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Lucidchart vs Lucidspark comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Lucidchart
Ranking in Visual Collaboration Platforms
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.1
Number of Reviews
54
Ranking in other categories
Mind Mapping Software (2nd)
Lucidspark
Ranking in Visual Collaboration Platforms
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Visual Collaboration Platforms category, the mindshare of Lucidchart is 12.8%, up from 10.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Lucidspark is 9.9%, up from 9.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Visual Collaboration Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

MichaelChirinian - PeerSpot reviewer
Intuitive, integrates well, and is a great way to change text into visual ideas
I'm not a super user, and there might be a way of doing it that I haven't explored, but I was looking for some specific icons that are just standard icons, and I found the icon library to be very focused on architecture icons. It didn't have as many standard or generic icons. Another thing that somewhat irritated me is the fact that there is a paste function in the menu, but when you right-click and select paste, it tells you that you can't use paste. You must press Command-V or Apple-V to paste. They give you a menu option to paste, but every time you use that, they say, "We don't accept it." On top of that, normally, you'd have an option for paste or paste values, but when you use the paste function, you don't have that capability. So, to copy text from one place, I have to use Command-V to paste it, but if I don't like the format, I've got to go back and do copy style and then paste style on top of that. It is a small detail, but when you're doing diagrams, it is annoying that they don't support paste values. It is a small irk. I'm not penalizing it, and I still think it is a five-star product. In terms of other bigger things, I don't really have any comments or criticism so far.
MS
Encourages collaboration with our clients, and reactions help to prioritize ideas, but automation to make things more consistent would be helpful
This is a feature-rich product and I would like to see more opportunities for teaching new users how to learn and use the breadth of the platform. Ideally, it would be nice if there were a set of guidelines to explain what it is capable of. I know that there are videos online, and I've watched a few. But, I know that when I first started, just playing around, there were things I didn't discover that I could do until much later. This is why I get surprised by certain integrations I learn that they have. It would have been great to know right from the start, with a guided tutorial on how to use the various options. As it is now, we have invested internally in the educational resources needed to learn how to use it. A tool that can be very self-serving in that way, and enable its users to use it to the breadth of what it is capable of doing, is always a great thing. Whatever they can do to help make the visual look a little cleaner would be great because it can get a bit messy, or inconsistent. If there were automations to do things like making sure that elements are of the same size and correct alignment, it would help to make the visual more presentable. This is important because, at the end of what you create, it can have a very positive impact on what is ultimately shared with the client.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It is important to me that the solution accommodates both Mac and PC users because the developers in our company use Mac, then the business people use Windows. The technical people create the technical architecture using Lucidchart. So, it is important that it is compatible with both the systems."
"Lucidchart is a 10 out of 10 when it comes to documenting things such as processes, systems, and new teams. It's just so user-friendly. The fact that even if you've never used Lucidchart, if you take a template and adapt it, you'll inevitably find something to fit your needs, but it's also perfect for building from scratch. It's the ease of use, clarity, and the different functionalities that make it incredibly useful."
"I like the panel on the left of the screen that has all of the shapes that are available to use in the charts. It's easy to use because you can just drag and drop."
"The interface is very user-friendly and it is not a hassle to use the site at all. They did a really good job in that regard."
"Lucidchart is a lovely tool for creating visual representations of any process or organization."
"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."
"I love the simplicity and how clean all the different boxes, arrows, and charts can be. Especially with something complicated like our sales flow, it could be really easy to be all cluttered and everything like that, but my favorite feature is how clean it is, how straightforward it makes our flow look, and how easy it is to understand. Lucidchart accommodates both Mac and PC users which is important to us because at my company right now, our sales floor and then every other computer we have as a company is a Mac, but a lot of our employees actually have PCs and Android as well. So it's really beneficial because if we're ever on the go or we need to make a change, it's versatile and is open for both Mac and PC."
"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 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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the different ways that you can build out the charting and the mind maps. There are various different templates that are included in the program."
"It helps with our brainstorming sessions when we are working from home. It is like having a whiteboard in the office."
"It's easy to collaborate and it's easy to share amongst various team members. I myself am a product designer, and I found that in the past, as a project designer it's hard to work with engineers in terms of finding a product that satisfies what I need and want to do with the project designer and what they need and want as engineers. This tool is a good combination of both, and I feel like it's super easy to use. It makes a lot of sense. It's simple enough, but also has enough complicated features to make it what we want it to be."
"The 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."
"The virtual whiteboard for brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts is great. It's ideal for things like moving around sticky notes and having an infinite whiteboard."
"My workshops have seen a much higher engagement. In the past, maybe ten or twenty percent of my clients would normally participate. With Lucidspark being involved, I see almost 90% engagement of everyone in the room, because they're required to add something."
 

