Lucidspark Reviews

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.

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.

I have experimented with using it for brainstorming and I have identified a use case that I want to use it for, but I haven't practiced that use case with it yet. That use case, which I am really excited about trying to use it for, is affinity diagramming, also known as the KJ mapping process.

Lucidspark definitely improved the productivity of our working and brainstorming session. The level of participation and collaboration was up, and people felt that they had a level platform for communicating their ideas and having their voices heard. It was definitely a major step forward from the other collaboration tools that we had at our disposal and was definitely equal to my experiences with in-person meetings.

The real-time collaboration has been valuable. People are able to get in and put their ideas on the chart, on the board, and have their input captured for use by the others on the team. 

Lucidspark's virtual whiteboard, for brainstorming high-level ideas and concepts, is very helpful in that everyone has the ability to add their stuff, add their content, put their ideas down and, to a certain degree, avoid groupthink. That is one major advantage.

The user interface and intuitiveness are very friendly. Users pick it up very quickly and don't need a lot of training or education on it. It's fairly self-explanatory. The people that I worked with picked it up readily. But the people on my team, generally speaking, are technology-friendly. I can't say that would be universal, but it's not something that would require a whole lot of training for my environment, where my user base is all back-office anyway. Those people are fairly technology savvy.

We specifically sought to aggregate data and brainstorming and then to look at the ideas that seemed to have the most value. We were able to prioritize and identify productivity issues and move forward. Being a continuous improvement expert, I tend to use very specific tools for prioritizing, but the tools in Lucidspark did help us do that on a qualitative basis, very effectively. On a scale of "not important," "somewhat important," or "highly important," it would be somewhat important. There are times where we need to do that qualitatively with the team we're working with. At other times I really want to use a very robust, database-based approach and I would use an offline tool for that. But everything that we wanted and needed was there, to do what we wanted from that session.

The tool is very robust. I've got very limited experience, so I haven't noticed any immediate gaps to be dealt with other than, as a new user taking it up, along the lines of the educational training communications.

I did attend a Lucidspark training session, a webinar, and that was incredibly effective in communicating the opportunity to use the tool. 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.

I have been using Lucidspark for the better part of one month. I have only been experimenting with it. I am not a commercial user. I've only been testing it for consideration in production. 

I have had no hiccups or complaints or issues in my limited use. There have been no outages or glitches or anything of note. We've only used it among my team of four people, with me as the continuous improvement coordinator and my team who are black belts.

It is uncertain at this time whether we will increase usage of Lucidspark. We were using it during our trial period but I don't know if the license agreement will include Lucidspark or not.

I understand that Lucidchart and Lucidspark are separate products, but to exploit the power that it offers, getting it into people's hands and then building on it from there, it would be good to see them packaged together, or priced in a way that they would be leveraged. That would be the only thing that would make it even better: to make it more accessible, easier, faster, and cheaper.

I have not had any need to use technical support.

All our previous tools have been offline tools. This is the first collaboration tool that I've used in a virtual remote environment.

We have collaboration tools. We use Google Suite in our business, so we have the Slides and the Docs and the Sheets and Google Meet. They've recently added a whiteboarding function and voting and the other things to compete with Zoom. I believe the whiteboarding function is intended to be that kind of collaborative piece, but I've not used it. It's only been recently released.

We use Lucidchart as the primary application in the Lucid suite. We use that more than even Lucidspark. It's a very user-friendly environment. All of the members of my team are very happy with Lucidchart because they do mapping for our constituents frequently. Lucidchart is very helpful, quick to use, and easy to produce the process documentation that we need to make.

My impression so far is that Lucidspark is more powerful than I am even aware of. It's got fantastic tools and methods with the tagging and some of the automated features for grouping and color coding. It will take time, practice, and repetition to take advantage of them.

Regarding virtual or remote sessions, when it comes to the activity and engagement levels of users, compared to in-person sessions, in some cases it's higher, but it's impossible to force everyone to engage, especially when remote. In an in-person session, you can visualize who's not engaging and draw them in. It's more challenging to do that with virtual collaboration tools unless you've got someone dedicated to looking for that lack of participation. As a facilitator, the virtual piece is challenging, but the fact that everybody can get onboard simultaneously is at least as involving as in-person.

Overall, I would definitely give it a nine out of 10. It's absolutely strong and more powerful than I am aware of. I'm ready to tap into it and would like to exploit it more.

I'm using it for two purposes. One is internal brainstorming with team members inside of my own organization, and the other is external facilitation, in a consulting capacity, with our clients.

Just yesterday I led a session with some existing team members and some new team members, an onboarding session, to talk about what attributes make for a good client. It was really easy to have team members with more experience contribute more, and have team members with less experience see and learn from those contributions. And when it came to the distillation and sorting and aggregation of those ideas, everyone was able to contribute to those bigger-picture things.

