Lucidspark Reviews

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 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.

My primary use case for this solution was educational. I used Lucidspark to practice design thinking with several other students. It's a good place for collaborative work. 

Some of the students I collaborated with were interested in product management, a big part of which entails thinking from the customer's perspective and figuring out what the solutions to a problem should be.

As a group, we used Lucidspark to collaborate and share our thoughts on potential problems and solutions. Think of it like a human design-thinking workshop.

Lucidspark helped us prioritize ideas, which was very important for us. We did a workshop and, as part of that, we were trying to act as product managers and figure out which solutions should be implemented, so idea prioritization played a major role.

The ability to group ideas automatically does save time. For example, four people can put their thoughts down and Lucidspark will help them see the commonalities and patterns among their entries.

Lucidspark's ability to automatically group ideas saves time and helps users prioritize. This Lucidspark feature quickly distills the entire group's ideas into different buckets. The group can then make a call on what to first solve for. This is how we used Lucidspark. We knew that we would come up with multiple ideas but we wanted to see which buckets most people would fall into. 

This feature is helpful if, for example, you are trying to identify the problems associated with a particular product and prioritize which to work on first.

With Lucidspark, you really don't have to keep track of everything because so much is automated. The solution enables you to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and less time organizing. This was important for us. Had we been using some other solution, like Notepad, for example, a lot more time would have been spent in writing things down. With Lucidspark, we spent very little time doing that. It definitely improved our productivity.

Lucidspark is very customizable. We spent more time in ideation rather than making sure we were writing in a way that is clear and that nothing was lost.

Overall, I found it very intuitive and easy to use. I didn't find it difficult at all. I appreciated Lucidspark's integration with Lucidchart. 

I found the whiteboard very customizable. You can create different stages of a flow chart, for example. You can play around with a lot of variables. Initially, the default structure of the whiteboard was not useful for us. However, we were quickly able to change the structure. I found the whiteboard easy to use and change. It’s easy to collaborate using this product. Also, multiple people can use the whiteboard at the same time. For example, I can be filling in something while my classmates fill in something else. This is helpful.

We used Lucidspark’s Collaborator Colors feature. I've never come across anything like it. It's a good solution for collaborative brainstorming. I don't think there is any other solution where I could do collaborative brainstorming this well.

We also used the sticky notes quite often. We would write our thoughts on a sticky note and then circle back in five minutes to discuss what we put together.

One challenge we ran into while collaborating on Lucidspark was tracking time. We would, for example, set aside 90 minutes for a particular task but end up spending a lot more time on it. It would be great to see if Lucidspark could also help us keep track of time. That feedback would be beneficial.  

I've used Lucidspark a couple of times as part of some group activities. 

I did not run into any issues with stability. 

Lucidspark seems scalable; like any number of people could use it. We've used it in groups of five to six people. I plan to increase my usage.

I have not used their tech support yet. 

I never knew something like Lucidspark existed before. For previous brainstorming sessions, I would just use a projector and open up Notepad. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It only took a few minutes. 

Initially, it was straightforward to use and play around with the whiteboard. I was immediately able to start working on it. It didn't take me more than two or three minutes to get started.

We implemented it ourselves. 

I am still using a free trial. 

I did not evaluate other options. 

Lucidspark is a great product. I would definitely recommend it to anybody who's thinking of doing some collaborative brainstorming work. The solution can also be used by individuals working on big projects. 

I didn't notice a difference between remote and in-person sessions. Using Lucidspark, it felt like all of us were working in-person on a huge whiteboard. You could see in real-time what everyone else was doing.

I haven’t used Lucidspark’s Slack integration, but it seems useful and natural.

I mostly use it to make mind maps and some process charts for the place I work. Sort of like work processes, the flow of things, so everyone knows what you need to do.

I'm pretty sure that in the coming weeks when I start to use it more on a regular basis, maybe every day or a couple of times a week, that's probably when I will figure it out more. But for the time being, it's been really good.

