charts that I am reviewing. Then, it integrates with Outlook (or whatever mail service) and sends it to the appropriate people. The less clicks, the better; if it takes me one click to do that, then I won't forget. I won't have to write it down someplace. It will just be done.

I have been using it for about two months.

I haven't had any trouble. It works the way it should, and it is up when I need it to be up.

We haven't been in a place where we needed to scale. From previous uses of Lucidchart, not Lucidspark, it was easily scalable.

We are really small. For now, I manage the unified administrator console and that is easy to do. As we expand, I can see that it still seems pretty user-friendly and easy to manage. At previous companies, most of the project managers and product developers had access to Lucid. I could see for us moving forward we could have a similar strategy, where people would have access to these tools and that would be important.

Right now, there are just three of us using it. I am the CEO, then the other two are consultants/technical advisors.

As our company matures, I have had good experiences with Lucid at previous companies. As our company grows, it would be one of the baseline software applications that new hires would receive. It just makes day-to-day work, and the transferring of that work across departments and functions, just so much easier. So, as we grow, people will get it.

I have never had any issues where I have needed to use it.

I have used Visio and all kinds of Google Docs. In my experience with Lucidchart and Lucidspark, they make the process painless. It makes it easy for people to become a part of it so there is not a lot of upfront work that needs to be done, instead of making it difficult for people to join into conversations. People can immediately help and are instantly recognizable. It's just seamless moving things through Lucidchart and Lucidspark, even exporting things for people that don't necessarily have it into a PDF. It is very user-friendly and seamless, so we don't have to worry so much about the formatting of things. We can focus more on the actual action of creating.

Box had similar capabilities, at least in the way that we used it. It had a shared document and people could all be a part of the document, but it was very rudimentary, where everybody was able to see a document being edited. It had its own issues with that, but we also used Box.

The initial setup was very easy. I got an email, then 10 or 15 minutes later, the entire team was set up and ready to use it.

The time is no longer spent trying to get everybody to be in one document or sending documents back and forth so that everybody is on the same page. Those things add up, especially as a team gets larger. Also, there are errors that come with that, e.g., sending the wrong version of a document. If the document is held somewhere, then it is easy to determine who made the last correction. Everybody is a part of the team so I can remove people as an administrator who need to be removed or add them to a specific thing. It is very straightforward and worth it in that manner.

It is not cost-prohibitive. It is well worth it, but we are also a small team. We are definitely planning on having it as part of our onboarding for everyone, but I haven't looked at the pricing for an enterprise level or large set of employees. For right now, it's worth the cost and there are no issues with it, but I'm not sure what that would look like with scaling.

I used Lucidchart previously, which is why I believe that I was invited to use Lucidspark.

Every solution has their own framework. We have used all sorts of collaboration/project management software: Visio, Asana, Lucid, and Google Docs. Because I worked in IT, we tested them out. We picked Lucid because of its ease of use and breadth of capability.

Visio is the old standard for people, and it will do a certain thing. However, sometimes it is not the most user-friendly, and there are sort of capabilities that it doesn't have. Google Docs is sort of on the other end of that, where it has this sort of pervasiveness where everybody uses Google Docs, but it is not as user-friendly in getting people to share documents or being part of a document with shared across a team, seeing that in real-time, and having all of those markers. There is a lot more upfront work that needs to happen, as opposed to Lucid where I just send out the emails. People are a part of it, either the team or page. It is very, very simple and straightforward. 

The biggest lesson is that it doesn't have to be difficult. Part of this is a mid-COVID situation, where having remote or virtual conversations can be just as effective as having in-person conversations, if you have the tools which support that. I know that Lucidspark has definitely supported this. My team has never been in the same location, but we have been able to move our process forward with this tool and other tools, just based on its capabilities. So, it has worked well for us.

The first time that we used it, because it was a new tool, the engagement wasn't high. After that, people (other than myself) who hadn't used it before saw its capabilities, then it was used more often.

