Lucidspark Reviews

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.

I am making use of Lucidspark as an architectural design tool for my final year project. 

While I have tried other solutions, I have found Lucidspark to be very helpful with my use case. 

The solution offers many features that I find to be beneficial with my architectural design.  

The user interface is pretty easy for me to use... and I haven't faced any kind of issues with it.

The virtual whiteboard for brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts... is good.

The solution enables me to prioritize ideas. This is basically why I use Lucidspark. When I started out on my project I had planned to design my final architecture with the help of some online tool from a white sheet on which I had drawn. When I found out about Lucidspark I realized that it helps me with the design.

The solution has features to tag and automatically group ideas to help organize and synthesize them after a brainstorming session. This ability helps me to find patterns and things among the ideas. It really helps me to share ideas with my friends.

The solution allows me to automatically group ideas so that I can take action and move them forward. It allows me to repeatedly download my ideas, share them with my friends and get their feedback.

The solution allows me to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps and less time organizing them. It really helps me to decrease the need for manual effort. I feel very positive about this feature. It is good enough to help me.

The copying and pasting features need to be improved as they gave me trouble when I tried to copy and paste from one end to the other. This proved especially problematic for students who are working on disparate projects. 

It would be really helpful if more features and templates would be added to the product. This would also result in a decrease of manual effort. 

I have been using Lucidspark for the past month. 

The solution is quite effective and insures against any problem or challenge one may encounter. 

We have not made use of the solution's technical support. 

While I cannot recall their exact names, I do know that I tried several online whiteboard tools but found their use to be difficult. Lucidspark, by contrast, turned out to be straightforward.

The initial setup took several minutes. I do not have any specific implementation strategy of which to speak. 

We did not use an integrator, reseller or consultant for the deployment.

I have not seen a return on my investment.

One must pay extra if he wishes to have a higher level product. Most students such as myself will opt for a paid version. 

In my experience I have found the solution to be quite easy to use. 

I rate Lucidspark as a 7.5 out of ten. 

Our primary use case was to put together a presentation for spelling and demonstrating our product and process charts for processes in the insurance industry.

Everyone was involved in doing a remote brainstorming session. Everyone felt like they needed to be involved. We have a great team. Everyone was involved and had ideas. Instead of everyone drawing everyone said, "Hey, we could do this." And the reason why is because of the nature of who the boss is. She wants to have more control. If we have a different organizational structure, then it would have been easier for everyone to say, "Hey, here's my idea." But you have to throw it out there and see if the boss likes it first. If the boss likes it then we draw it so everybody can see what it is. So it wasn't a true brainstorming session.

Lucidspark has made us very productive. If we didn't have Lucidspark and I had to use Visio, I really wouldn't have used Visio. I would've used another tool like Adobe publisher or something like that. I wouldn't have used process charts. My boss really wasn't asking for that to begin with but once she saw it, she loved it. And so we went that way, but some of the illustrations that we were preparing for the presentation did not lend themselves well at all to process charts. So I used Adobe products to put those together, but once we started using the process charts, that's what she was excited about. And that's what we went with. 

It made us very productive because it was very easy to make the changes once we had our brainstorming session. We were able to scale quickly to make those changes.

We're a startup company and so our goal with Lucidspark is to get more people aware of it. And so the presentation at this point is just for an outside consultant so that they can tell us how we can fine-tune it so that we can actually go to larger people in the insurance industry and get more buy-in. It's too early to tell how successful that will be or how we haven't had the big presentation yet. That will be coming soon. That feedback and input will be coming soon. If it's successful, then Lucidspark will make us look good. It's worth a lot of money to us.

Some of the basic process features like the circles and squares for texts and the arrows are the most valuable features. One of the most important features that we used was inserting images and resizing them. I don't think we could have used it if we didn't have the smart snapping system for snapping the lines to objects.

We use basic features like object fill and line color. 

It's very intuitive. There were other features that another team member described as the go-to standard for the industry for making process charts. And so they recommended it. They developed a template with it and shared the template with me. It was very easy for me to just create the same thing. 

The user interface is easy to use. There were other things that I was expected to make work like other people had done and they were expected to make things like I had done. Even though we had a template, there were times when we couldn't access each other's template and it was very easy to just go ahead and make it just like they had it. It's very intuitive. It's very easy to figure out where things are and how to use things.

We used the virtual whiteboard for brainstorming high-level ideas a couple of times. There were a couple of meetings where it was really hard to describe on the phone what we wanted to do. So there are times when we circle things and say, "Okay, we need to move this over, put this over there." 

It's not really better than some of the other things out there, but it worked. It was entertaining for the guy that had to draw with it, but there are several things about whiteboards that I just don't like. But it's really not worse than anything else out there, it's just not better.