We have started to integrate some stuff on Slack, but individually on its own, and then we've also started Lucidspark. At some point down the road, there will be an integration between the two programs, but we haven't started that yet. We're trying to move everything to Slack.

Now, if we need to have a project on hand, if it's a weekly project, or if it's a one-time project, all the processes are started right there. So instead of having to call the whole team and brief them step-by-step, you just send over the chart. Then from the colors and from the shapes, everyone in the team is quite familiar with the shapes and the colors. Everyone would know it, you wouldn't have to waste time. You could maybe save two hours of a meeting trying to explain everything to everyone.

We have only been using it for a week now but it has already made things so much more convenient. It's easier to see rather than just talking about it and sending each other notes.

It enables us to prioritize ideas. It's extremely important that we can do so because an idea is just an idea unless you actually decide to take the initiative and the effort to execute it and this has helped to do so.

We can also spend more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps and less time organizing them. We spend much less time. It saves hours of trying to explain stuff and back and forth.

If our effectiveness was at around a five or six before this, the process would have definitely helped move it to an eight or nine. There are still some improvements that need to be made, but I think once we actually make use of every single feature on the program, then we would be able to move up better. I have not seen a program like this in my past. And I know for a fact that in any other company, it would have helped, regardless of the field that the company is in, it would've helped definitely.

I like the freedom it gives you, how easily everything flows, and the fact that everything has labels on it, so the different shapes have different things. At first, when you start using it, you probably wouldn't know what every shape means. But as I go through it, I'll see a shape like the diamond and I'll know that a decision has been made and it needs to be sent for approval. So it's either a yes or a no, a pass or a fail. It makes things a little bit easier. 

I also like that you can color code it, so you know which departments are supposed to handle which parts of the process.

The user interface and intuitiveness are pretty good for what I've been using it for. It's pretty good, very easy to use, and very easy to understand. I like that they have a lot of tutorial videos that you can watch, so you're not just stranded there and trying to figure everything out for yourself.

The virtual whiteboard board is amazing. That is something that we've all needed, and I wish I knew about this back when I was focusing on my master's in university. That would have made things so easy. I struggled with MindManager and all these other free programs that you can use to make your mind maps and share your process with your supervisors and your classmates. Lucidspark would have been a lot easier to use and would've been a really good thing to have back then.

You can put anything down, you can add sticky notes, and then you can add certain hotspots. The arrows are easier to match as well because you can draw them from anywhere.

I use the Collaborator Colors feature. I've only just started incorporating that but it has been a blessing. It's very important where I'm working because it lets the whole team know the processes and which department is in charge of which section. So you know how crucial this department is for the next step to carry on and for the whole thing to run smoothly, whether it's a project or whether it's a weekly process.

I have used Lucidspark for remote and virtual brainstorming sessions. It was amazing. I've actually never done anything in person with this particular place that I'm working at, so I don't know if I'll be able to answer that. But it has definitely made virtual things a lot easier to do because otherwise, I'd be stuck doing this chart on Illustrator, which would be a pain.

Some parts where the arrows flow tend to flow in a strange direction where you want to drag it to, and it requires a lot of adjusting here and there. It's just the flow of the arrow sometimes gets a little tricky, and then when you move something else, it gets wonky, and then you have to go back and fix it up. That's the only thing that needs improvement.

I have only been using Lucidspark aggressively for about a week, but I have been introduced to it for about three weeks, so I've been playing around with it. It is extremely user-friendly. It is one of the most user-friendly tools I've ever used to make a process chart. I've used a lot of other tools before, like MindManager but Lucidspark was really easy to work with. The tools that they have at deciding the shapes, adding arrows, and the fact that you can customize everything was really good.

Stability is pretty good because there were a couple of times where I accidentally, and this was to no fault of the app at all, I accidentally turned off my browser. I sometimes click on the mouse and because of my mouse pad and because my laptop is a touch screen, I would accidentally exit the browser mid-type or while trying to drag an arrow somewhere. And when I open it up, it has automatically saved anything, so I just start off from where I stopped, which is great.