I would rate the solution as a 10 (out of 10).

My primary use case is for documenting processes. 

The Whiteboard session feature could be the most helpful feature. It can help my organization through brainstorming and design sessions for technical tools, systems, and solutions. It's hard to brainstorm remotely and this tool will help to facilitate that.

Lucidspark enables us to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps and less time organizing them. We're spending the same amount of time working through all those items. It takes the same amount of time for us to use Lucidchart as it is to use Lucidspark.

The suite is really helpful at helping us to visualize each step of the process from brainstorming additional ideas to turning those ideas into reality. I'm speaking more to Lucidchart, but also Lucidspark. I use Lucidchart and Spark pretty often. The products in the suite easily convey processes to people. They're really helpful. I think they're great workflow tools.

It is pretty easy to move our ideas from the idea stage to execution using the vendor's suite of products. We use it pretty often too. We use it to convey how the technical solutions will actually impact a stakeholder. It makes it really easy for us to give our stakeholders something visual before we've actually built something.

The sharing feature is the most valuable feature. It's been really easy to share Lucidspark boards and documents with other people.

The Lucidspark app creates a web link and you can just copy-paste and give that to anyone, for anyone to view a flow chart or document you've created, it's just like a Google doc.

The user interface is pretty straightforward. I have no real complaints. It's pretty clear what I need to do and how to do it.

So far, Lucidspark and Lucidchart have been comparable products. Lucidspark has been helpful, but it feels like there are products that can replace it and that I could use that work just as well.

The tool felt pretty similar to Lucidchart and I wasn't a super avid user of it. A lot of the features were pretty similar. I feel like they were pretty straightforward. I didn't run into any issues. And even in terms of non-issues, like enhancements, I feel like there wasn't anything I could really think of that would be helpful to improve the tool.

Creating the documents was pretty straightforward. Lucidchart has templates. I didn't use the template feature, but that was something that I wanted with Lucidchart that I saw that they had in Lucidspark, but I didn't use.

I have been using Lucidspark for two months.

It is very stable.

It is pretty scalable. It felt like it matched a lot of the same structure as Lucidchart in terms of how they organize their documents. 

One of the other team members who uses it is a software developer. He helps to build and design technical shelves for submissions. I use it in my role as a manager of the business systems team. I help with the use case that I use it for which is for business analyst work that is documenting requirements and sharing process flows for the business.

It does not require any maintenance. 

We did not use it that extensively and currently have no plans to buy a license. It looks like a helpful tool for the Whiteboarding component, which I'd love to use in future meetings, but I think they have a free version that I'm looking at now. 

I have also used Google Sheets. I chose Lucidspark because of the free trial.

The initial setup was straightforward. I just got a license and then logged in and it was an easily true SaaS product. The moment I had the license and was able to log in, I was able to access the product and immediately start doing stuff.

If we were paying for the solution, I would definitely expect to see some return and the return would be in terms of efficiency gains. The main reason I'd want to use it is to make it easier for my online team to communicate, discuss, and brainstorm with each other. If it's subjectively easier to do that, then that feels like a return to me. It would be around 5% to 10% of a return. 

There are licensing fees for some of us to use it, but I'm not sure what they are and I don't remember encountering it during the trial.

It has not affected the productivity of our working and brainstorming sessions too much. We recently did a big overhaul on our Salesforce system for some of our logic and one of our offshore developers used Lucidspark to explain how he designed the solution that just made it really easy for us to understand. He used documentation as the technical design.

My advice would be to use it more. Use it more than I did specifically for the Whiteboarding design and scrum rituals that happen. Utilize more of the features. 

I would rate it a six out of ten. It's a good product. I just don't know if it's valuable. It just seems like I could use it in Lucidchart or with other products in their suite to replace it.