They have a nice color palette and the color palette is intuitive. What I mean by intuitive is that the colors chosen work really well with the text. If you put text over an object with color behind it, then the text is very visible. So that's very nice. But we worked with the owner of the company to make presentations and she wanted colors that did not make sense but we went ahead and used those anyway. It might be nice to have just a few more default colors set up even if they were the colors that you would have to reverse the text out. Maybe if they were dark and you'd have to use white text on them.

It would be nice to have some of those because everything that we started out with, the boss said, "All of those are pastel colors. So I don't like those. We need something bolder and brighter." That's what we had to go find. If there were some default colors that were bolder and brighter, even though they don't work with texts so well, then we could reverse out the text and make it whiter or something like that. 

They have a grid system for snapping too, and they've done a lot to try to line things up so that the lines don't squiggle when you draw a line between one item and another. Everything has to be lined up. Everything has to be 90 degrees exact. But a lot of other people on the team just throw something together really quickly and the lines are not straight. And so it would be nice to have some feature that eliminates that problem.

I write software, so I know that's probably a very complex issue and they look like they spent a lot of time working on it that still doesn't quite work. That's the only thing that I can think of that might make it better.

I have been using Lucidspark for three weeks.

It's very available. It's very easy to get started and very easy to use. We didn't have to wait on it to update and didn't have to wait on the server or anything. It was very available and very easy to use. There were no problems at all using it.

There were only three of us using it and so I don't know how big it can scale. I'm sure it is scalable.

We don't have plans to increase usage in the future. Since we've used it in the past and it worked well, I'm sure we'll use it again. But I really don't know how much longer or more we will use it.

I have used Visio and I like Visio. I know how to use it. When you're asked to do something quickly and you already know a tool that you can use well, the tendency is to use the tool that you already know. Someone else convinced the boss that this was the best tool. I jumped into this which is a plus for the intuitiveness of their user interface. We were able to get going quickly. It's just as easy, if not easier to use than Visio.

Visio is not really software as a service. It's more of something you install on your system. And so if you're getting started and you have to use it, you would have to install it. Compared with Lucidspark and what we were doing, there are more tools and templates. There is more of an opportunity to get confused and lost. It's a little bit less intuitive. What we were doing with Lucidspark was truly easy and fast and it's online. So you really don't have to do anything to get started or get it going. I really liked that it was very frictionless.

The initial setup was very easy. It was frictionless. Nobody was setting this up for us. And so once the decision was made to go to Lucidspark, we all went out, created accounts, and got started. It was very easy to use.

It's too early to see ROI but the boss was very happy with what we produced and I get paid for that. So I have certainly experienced a return on investment from using it. It's $9.99 a month and I get paid well for that. So I've gotten paid for my investment in it.

They have a good pricing model. I'm an independent contractor and so I don't mind paying $9.99 a month for that when I'm getting paid well to use it and get results with it. So I think that's a good model. If it was $39.99 a month, I certainly wouldn't have chosen to use it.

There are no additional costs to the standard licensing. 

It's the easiest flowcharting process software out there. I would have chosen Visio but since somebody suggested Lucidspark, I decided to try it and it was in fact much easier than Visio to use if you're making process charts or diagrams. I'm thinking about using it for planning and creating process charts of my own, not just for my work. I would recommend it.

I would rate Lucidspark an eight out of ten. I like to give room for improvement to things. The snap and grid system still needs to be fixed so that people are less careful about how they make things look.

I'm an Agile coach, so I use Lucidspark to facilitate retrospectives and user-story workshops.

We're using the latest web version.

As an Agile coach, where I'm currently working, Lucidspark enables me to create a kind of a forum to collaborate. Whether it's with games, whether it's with discussion, whether it's brainstorming, having a tool like Lucidspark has definitely helped us to be more organized in the way we facilitate meetings. Having something that we can present to people and get them to engage with has been very valuable.

I'm also able to use the solution to prioritize ideas. We use Lucidspark for story-boarding and story planning. When I'm facilitating meetings, I get the product owners to talk about features that they want to develop and then put them on the board. Then, I assist the process of discussions where they prioritize the items that they wrote in their sticky notes. As a result, we're able to collaboratively see the prioritization of the work items. We then end up exporting what we've discussed in these meetings to the tool that we use for product development, Jira, and take it from there.

And it allows us to sort ideas, especially when I do retrospectives with my teams. I'm able to ask questions about things that went well and what didn't go well, based on what people put up on the board. I'm able to categorize them and talk about them, and that really does save us time in our meetings. That's especially true in collaboration, with everybody looking at the board and seeing what I'm talking about or what somebody else is talking about. It does save us time rather than getting people to just talk.