Scalability is pretty good. There's definitely room for improvement, but other than that, I think it's really good.

Everyone is based in management positions and giving out rules to their underlings, and technically everyone uses it. It's mostly to identify what your roles are for different processes.

I'm using it quite frequently. For the past week, I've been using it maybe every day, but that's because I've been trying to build a process. There is a possibility that we'll always be creating new processes, there'll always be new projects to work for. I think we'll be using it quite frequently. It really depends on my superiors and what they decide.

On a scale where five is the highest, I would rate technical support a 4.5 out of five. 

I didn't use another solution before Lucidspark. 

Initially, the setup was very complex, but after watching the videos, actually continuing to use it, studying every inch of it, you're just clicking around, and just running around inside there to see what things mean. It got a lot easier after that.

It took five to six hours.

In terms of the strategy, I had a project to create the process for, and I did, we just went through it one by one. That's where it started to become more user-friendly to me because I started to understand everything more.

We did not use an integrator for the setup.

My advice would be to give it a try, it's actually pretty good. It's really good. It makes things a lot easier.

Watch the tutorials, it helps.

I would rate Lucidspark an 8.5 out of ten. 

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 have used it primarily during conference calls to share things and to use it as a whiteboard tool, so that I am able to draw block diagrams with remote people, just like I would on a whiteboard in person.

Lucidspark has allowed my team to better communicate visually when it comes to explaining how different things work and then how they go together. We do hardware design, primarily, so being able to show how a system goes together structurally is helpful.

It also enables you to prioritize ideas, which is important. When we are having a meeting and want to assign tasks to people, being able to prioritize what people work on first is important to us.

Overall, our brainstorming productivity has been about the same with Lucidspark as when we were in the office. But because we are working remotely, it has been a time-saver and allowed us to be more productive while being in different locations.

In combination with Lucidchart, it is helpful when it comes to moving your ideas from the idea stage to execution. It definitely helps get everybody on the same page and working in the same direction. It keeps everybody going.

It provides that functionality of being able to draw freehand. That is one of the strong points. The block diagramming and being able to draw and then erase is helpful. And then I can save a copy of it. It's great.

The user interface is good. I have used Lucidchart longer than Lucidspark, so I was used to the way their drawing tool works, and that translated well to using this.

The virtual whiteboard is useful for brainstorming and quickly drawing and getting your thoughts out without having to do a formal, formatted drawing. For example, if I am doing a Zoom call, I can just share my screen and I can draw freehand and change colors.

It's also helpful that the Lucid suite can be centrally managed by a unified administration console. Although it is not critically important, it's helpful that one person can control it.

One thing I wish it had is, if I draw a square or a rectangle freehand, that it would actually just draw a nice rectangle; or similarly with a circle. Some sort of automatic shape recognition and formatting would be helpful.

I also wish I had a pen and tablet so I could draw better. I have a hard time drawing freehand with my mouse.

I have been using Lucidspark since it was first announced in September or October, so it has been a few months.

My impression, so far, of the stability and performance of Lucidspark has been that it's great. I use it just about every day.

In terms of the scalability, I understand you can get whole teams of people working on it and that is great. We don't necessarily need to do that at the moment. At any given time there are four to six people working in Lucidspark in our company, all engineers.

As we grow our business, we will increase the number of seats that we have, for sure.

I have not needed to use their technical support.

The initial setup was very simple and very quick. There were no problems whatsoever setting it up since we use it online. There was no install. It was just a matter of logging in and reading through the instructions and getting to work.

We have definitely seen ROI. It has saved a lot of time and frustration in just doing diagramming. Things come out much easier on Lucidchart than on other tools. Lucidspark has been helpful in remote meetings. If we were all in the office, I would possibly not be using Lucidspark, but its biggest appeal is for remote access.

The pricing seems reasonable. Lower would always be good.

As far as drawing tools go, it has been my favorite. I was previously a Visio user and I find Lucidchart to be much more useful than Visio.