Primarily, I was using Lucidspark for the whiteboarding and collaboration. The whole thing was initiated because I was trying to work using the workflow on LucidChart, which triggered me to have a kind of a collaboration meeting. Nowadays, because of COVID-19, everything is virtual. So, I thought it would be a good idea to collaborate over this collaborative whiteboard using my flow in LucidChart over to Lucidspark.

Lucidspark was pretty useful because of the integration feature available, e.g., what you do in Lucidchart can be easily rolled over to Lucidspark. However, I feel there could be more integrations built into it, which would help to bring in more easier integrations from work that we have done on other tools, like Jira or Confluence.

Because of COVID-19, we were not able to run our workshops in person because of the situation. This tool helped us run the agenda of our workshops during those times using its collaboration tool, which was pretty useful for us.

It positively affected the productivity of our working and brainstorming sessions. It was definitely a saver for us because we wanted the agenda to be addressed as soon as possible. We were able to do that, and this solution was pretty useful for us.

I was able to consume what I had done on Lucidchart into Lucidspark.

I have used their sticky notes and free hand drawings. The Collaborator Colors feature is important just to be able to segregate individuals for the better interpretation of what you are putting up on the board. 

I found Lucidspark's virtual whiteboard useful, but I still felt there could be more features, like putting up presentations, creating frames, and being able to run it like a presentation. These things would make it better. If they could add more features for presentations and organizing the different sections of the board in a space, which is interlinked to how you can present them efficiently. This would be very helpful.

I started using Lucidspark very recently, for probably a month.

Performance has been fine. It has been pretty good, in fact.

I have not tested scalability.

I initiated it within my company. I'm a product manager. We did this workshop mid-December, and in the workshop, there were around 15 people.

We haven't used the support.

We have been using a couple of whiteboarding or brainstorming solutions. One is Conceptboard and the other is MURAL, which specifically has more collaboration with more features. For example, one of the features that I mentioned was integration with Bluetooth. So, MURAL has more integrations available. MURAL has the presentation capability as well, which is helpful. It also has more templates to choose from as a starting point. As a con, MURAL is just a whiteboarding tool, whereas Lucidspark has Lucidchart to help provide us a flow chatting tool as well, which kind of an advantage on the Lucid side.

Setting up and using it was pretty easy. The setup was just a few minutes. I was able to work soon after.

I personally had a hard time getting the licenses sorted out. In the organizational license, the whole process took a lot of time. Personally, I feel that the licensing could be done much better on that front.

Onboarding it was a challenge for me. They need to work a bit on making users stick to their platform, be it Lucidchart or Lucidspark, then engage them into any kind of paid services. Primarily, this will help people get stuck on their platform who will eventually use it, since they would have their work set up on it rather than the other way around. Instead of using both of these tools, Lucidchart and Lucidspark, I would recommend sticking with one or the other.

I personally believe in-person sessions are more effective for multiple reasons. You can sketch and draw ideas on a virtual whiteboard, but you cannot replicate the total creativity that comes out of a physical session workshop and what happens on a physical whiteboard. One reason is you cannot replicate the creativity that comes out of the whole environment when everybody is in the same room versus when everybody is collaborating over Zoom, or whatever meeting tools that you're using. Another reason is physical presence adds a little bit to the whole discussion as compared to being on a call or meeting on the Internet. Primarily, it is easier to see expressions, the involvement, and have more participation, as compared to a virtual platform where it is more on the individual to kind of take the lead.

I would not say that the tool itself helps prioritize ideas. Because at the end of the day, it is a collaboration platform and more based on the output of the workshop. The workshop helps you prioritize ideas, but I would not specifically credit that to just this tool, or any tool for that matter.

I would rate it around a seven to eight (out of 10). I still feel there is a scope for improvement, but it is pretty good as a baseline. If some things discussed in this review could be worked a bit on, I would definitely prefer using it.

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. 

