Lucidchart and Lucidspark are solutions from Lucid Software designed to work together throughout the visual collaboration workflow. Lucidchart focuses on creating professional diagrams, flowcharts, mind maps, and other visual documents. It excels in organization, precision, and collaboration on these structured visuals. Lucidspark focuses on brainstorming, free-flowing ideas, and planning sessions. It offers a virtual whiteboard with sticky notes, drawing tools, and real-time collaboration for messy but creative exploration.
Lucidchart and Lucidspark stand out in user reviews for their real-time collaboration capabilities and integration with other tools, offering significant productivity and efficiency enhancements.
Lucidchart is the go-to for professional diagramming and documentation, while Lucidspark fosters creative exploration and collaborative brainstorming. Used together, they offer a powerful suite for visual thinking and communication throughout the project lifecycle. The summary above is based on recent user interviews with Lucidchart and Lucidspark users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"I've been using Lucidchart for quite simple things, but it's definitely much easier making process maps using Lucidchart than it is using Google Docs for basically everything. It's much simpler in terms of how easy it is to use Lucidchart. The way that you can get the arrows on the flow charts, based on the process mapping, you can drag the arrows from one box to another and it automatically shows you where you can put it. It makes decisions for you in terms of if you have a decision diamond, then the line is automatically a yes or no. This just makes it so much easier."
"Documenting complicated workflows and technology integrations so that we can go back to it has also been a benefit. And without having to dig into a lot of technical, the codes, the documents, I can simply understand on a high level what's happening."
"The most valuable features are the different templates that they have already created, as well as all the different shapes you can use in the process charts because each shape stands for a different element or thing that's being done. It's easy to distinguish between different steps using the already set-out shapes."
"Lucidchart enables me to put down on paper what I was visualizing in my head. It makes it more shareable than only using words."
"The best part of Lucidchart is its comfortableness when sharing it with my teammates. Lucidchart provides me a folder for my ERD. I can make a dozen lists of my chart, then share them with my teammates easily through the diagrams of Lucidchart. This is their main comfortableness, which is the reason why I choose Lucidchart rather than some other chart program."
"One of the features that I really like is the collaboration aspect of it. During the pandemic, it's very important that we're able to collaborate virtually."
"The ability for Lucidchart to create database schemas or modify existing data structures is strong. That's what I initially introduced it for in our organization. The script that Lucidchart provides works with other systems like Oracle, SQL Server, and Postgres that I can copy-paste, and get a quick dump of metadata and import into has saved me a ton of steps that I didn't have to manually create these tables. I had a lot of things where I still had to put in the linkages between tables, but I didn't have to type in every field name, every data type, and everything else that came in. That saved me tons of time."
"The wireframe and mock-up features have been the most useful so far. It's easy to create the mock-ups and then communicate to our development team what they need to look like. Lucidchart's capabilities for visualizing and understanding process flows or workflows is very good as well. I'm able to easily use any style of box that I need to create on a flowchart, to effectively communicate to our development team."
"I like the templates that it comes with. I also like how easy it is to change colors and icons and just flip back and forth. It is really easy to maneuver and use."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"I like the fact that Lucidspark has got all these templates that we can use."
"I am not quite sure what different functionalities it provides as well as the difficulties other people are facing. When I have a better understanding of the solution, I will increase my rating of it. No solution is perfect, so I am sure that I will be facing some problems in the future."
"It might already exist and I haven't used it, but in terms of improvement, I would like a hot-key system for some of the diagrams to auto-generate things a bit quicker to be able to produce charts a lot faster, or have more standard templates that you can just go to if you're trying to generate something quickly."
"Perhaps it already exists, but if there were software to install the solution on a Mac, that would be helpful. I see that it's not in the App Store, so that's something that could be improved."
"I would like an on-premises version of the software that I can just download and use. I think that it's easier that way."
"They should continue to bring in more shapes. For example, I saw something cool the other day that was a timeline and in between each step, there was a circle. I thought that that was very clean and that's something that I could see myself using. Lucidchart could come up with more visualizations. I'm not a designer so I would like to have more visuals. That would make my job easier because it would make my job much more professional looking but without having to be a designer myself."
"The layering is something that can be improved because sometimes, it is confusing for me when I'm trying to get to the layer that I want to edit."
"This might already be a feature, but I remember sometimes when we're just all viewing, if you accidentally click, then there's an arrow that pops up, and you have to go back and delete it. A lot of times there are accidental arrows being drawn when really we're just trying to present to each other."
"The main improvement I would like to see is for them to improve the help section on the flow charts or on the formatting."
"The user interface is not intuitive because I have used other applications previously, and it took a little bit more time. Once I figured that 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."
"The only thing that is a little cumbersome for me is trying to use a mouse as a stylist somehow. I would like it if there was a different way to do that."
"On the Lucidchart side, they have a fantastic document-based tutorial and how-to educational module built into the application. I would love to see something like that on the Lucidspark side."
"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."
"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."
"Layers would be great. They don't have a layer feature. When you have a lot of items in the same place, it is hard to pick them out."
"It would be really helpful if more features and templates would be added to the product."
"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."
Earn 20 points
Lucidchart is ranked 3rd in Visual Collaboration Platforms with 54 reviews while Lucidspark is ranked 4th in Visual Collaboration Platforms with 33 reviews. Lucidchart is rated 8.6, while Lucidspark is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Lucidchart writes "Good brainstorming features, facilitates collaboration, and keeps us focused on our work". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Lucidspark writes "Facilitates a lot of the productivity of our working and brainstorming sessions". Lucidchart is most compared with Figma, Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, Visio, Visual Paradigm and erwin Data Modeler by Quest, whereas Lucidspark is most compared with Figma, Miro, MURAL and Jamboard. See our Lucidchart vs. Lucidspark report.
See our list of best Visual Collaboration Platforms vendors.
We monitor all Visual Collaboration Platforms reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
Hi @Krista Thompson - Yes, LucidSpark is a much more nimble and, in some ways, user-friendly tool than LucidChart. LucidSpark is designed to do a better job managing multiple users participating simultaneously and I've found its ease of use is really helpful when working with clients who likely don't have any previous experience.
I use LucidChart for detailed process maps and flow charts (just me, working alone). I used LucidSpark as a virtual whiteboard for dynamic brainstorming (working collaboratively).
I hope this helps!