I have also evaluated a lot of tools that compete with Lucidchart, and I have liked Lucidchart better than all of them. It's a personal preference. It is just the way one's mind works. Lucidchart draws things intuitively, the way I would like them to be drawn, without having to figure too many different things out. I have a real problem with the Visio works, and I used to use OmniGraffle on the Mac, and Lucidchart is superior in most ways for me.

For me, the Collaborator Colors feature is only moderately important. And when using the solution for remote or virtual brainstorming sessions the activity and engagement levels of users during such sessions, when compared to in-person sessions, is about the same.

I don't think it provides more time to discuss ideas, rather than organizing them. It's about the same as if we were all in the office and doing it in front of a whiteboard. But especially for remote working environments, it has been really handy. I like being able to export the drawing to a PDF and save it for future reference.

Overall, Lucidspark is a useful tool.

I'm a private tutor. I run my own tutoring business. I use Lucidspark for my teaching purposes.

I use the free version.

When I have an online class in our school, on Zoho Meeting or Zoom, I sometimes share writings and use the whiteboard. It's easy to use and it has a lot of tools in it. So I use it as a whiteboard for my students.

I use it for remote sessions. 

Lucidspark is just like being in an actual physical classroom, there's a whiteboard in the classroom. I use the Lucidspark whiteboard similarly to the way it's used in a classroom. I share my screen through Zoho Meeting and all my students can then see the whiteboard from Lucidspark. I use that to present my concept.

It's a really good whiteboard, it's not simple. It's like any other whiteboard. 

Lucidspark has other facilities and other tools, but I haven't explored any of those. I've stuck to using the whiteboard.

I only use the whiteboard and I'm not sure what other features are available. I haven't gone so deep and delved into the other features. 

The whiteboard has been very helpful. It's a nice tool. At least for me, as a teacher, that's been very helpful and it's an easy tool. There are specific tools within the whiteboard for drawing. It makes things easier, so I like that.

It's easy to use. 

The activity and engagement levels of users during sessions, when compared to in-person sessions, depends on who is engaging them. I find my students to be very engaged. They give their 100% to it. So it's been good. 

I would like for the whiteboard to have the ability to be expanded. It doesn't have the ability to be a continuous page so that you don't have to erase things.

This would help when I'm teaching concepts and move on to something else if I want to go back to what I had shown earlier. It would help me to have a way to reach that.

I have been using Lucidspark for around a month. 

It's always available. I've never had any issues with that. 

It has served me well. It's been good. 

The setup was simple. I remember that it wasn't complicated, but I don't remember what they did for it. It took around five minutes to set up. 

I didn't evaluate other solutions. 

My advice would be to let it work. If you want something to stay, and you don't want it to be erased, take a screenshot, and save it. Many whiteboards have the ability to go back to what you already had.

I would rate Lucidspark a nine out of ten. 

It's a faster process. Time comes at a premium. A lot of what I do is less long-term project planning, and much more a subset of longer-term projects and a lot of very fluid, short-term tasks to be accomplished with medium-term goals. It's a lot more like a series of sprints and a couple of longer-term races. The choices I have are that I can put it on a whiteboard, I can put it on a pad of paper, or I can put it on Post-it notes. In some cases, it works keeping track of that stuff that way. But I end up crossing things off, moving them to another pad or another page, and rewriting the things that are still open, to make things clearer in my head. Whereas if I'm using Lucidspark, I can keep all that stuff there. I can reprioritize. Nothing is permanent like it is when crossing something out. I can take a group of tasks, I can move them up, I can group them and highlight them, as the things that I have to do today. It's just much more fluid.

I can't tell you that I've taken a large energy project from beginning to end on one of the Lucid products, but I've used those in conjunction with such projects. In the past, when I was doing development work for energy projects, there were areas where you had to worry about certain things such as procuring land, getting the right permits, doing public and government relations. Within those, there are always a garden-variety of tasks, plus a lot of things that are unique to the project. A lot of times, I've used Lucid products to put together those thoughts, get them in one place.