We use Lucidspark as a tool to collaborate on organizing our platform architecture. The company I work for has a lot of different platforms and backend systems and we've used Lucidspark a lot to document what those platforms are, share it amongst our teams, and make sure everything looks correct. If there's feedback or changes, it's really easy to use this app to have that shared with everybody.

An example of the use case would be a request to show the entire structure of our company, data structure, and platform structure. I would create a chart with all that information. Usually, it would be from a sketch or a whiteboard drawing, and then I would use Lucidspark to make it that much more clean, clear, and editable.

It's easy to collaborate and it's easy to share amongst various team members. I myself am a product designer, and I found that in the past, as a project designer it's hard to work with engineers in terms of finding a product that satisfies what I need and want to do with the project designer and what they need and want as engineers. This tool is a good combination of both, and I feel like it's super easy to use. It makes a lot of sense. It's simple enough, but also has enough complicated features to make it what we want it to be.  

The usability is overall super straightforward and it makes a lot of sense after you spend some time in it.

The user interface is not intuitive because I have used other applications previously, and Lucidspark took a little bit more time. Once I figured out how to save shapes, that was super helpful, but it did take probably one or two times to get there. Once I understood it, it made a lot of sense. I did watch a quick tutorial, which was helpful just to get a sense of how to make some changes and update everything. 

I've only been using it for a very short amount of time. It's pretty new to me. I've used other products similar to it before, but I'm on a new team and so we're using this product to check it out and see how it would work from a collaborative perspective.

It seems very stable. I haven't heard of any issues with it. I know it's been tried and true with our team.

It seems to scale really well. It seems to be really easy to modify, expand on, and add on to. Currently, we have about 60 users and their roles range from data analysts, backend engineers, front-end engineers, platforms engineers, and one product designer. 

I've never had to engage with their tech support but there seems to be a lot of resources.

We were using Overflow and were using it mostly just because it was familiar to us and it was pretty simple. But we switched over because Lucid is far more robust in terms of what it could do and is more geared towards the engineering team. It was also more affordable for our team.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was really easy to jump right in and figure things out. It took a little bit of time to find out some more specific things that I wanted to do, but it was pretty easy to understand and figure out.

Our engineering team does the deployment, if necessary.

We needed about three members that have access to deploy. All of their roles are various types of engineers.

Lucidspark is being used within a small portion of our team relatively extensively, but we do have plans to expand on it and provide more access to more teammates at my company. The growth will be slow over time but it surely has been growing.

It has enabled us to have the ability to ramp people up more quickly and educate employees more effectively. Even though we only have five or six of us using Lucid, we have a lot of our teammates still viewing and engaging with it. That has been extremely valuable to better document and educate our teammates on various topics and information.

My advice would be to really check out all the features, see all that I can do. Understand that it's a really powerful tool and it could really add a lot of value to what your team does and how they structure everything.

I learned how important it is to have tools that allow my teammates to be able to see what's going on, make comments, make improvements, and to do it in a way that doesn't bottleneck. It has been eye-opening to see how those tools enabled that without having a ton of back and forth. It makes my job a lot easier.

I would rate Lucidspark an eight out of ten. It's a really great product. I do think that there are still possibilities for improvement and extension, or just overall ad-ons to make the user experience a little bit cleaner. But in terms of what it can do and all the additions it has, I think there's a ton of potential.

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.

We do a lot of whiteboarding.

Since we're in the IT field we have a lot of process maps that we draw and it's easy to collaborate with the team on a live Zoom or any conference call we have going on, where whoever is participating just throws their ideas onto the board.

A benefit is that anybody, across any platform, can collaborate anywhere. They don't need to have software installed, like with Visio.

The solution also enables us to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and less time organizing them. Once we're ready, we take it to our leadership and the leadership might see something that we didn't see. They're able to easily move it around and say, "What if we move the process this way?" They can do it on their own time. We don't have to wait for them to join a call and do it. We just send it over, and then they'll revise it and send it back to us. It has made our working and brainstorming sessions very simple. It has cut down a lot of back-and-forth. We're able to get to the result in less time than we used to. It saves us at least one day per week.

