Freehand, from InVision headquartered in New York, is an online whiteboard that enables teams to plan, brainstorm, and draw together. It aims to give everyone a simple way to visually represent ideas with charts, diagrams, and drawings. Whether for mind mapping, creating a customer journey map, or drafting up an org chart, Freehand can help teams make ideas and plans visual.
$4
per month per user
Lucidspark
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Lucidspark is a virtual whiteboard that brings efficiency to brainstorming sessions. Whether remotely or in-person, Lucidspark provides a place where people, teams, and ideas can come together to spark innovation. Lucid Software is a supporter visual collaboration, and its products--Lucidchart, Lucidspark, and…
$0
per month per user
Pricing
Freehand by InVision
Lucidspark
Editions & Modules
Freehand Free
$0
per year per user
Freehand Pro
$4
per month per user
Freehand Enterprise
Custom Quote
Free
$0
Individual
$7.95
per month, per user
Team
$9.00
per month, 3 user minimum
Enterprise
Contact us for a quote!
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Freehand by InVision
Lucidspark
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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Free, individual, team, and enterprise licenses of Lucidspark are available.
We were using inVision Freehand at the time based on a team member's suggestion. They were familiar with it, having used it at their prior organization, so we naturally adopted it after they introduced it to the organization. However, the team quickly moved on to other …
All products are getting pretty good, but InVision stands out as the most frictionless one to use. A lot of the power is cleverly designed so that it doesn't get in the way of how differently people naturally think and operate. For example, even the presence of a grid on some …
InVision Freehand has quickly evolved to be a very robust solution for our pre-design process and collaboration with stakeholders and other product teams. It has brought a lot more hands-on workshopping opportunities and created engaging spaces for cross functional teams. Internally to our design org we are able to prototype ideas faster and generate insights or changes BEFORE going into more hi-fidelity design tools or processes.
This product is crucial for an for any product owner, product manager, scrum master, project manager, or anyone in a leadership role. The Jira integration makes it easy for teams to visualize their product backlog, sprint backlog, PI Planning Program board, and story mapping. This has helped my team in PI Planning to visualize our Program Board and has saved steps from having to input those cards into Jira. In addition, this has helped my architecture team to visualize how the product backlog connects to the required architecture, infrastructure, and security requirements. With being able to see how the product backlog connects to non-functioning requirements, my product leadership team has been able to make impactful decisions that has saved the team time.
The resolution: Our webpage designs always pass the resolution threshold to where freehand starts to work its compression. During presentations, it can be a little embarrassing when we can't read the copy because it looks like potatoes.
Embedding videos: GIFs are only good to a certain point, and creating Vimeo embeds is tedious. I wish I could embed MP4s or web assets a lot quicker.
Touchpad panning: I can't tell you how many times I've "gone back" in my browser when I'm just trying to pan across the freehand. Has honestly made me wanna force quit on many occasions.
Sticky notes and text in shapes: Overall, it's really hard to use the sticky notes and text inside rectangles without the text just getting all over the place. It's different sizes, it gets too tiny, it gets way too big, and overall, it just doesn't look professional, even with a lot of fussing.
No ability to crop/mask an image. Nice to have, but sometimes we just need to delete a chunk off a screenshot, and it requires opening PS or taking a screenshot to edit anything.
Wish there was a way to have "internal comments" that are not visible to our clients.
Honestly as in any organization it's up to budget. I feel like every organization I go to I'm constantly striving to keep InVision as part of the main funded tools used by the team especially in a remote environment. I feel there is a push to move to Figma and Zooms new white boarding tool but I'm still not a fan of Zoom's tool. Microsoft also created a white boarding tool which has been buggy.
Color Selection can be tricky when changing colors for shapes and text I've seen other users struggle with creating sticky notes and getting text to fit in the box properly and had to abandon the tool for a workshop for this reason After having a demo, I learned of new features I wasn't using. I don't know it would have been intuitive to find on my own.
Lucidspark is very much the easiest offering to pick up and use and its not even close I have been to Lucid summits to lean how to better utilize Lucidchart and its hard to get others to do the same. The best part about Lucid spark is that when new people are involved in my project planning it takes less than 5 minutes to get them up to speed and collaborating right away.
For availability, we never have to even think about whether inVision Freehand is going to be available for us to work with. There has never been a time when we have opened up the application and had any issues of any kind. I can't imagine why anyone would work with a platform that is unreliable. inVision Freehand is realibel, stable, and getting better all the time. Whether it's their built-in tools or the expanding of Templates to work with Freehand has been a reliable go-to platform for us.
It is a little slow when bringing artboards from Sketch to Freehand using Craft. I have had some issues loading and redrawing pages when I have a lot of images on my freehand board. It gives me an error message while I am in the file and starts to reload and redraw all the photos again. Not sure if it has a limit on how many images it can handle on a board at a time.
I haven't had to use the support team for anything, which is great news because that means the product usually works as expected! In terms of online support, I've been able to find videos that show how new features work. Also, many of the people I work with have experience with the tools so they are a great resource for me.
It is efficient enough to execute the workflow and lacks only a few convenience requirements. It is easily recommended to any user due to its optimised templates and tools where the size limit is only interfering with the work process for new users to test it. It is also a potential platform to work with a team to get very good real-time responses.
The implementation is pretty much easy-peasy and plug-n-play. We simply download the applications and install, signed in and were good to go. I really cannot imagine that there would be anyone who would have any difficulty whatsoever in getting started in more than just a few minutes. It's really how implementing these officewide improvements should always go.
Miro (formerly Realtime Board) is the original product concept for this tool and I used it for 3-4 years for product development. Invision is aesthetically a carbon copy of the tool but lacks in fine usability controls. We actually didn't choose Freehand, it just came as an added tool under our Invision subscription. It's helpful but knowing the previous tool, it's been a hard sell because it's just not as good. Again, it's really fine tuned usability things like navigation, zoom, switching from tool to tool, selecting and deselecting, etc
Other comparable platforms, such as Miro & mentioned above are slightly too vague in scope when it comes to virtual whiteboarding tools, however, they allow for linking blocks to live-updating Asana cards among other productivity tools.
Getting set up with inVision Freehand was super simple. We figured how many of our team members were going to be using it and we set up our account knowing that. There were no negotiations, contract hassles or anything that would have been a waste of our time, efforts or resources.
Not everyone in the company has access to Invision, and they can't view the links I provide to them. I also wish everyone could view a file without logging in to the enterprise account. It comes in handy when I am doing focus-group studies or other studies with our customers that don't have Freehand. Unfortunately, if that is possible, I don't know how to do that.
I've made a Planning Poker template in Lucid that we use for Sprint Planning, and it's made it easier to switch to Story Points and forego task breakdown and time estimation altogether. It does save time during Sprint Planning but that's less significant than the fact that developers no longer feel the need or pressure to conform to whatever random time estimate was provided. That's thanks to Story Points, not Lucid itself, but Lucid surely made Planning Poker a lot easier than it used to be. As an added bonus, it stores voting history, so we can go back during the Retrospective and review particular items of interest that we completely botched the sizing of.