The alternative that a lot of people use are bullet-points or checklists. Those make it hard to visualize things. If I'm working in Word or in Excel, and I'm typing in entries or things that I'm thinking about, they're in a line and I've got to go through three or four or five keystrokes to move a line to a different place, to reorder them. On the other hand, if I'm working in Lucidspark, I can keep generating items. I can mind-map them out. I can move something up, highlight it and move it up to a different place. I love the fact that the connections automatically move around. There's a freedom to the way that it allows structuring of your diagrams that makes it a lot easier.

Lucidspark is very powerful and it's far more intuitive. It's not clunky. I confess, I love it. I played around with it and the Templates library is very robust compared to a lot of other platforms. Other solutions do things that look funky and colorful and they give you options to change the color, but not much more. That's not what I really need. I really am trying to use this for work and so far I've been very successful.

The package of the two apps together, Lucidchart and Lucidspark, completely covers the waterfront. It's a great platform. I use Lucidchart all the time. I'm starting to use Lucidspark regularly, and the fact of the matter is that the output looks great. One of the things that I found and that I really hated regarding a number of these mapping apps is that they looked great on the screen, but when you printed them out they never quite looked like what you wanted. I've had really good luck with the output coming out of Lucidspark. A lot of times I'm reducing it to a PDF and emailing it around.

I love the SVG with the transparent background format. You just take one of those things, drop it into a document, scale it and it works, especially when I'm doing presentations to investment committees.

The combination of Lucidchart and Lucidspark in helping to visualize each step of the process from brainstorming initial ideas to turning those ideas into reality is absolutely fantastic. There's something to be said for the expression, "A picture is worth a thousand words." If you can reduce what you're doing into a picture, people will have a tendency to understand it better, and it's more concise. If you can reduce your thought process into a format where you can rearrange it freely and easily in real time, without a lot of interruption from having to use five keystrokes, the chances of your being able to get your thoughts down on paper quickly, and move them around and move them a different way, and move them again, and come to a coherent thought process and solution, are a lot better. It's a great tool.

One of the things that I had trouble with, and it may be due to the fact that we're a Microsoft Teams environment, and it may be that I just have not been able to get the permissions to integrate my versions of the apps with Lucidspark because of the security measures, but I have not been as successful in integrating my desktop apps with Lucidspark and Lucidchart, which is something I would like to be able to do better.

There is an emphasis on Google as a set of cloud apps and cloud storage but I don't use Google so that doesn't really help. We're a Microsoft shop so we've got a lot of OneDrive. We have been using Box, which I don't like and which we're moving away from, but my legacy storage asset was Dropbox. Some flexibility there would be worthwhile.

I was looking at the Kanban Board template and it's great. You bring it in, the grid is set up, and then you can add sticky notes. I would like to be able to lock the structure in place so that I could just move sticky notes. Maybe that's just something that I haven't figured out yet, but that would be amazing.

I've used Lucidspark since it came out. I've used the free version. I wanted to test-drive it to see what it was like.

Since they integrate together, I wish they offered a special deal for people who subscribed to both Lucidchart and Lucidspark.

By way of background I have, as a general matter, looked at a number of mind-mapping and project management software platforms. I've actually been really keen on trying to go from just white-boarding to something a little more tangible. My background is as a lawyer, but I worked in the energy space and spent time in tech as well. I did a lot of Agile project management and Kanbans, trying to manage project tracking and ideation related to strategic planning and the like.

I started out years ago with MindManager. They have, perhaps, the worst support for Macs. I tried to stick with that for a little bit. Not only did they provide terrible support, but it was also a question of how clunky the interface and the whole environment was. I've done a variety of work in conjunction with projects where I've used Redbooth, LeanKit, Project Plan, and Pivotal Tracker for Agile project management. Those are okay.