The most valuable feature is the live, interactive whiteboarding. For brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts it's like Visio but much better, because it's online. Collaboration for process is much easier. Everybody else has more of a "sticky-notes" type of solution. But with Lucidspark, you're using visual diagrams and the icons and things that you need that are more like Visio.

In terms of the user interface and intuitiveness, it's easy to use even for a non-technical person. You just throw things on and, for whatever you need, there is drag-and-drop. You don't have to train anybody. Everybody, right off from day-one, knows how to use it and take it forward.

We also use the Collaborator Colors feature and with it we can see who has proposed an idea when we're on a live call. If it's me or if it's my boss who said, "Hey, maybe we should do this," we can say, "Yeah, that looks better than what Joe said," for example. Or we can say "Hey, Joe's ideas kind of make sense," and we can take mine out and put his in place.

In addition, it has ready-to-go boards for process. You convert them into PowerPoint or the like and export them very easily and plug them in. That's what we do, most of the time: We build the process map and, once it's ready, we export it and stick it into PowerPoints. We also build a lot of solution documents for different technologies and processes. We use the Lucid diagrams and put them into the solution documents.

You can also add pages. Once we like something on page one, for example, we drag it and move it to a different page where we're saying, "Hey, this is the final process for this."

And the fact that the suite can be centrally managed by a unified administration console is very good, because then you're not tied down to a per-license model. Instead, it's more of a SaaS model, so if somebody leaves the team you can just reassign the license to their replacement.

We have been using Lucid products for years. We have been using Lucidspark since it was released about four months ago.

The stability is excellent. We haven't had an issue where it was down or we couldn't reach it.

It's easy to scale because it's not on-prem. It's cloud-based, so we just have to add licenses and reach out to our rep for Enterprise.

We have about 10 users of the solution. There's room to grow, obviously, but I don't see us doing so right now.

I have not used technical support.

The initial setup is straightforward because we use the SaaS model; nothing on-prem.

The process took us about four weeks but that was more due to our internal process because we had to get approval from InfoSec and everybody to make sure that there were no vulnerabilities in the software or anything that was getting installed, and that no data—client information, health information—was stored on the cloud.

For the deployment, on our side, there was just one person, but building and getting all the initial approvals involved about four people who are in InfoSec, IT, the leadership, and FP&A for the cost.

Not everybody uses Lucidspark on a daily basis. Some teams just use it when they need to build charts, once in a while. But we have seen a return on investment for people who use it on a daily basis, in terms of time and money savings, because we're not allocating licenses 100 percent. We can transfer a license on-the-fly. With Visio, if a person leaves the team tomorrow, you have already paid upfront.

There is room for improvement in terms of the cost. It should all be bundled together. It's becoming like a Microsoft, where you have to buy all the different version features separately. It should just all be bundled with one price. I shouldn't need to buy Lucidspark separately and Lucidchart, etc. That model is like what Microsoft does, and it's very annoying.

The only other options were Visio and Visio Online but they are both by Microsoft. They were not compatible with Mac and others. That's why it was easy to make the decision to go with Lucid.

When it comes to prioritizing ideas we use monday.com to prioritize our tasks at hand. Based on that, we use Lucidchart to bounce ideas around.

We have the full Lucidchart, the full Enterprise version, so that we're able to build process maps and everything else. I am mostly on the build side of things. We build the solution and then we hand off the solution document. We design how the process will look, on Lucid, and then we build it out and give it to operations to run. We don't really see when it goes live. But it helps the build side to collaborate and get to that point.

I think it's a great product. It's easy to use and there is not much hand-holding needed from an IT perspective. The SaaS model is great because it's cross-format. We're able to use it from our iPad or phones or from anything. It doesn't matter where we are.