Lucidspark definitely enables you to prioritize ideas and that is extremely important. The prioritization of ideas is one of the most important pieces of decision-making, and decision-making is a central function of any business. If you can't make decisions, you can't move projects forward. We're all trying to figure out how we make those decisions in a virtual space, without sharing an office together. This is a tool that has helped us do that.

It also enables you to spend more time discussing and revising ideas and next steps, and less time organizing them. I had no idea it was important to me until I knew that it was possible. Now that I know that it's possible, it has a lot of value. Any opportunity to get to the most important pieces and parts, such as what is the hardest question and what is the most challenging next obstacle—the sooner you can elevate them—the easier it is to get to the hard conversation.

Overall, Lucidspark is a vast improvement when it comes to the productivity of working and brainstorming sessions. Where we may have previously had folks respond to a static survey, with open-ended responses, it can now be a dynamic, crowd-sourced session with real-time contributions and improvements that may have otherwise never appeared. Or, if they did appear, they would have been in a follow-up meeting after a whole bunch of synthesis of those old survey results.

We also use Lucidchart and that was actually how I became aware of Lucidspark. The overall suite, for helping to visualize each step of the process, from brainstorming initial ideas, to turning those ideas into reality, is very good. I have used a lot of different chart-building tools in the past, in many different forms, but there are a lot of intuitive features in Lucidchart, inclusive of their templates. Those features make standard business process design and modification really easy, and really easy to convey to others who do not contribute to the creation of those documents. The ability to take a chart made with Lucidchart and use it in a Lucidspark environment is a really great opportunity to take what used to be one person writing down and designing a process, and turn it into allowing more people to contribute.

I have really enjoyed Lucidspark's virtual whiteboard. It is a big step up from some of the other tools that I have used. Not to be judgemental, but the Google Suite has a product called Jamboard and that is what we used previously. They are very different in their capabilities. I appreciate the robustness of Lucidspark quite a bit. It adds a lot more functionality when it comes to multiple participants, and I really appreciate that it is an expanding canvas. The limited size and shape of something like a Jamboard is not conducive to new ideas expanding, going further. I really like a lot of those features in the design. 

I certainly have made a lot of use of the template library as well.

I also really enjoy the emoji reaction voting. That is a fun gamification of a pretty common feature for facilitation. 

And the sorting and aggregating by color, or grouping, or contributor, are all also really helpful features. While the Collaborator Colors is a really nice feature to have, I could imagine a way to still use the tool without it.

Absolutely all of the work I've done with Lucidspark has been done when I've been in a different location than the other contributors. It meets the different needs of contributors, who may be less comfortable in an in-person environment, to be at a place where they have more ability to contribute, and I really appreciate that. It's not reliant on somebody speaking up because there are so many ways to contribute, without having to come off of mute on a Zoom call and say something out loud. Not everybody likes that version of contributing. It might make them feel anxious. The ability to just be able to type, or respond, or help with consolidating ideas into groups—any of those things are really easy for anyone in a session to do and to support. I've loved that.

One thing about the template library is that it does seem too focused on folks who develop SaaS products. There might be an opportunity for a little bit of an expansion for other, virtual, business-meeting-facilitation use cases, for folks who are not in the product development space.

In terms of its user interface and intuitiveness, it took a little bit of time to figure out the difference between the selection tool and the move-around tool. When I was able to figure out a few keyboard shortcuts, that helped a whole lot. Having those keyboard shortcuts a little more apparent or visible, in the early setup, as a new user is getting used to the platform, could help.

The one other significant recommendation is because I do work with folks outside of my organization quite regularly. The user experience of having them all have to set up a free account to join me in a workspace is a bit cumbersome. I really would love it if there was a Visitor link that would allow contributors who don't have free logins to join and participate.

I've been using Lucidspark for just over a month.

I have had no outages, no glitches, or anything that would make me think that something in the solution is unstable.

I would rate its scalability as very strong. I appreciated that when I dropped a link in Slack, it said, "Hey, we think this is a Lucidspark link. Do you want to download the Slack plugin?" I thought that was intuitive and helpful, given that we do so much of our day-to-day work in Slack already. If it talks to Slack nicely, that's a heck of an upgrade.

I have not used technical support for Lucidspark.

We selected Lucidspark because the existing work that we've done in Lucidchart is a huge component. We have a bunch of process and workflow documents that exist there, and team members who already have Lucidchart logins. Adding an additional license to access Lucidspark on top of that was really seamless and easy, once I found the button to start a Lucidspark session. That existing product that we already had was a huge foot in the door.