In terms of the productivity of our brainstorming sessions, it has probably made us 80 percent more efficient. With things like story-writing sessions, rather than getting people to talk about the user stories they want to work on, or having them go off to Google Sheets, having everybody work together to put their ideas out there and then sort and prioritize those ideas, definitely saves us time, compared to copying and pasting things from Excel documents onto very flat document structures.

The sticky notes are the most valuable feature we use in Lucidspark. In a lot of the meetings that we conduct, we want people to be able to express themselves. They can grab sticky notes to write down an idea they're thinking about. Using the sticky notes, we can talk through each of the notes that my teams use, or we can sort them based on the kind of feedback we're getting from the questions we throw at them.

The solution’s virtual whiteboard for brainstorming is great. It feels like I have an endless board where I can zoom out and draw everybody to what I'm looking at. It's invaluable, especially right now when most people work remotely.

I have also integrated Lucidspark with Microsoft Teams, so that it is connected to my team's daily stand-ups. While people are talking, or they have ideas, or they need to have a discussion after the meeting, they can just grab a sticky note and place it there. That's something that is publicly available for everybody else on the team. This is an important capability.

There is room for improvement with the user interface. It almost feels "uncooked." It sometimes feels like a prototype rather than the real thing.

I have been using Lucidspark for about a month now. I started this job recently and, so far, this is what we've been using. The company itself has been using it for a few months. All our users are scrum masters and Agile coaches.

I haven't experienced any outages or latency problems with Lucidspark.

It scales well. I have not had any problems with scalability. We've had sessions where there have been 50 people participating and I haven't been aware of any problems. In our company, it's the product development team that uses the solution and that's about 100 people.

We are using about 30 to 40 percent of what Lucidspark offers and those features work best for what we use it for. There are other features of Lucidspark that we probably don't require. We don't have plans to expand usage at the moment.

We have not had to call Lucidspark's tech support.

I had always been a Mural person until I started working with this company. In terms of the user interface, Lucidspark feels very basic compared to Mural. The Mural interface seems a little more straightforward. Lucidspark is a little bit intuitive, but that aspect could be better. There have been situations where I was trying to look for a timer, for instance, and I didn't find it right on time. Also, when someone shares something with me or I need to look through one of the boards I created, finding it doesn't feel as intuitive as I would like.

Also, I wish Lucidspark had an iPad app. Maybe it has one but I'm not aware of it. I have to use a computer, and that is not as intuitive compared to when I was using Mural.

Overall, Lucidspark is a very simple, straightforward application. Anybody will pick it up almost immediately. 

The only tip I have is that if you're going to create a line with the arrow, you just have to select "none" for the arrow points. The line and arrow tools are the same thing. That's something that is not very obvious.

In-person meetings will always trump virtual. People like a lot of engagement, even in-person. People are more engaged when you actually see them face to face. You put out a whiteboard and marker, et cetera. With virtual, it's a little challenging because, first of all, you have to walk people who are not as technically inclined through the tool itself, and sometimes on short notice. If I have a workshop that I want to create, I first have to introduce everybody to the tool, because they don't have the time to go through the tool themselves. Remote meetings pose their own challenges.

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. 

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.

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.

So far, I have only used it for making flowcharts.

I find it a whole lot easier for making a flowchart process. Previously, I would use PowerPoint and then have to share the file. It's a lot nicer for collaboration.

I like that it saves everything for me in the cloud, and I can go back and change things. 

I also like how it has different shapes for the different actions on flowcharts.

I also found it very intuitive. I opened it up one day and I saw, "Button" and I didn't even have to look up how to use it.

There might be a way to do this in Lucidspark, but if there were a way to leave comments for internal collaborators, that would be good. Let's say we were brainstorming something. It would be helpful to have comments that we could see, but if we were to share a view with someone else, they wouldn't see those behind-the-scenes comments.

Also, it would be nice if they had something that I could share with co-workers, maybe a quick five-minute or something that shows, "Hey, this is the utility. You guys can do this."

I have not used their technical support.

I used PowerPoint, but I don't really find that comparable.

I went to a little webinar and checked out Lucidspark, after I found Lucidchart randomly, one day, when I was working with my Microsoft 365. I needed to make a flowchart for something and Lucidchart worked really great and it was super-easy. Then I got an invite to try out Lucidspark, and it seems really cool. I haven't been able to test it with any of my co-workers, and I don't know if anyone else at our company uses it, but it does look really interesting.

I honestly didn't even know that something like this existed, and I think it could be really helpful.

As far as functionality and usefulness go, it's great. I would rate it an eight out of 10, personally. But in the company I work for, even if it's the most amazing technology solution that will do everything that someone needs, rolling out something new and different is hard sometimes. So the eight isn't really so much about the product itself, it's more about how easy this would actually be to get people onboard with.