But between the ability to diagram in Lucidchart, white-boarding or mind mapping, like Lucidspark and, somewhere in between there is the realm of project planning and being able to move things around, I feel that the industry has been all over the place. I don't think there has been a particularly good solution in the past. Some have done some of these things well, and they work for a limited purpose, but I'm idealistic and I've been looking for the Holy Grail in this area. I've worked with a lot of these and I haven't really stuck with any of them.

On the diagramming side I used to use Visio. I discovered over time, after going through Visio and OmniGraffle, that when I started to use Lucidchart it was vastly superior. It is just so much more intuitive, so much more smooth. It works, it doesn't crash. It's just perfect. 

Enter Lucidspark which was trying to break into that somewhat related field, which is the mind mapping. As I said, I've used MindManager. I've used SimpleMind. I've test-driven some of the other stuff out there but Lucidspark brings together all of the ability to customize mind-maps and diagrams that you used to get in MindManager, and more, and that you don't get in a lot of the other apps that are out there.

For a team, Lucidspark makes a lot of sense. For a while we used LeanKit. I was working on a tech startup and we were doing long-term product planning and we had a fairly intricate project-steps chart with swim lanes. I spent a huge amount of time setting it up. It was great when it was there, but I ended being the only one who was keeping it current and it was just too much. It was really too much work to set up. Simple and intuitive and powerful, Lucidspark is fantastic; it has really hit on something. 

Lucidchart solves the Visio problem in a really elegant way. And Lucidspark really solves the mapping question very quickly. You can do pretty much all of your project planning very cleanly in that context. 

I am not a fan of these very clunky, entry-type project planners like JIRA and Atlassian. You ended up having to have someone who manages the platform and does the entries. I just don't think people want to be constantly updating their entries. It's just too much. It takes on a life of its own. Having done traditional project planning in the context of energy projects, and Agile in the context of tech, there are times and places for each, but there are pitfalls. One of the problems is just trying to keep a team organized in a more fluid environment, where there aren't very long lead times and very discreet, concrete steps. Lucid is a fantastic tool.

One of the things that was very valuable about MindManager, although it was very clunky, was the maps library. Lucidspark has done an incredibly good job of providing a very robust library of templates. I'd like to see more of those. But right now there are many more useful templates than anything I've seen with any other similar apps. Hats off to Lucid for that. That's fantastic. I love that.

I have been chasing this Holy Grail; I love the idea of mind-mapping and I've always been an early adopter trying these things. I like this whole area. It's a bit of a hobby. I really have wanted to find that, and to find some way to be more efficient in that process and to deal not only with immediate tasks, but also ideas. How do you break it down?

One of the big problems with planning is how do you go from A to B. You've got to break it down into tasks, then you've got to break it down into subtasks and get more and more granular. It's hard to do that. You can't do that on paper easily. It's very hard and messy. You're always writing and rewriting and breaking it down more. Using an app like Lucidspark makes it really easy to do. 

The idea has been out there, but no one has really done it in a reasonable way. MindManager had a great project 20 years ago and, although I don't really know how successful they've been at this point, they rolled it out to a lot of big companies. But they stopped at a certain point. They focused on the PC world and the result was that they really left the idea in an analog state, and they never brought it meaningfully into the Mac world or into a fully digital, really useful configuration. And that's been the gap. 

There have been a lot of other products where people have tried to solve some of the aspects of this, but I honestly think that Lucidspark has got something pretty amazing. I feel like they've been in my head, seeing the same things that I have, but that they've actually gone ahead and they've fixed these things. These are the things that prevented me from continuing to be a customer of these other companies and apps.

I don't have a good sense of how many people really have the desire to jump into this sort of thing, unless it's imposed by their company. I've tried to implement some solutions in the past and there's inevitably a certain degree of resistance. You don't always have tech-savvy people, and that's an issue. But my understanding is that if I had someone else who had a free account, I could share a link to a board that I had done and they could see it. I might not be able to collaborate in real-time, but I believe that I could provide them with a link that's evergreen, by publishing it. Presumably there are certain things that can be done without having that collaboration feature as part of your membership. I think there's certain limited functionality where you can do some collaboration, it's just not as smooth.