Cons

"If it could be a little more visual, in terms of being able to make it stand out a little bit more, then that would be helpful."
"What I do find extremely frustrating is that when I've sent the sheet to non-license holders, you have to create an account. You create a username and password. The path taken to create that account is so confusing that everyone thinks that they have to give their credit card number, and then they're reluctant. They don't want to go through the sheet."
"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."
"Wireframing can be improved. For mock-ups and wireframing, only 10% of what is required is there. If they can develop this feature, it would be much better because it will then provide everything. Currently, we can design network diagrams, processes, etc., but we should also be able to do wireframing."
"When you log in the first time, they ask you a lot of questions, such as what are you going to use it for. Half of the things weren't applicable to me. I couldn't see the skip button, so I picked random things because none of the given options was applicable to me. It is a tech startup, and I am in a consultant role. I use it for a variety of things, but the questions were tailored for HR professionals who are creating org structures or IT professionals who are doing data flow diagrams. What if I do both of them depending on the project I'm working on? I just felt that I am wasting time with those questions and just wanted them to stop asking me these questions and get into charting."
"It can have more colors or graphics. Currently, it is a little boring. It can have a little bit more fun factor."
"It would be nice to be able to import not just contacts from Salesforce but also leads. In the beginning, when I was still learning the ropes and my way around it, I couldn't find such an option. There might be an option, but I just don't know about it."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It has not affected the productivity of our working and brainstorming sessions too much."
"I hope that one of the updates will be a zoom-in/zoom-out function that's a little different than what they currently have, just to make it flow better when you're trying to move in and out of the board. I know they're working on it and that would be great, once they get that together."
"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."
"Using my iPad, it seems clunky and isn't as responsive as my PC."
"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 it 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."
"The challenge that I always face with a tool like this is how to convince other people to start trying it out. I can't say if Lucidspark does a better job than other such tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is very reasonable, and they have a free trial available that you can play with."
"I have a subscription as an individual user for one year, and it is not expensive."
"I was using the free version of Lucidchart, which was very helpful."
"The licensing is pretty cost-effective but I haven't considered it on an enterprise level."
"The pricing is very competitive. It is more cost-effective than some competing products, such as Visio."
"We signed up for the month-to-month and it charged us all at once for the whole year. I believe we signed up for the $7.99 one. I think that was the price."
"Pricing-wise, it is pretty fair. I don't really know what group pricing looks like, but right now, I pay $10 a month for my Lucid subscription. One thing I would say is that I do worry about my bosses being okay with paying $10 a month for every single employee because we would have around 20 people. It makes me a little nervous about whether they are going to pay $200 a month for people to be able to use this software. At the same time, from where I'm sitting, it's totally worth it. We save a thousand dollars from using this software. It's still a no-brainer."
"I was using the paid version, but at $12 USD per month, I canceled the plan because it was a little bit too expensive for me."
"The pricing is in line with everything else out there, and you get what you pay for."
"There is room for improvement in terms of the cost. It should all be bundled together. It's becoming like a Microsoft, where you have to buy all the different version features separately. It should just all be bundled with one price."
"The pricing is very reasonable. It is more expensive than some of the free options out there but much cheaper than Visio, and it works much better."
"I know that to get 10 seats for Spark is $2000 a year, which struck me as a little high."
"I don't think that the cost is ever something that I considered. It has always been worth it to pay a small payment and help everyone with their tasks. It has definitely helped me become more organized. I don't think that the cost has been a barrier at all, and it is worth it to be able to pay for it."
"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."
"The licensing is a fair price. We mainly have single users. We chose not to do the team user because of the cost. We didn't see a need for that at this point. We have talked to Lucidchart and Lucidspark salesmen often about that."
"It would be better if I didn't use Lucidspark at all and just used Illustrator and Photoshop, but it doesn't make sense for my projects to do that. It would remove a tremendous amount of steps, but it would cost a tremendous amount of money."
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Answers from the Community

KT
Jul 8, 2021
Jul 8, 2021
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...
See 2 answers
EB
Jul 7, 2021
Hi @Emilia Maria D'Anzica ​, @Kevin Heires ​,  @Sankalp Nigam, @Kevin Replinger, @Scott Rogers, @Mayank Thakur ​  and @MichaelSmith2. Would you mind sharing your professional experience with these tools? Tnx ​
KR
Jul 8, 2021
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!
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

LucidChart vs LucidSpark for brainstorming sessions over Zoom
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 ...
Do you recommend Lucidchart?
I definitely recommend Lucidchart. I feel it is one of the top visual collaboration platforms that’s available on the market. Out of all the solutions I have tried, it is by far the best for diagra...
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Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Salesforce, Adobe, Whirlpool, Uber, Wal Mart, Pearson, Twitch, Riot Games, Western Union, Trimble, Starbucks
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Find out what your peers are saying about Lucidchart vs. Lucidspark and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,564 professionals have used our research since 2012.