The distinction between what components were in Lucidspark, such as the virtual white boarding component, and which ones were in Lucidchart, was a little tricky at the onset. Finding that it was truly in the "setup new template," and that that additional link was present, took me longer to find that I expected it to.

I've certainly received a good number of marketing materials and communications that are branded from Lucidspark. While the branding and the coloring allowed me to pretty clearly connect the dots that these two things were associated, when I clicked through on the link, the acknowledgement of what we currently had versus what we could have if we upgraded or added Lucidspark, was more confusing than I had anticipated. The way I overcame that was just a bunch of button-clicking and finding the dropdown that allowed me to start a Lucidspark canvas. Once I did, I said to myself, "Oh, it's here," and I could show my team exactly where it was. But prior to that, I was asking myself, "How do I get from this logo that says 'Lucidspark' and that is clickable, to doing something in Lucidspark?" because it always brought me to up my Lucidchart interface. I didn't know how to get around that.

Overall, the Lucidspark deployment took almost no time at all, except for that little kerfuffle of trying to figure out how to get to it.

I've shared it in our organization and folks have free logins, right now, to act as contributors. We have not done a full company deployment with paid user profiles for all members. I work on our client success team and that team has just over 10 people. In addition to them, I have shared it with our chief creative officer and one of our senior product designers and they are starting to work with the tool in their product teams.

We have absolutely seen return on investment from using Lucidspark because of the time savings.

It's a very reasonable $8 a month. That makes it really accessible and helps it fill a pretty significant need for virtual collaboration. Just about every leadership team member that I've talked to said, “Oh, well, that's cheap, just go buy it."

I've used the embedded white boarding feature in both Microsoft Teams and in Zoom. They're rudimentary, but certainly better than nothing. The other product that I have spent the most time in is MURAL.

The connection between existing documents in Lucidchart and Lucidspark is a huge value-add, and I like that that ecosystem allows you to benefit from previous work inside of that suite. That's a great value.

MURAL's biggest thing—and it's actually where I had the inspiration for the recommendation for how Lucidspark could be improved—is that it does have a Visitor link. While working with clients, you don't need them to set up a free account to participate. That's a big thing. I could see a world where we continue to use Lucidspark internally, because it's really easy to have your employees set up logins and pay attention to them, and do client-facing work in MURAL because it's less cumbersome for the client. The teams overlap little enough that it would be very possible for them to do their specific work in each of those different silos. However, it would be another silo and it would be lovely if we did all of it in the same place.

In functionality, MURAL is very similar to Lucidspark. The templates that are available in MURAL are a little more advanced, and they cover a broader cross section of use cases.

My internal resource sharing across our teams was a little silly and delayed. When I saw this solution I said to myself, “Oh, this might be helpful," and that was probably a backward way to go about it. It may make more sense for people to think about all of the possible use cases in their organization, or at least multiple use cases in their organization. I really did come to Lucidspark thinking about just the chair that I sit in, but it has a lot of applications outside of my own role. Ensuring that folks know about it and can benefit from it can take the productivity that you might get from one team doing this kind of collaboration, and spread it to a broader cross section of teams.

The solution has features to tag and automatically group and organize ideas after a brainstorming session, but I need to spend a little bit more time with them. We've primarily done manual sorting at this point. Part of that is a holdover from in-person facilitation. The sorting and aggregating component when you're in an actual conference room is just a part of the process, because there isn't a way to do that with sticky notes. I still rely on that a little bit as a facilitation point, and it means that I've just not leaned on the tools that are built-in, as much.

But the feature that I like the most in that context is the ability for individual contributors to link associated ideas when somebody else may have had a similar recommendation or suggestion. Having those little legacy trails, where two sticky notes have a line connecting them, is something that you just couldn't do in a physical space without tangling the entire conference room in yarn. This ability to automatically group ideas speeds up the ability to take action, a little bit, and I'm still getting used to whether our team is ready for, and desirous of, that speed. The main focus has not been the speed at which we can execute. It's been the consensus-building along the way. But overall, it does help. Using the tool to group and bundle ideas takes about half the time that it used to take.

Using the Lucidchart suite of products, I actually think of things such as moving ideas from the idea stage to execution as still occurring in other spaces, from an execution standpoint. We leave the sessions in Lucidchart and we're still going to databases and to our product. The groundwork and the alignment and expectation-setting and direction, from the work that's done in Lucidchart and Lucidspark, are incredibly valuable to ensuring the ability to do those other things, but I still do think of those other things as happening outside of the Lucidchart suite.

I really have enjoyed the product. It is filling a valuable gap in the market as we all transition, still nine months later in most places, to remote work. I am happy to have it.

We do a lot of whiteboarding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have not used technical support.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.