Lucidspark vs. CommUnity by Personify

Lucidspark is well suited for teams who want to be aligned in understanding. Lucidspark even works well as an ideation or brainstorming tool an individual can use in isolation. Lucidspark would not work so well if it is needs to be an authoritative source of information but luckily there is a way to convert Lucidspark to Lucidchart

Incentivized

You can tell from the CEO and all staff that this is a very competent company that wants you to succeed with integrity. There is a strong
support and services team that works collaboratively with us to make
sure we are always getting what we need. They provide
24x7 emergency support, online ticket support, email support, a client
community, and the ability to call and talk to the same account manager or
community consultant every time (I even have Mariano's skype and he replies on weekends!). They recently launched a client community - so they are now even practicing what they preach. Our questions in the client community are always answered quickly.

• Intuitive and simple design is one of its strong points, so zero learning curve!
• Clearing away the whole board or parts of the board is a breeze to avoid confusion.
• The different pens with colors and nib thickness allow easy explanations.

Incentivized

• It's easy to use. The admin panel has a number of drag and drop options to modify the experience
• Flexibility. There are a large number of standard block features that can be added to areas. In addition, each dynamic block as a number of settings that allow you to tailor the experience you want to create. You can do this without being a programmer.
• Personalization. There are good tools that allow you to personalize the experience based on whether users are logged in or not, whether they are in particular segments (which we can create) or recommendations based on information the user has provided about themselves.
• Mobile. Small World Labs has a really great way of doing mobile. They give you a drag and drop interface for designing the mobile environment so there is a lot of flexibility with this. We are currently turning this module on.

• After editing one item on a board, all other items can be dimmed, took me a few seconds to work out that I had to hit the ESC key to resolve
• Can't put my finger on exactly why but the minimap is a bit frustrating to use
• I'd really like to see options that only admins have visible but not clickable, then I'd know without asking that a given thing could be accomplished

Incentivized

• Integration with our Association Management System (AMS) didn't go as smoothly as I had wished. Having said that all of the issues with that integration have been addressed.
• Because the platform is updated so frequently you need to stay on top of what is available to you and your end users or you may miss out on key functionality releases.

It’s integral to the way we operate and run the business. It’s slick, professional and always having new features added

Incentivized

From the first conversation and beyond, it has been a pleasure working with Small World Labs. Their staff are genuinely interested in understanding our business and our goals, and actively make recommendation on continued improvement and long-term strategy. All of their staff demonstrate a clear understanding of the product and when to expect new features. Furthermore, their CEO, Michael Wilson, is more than competent and has proven to be an industry expert. He understands both the technical side and the community strategy side of the business. In fact, we have already initiated a project to build a second community with Small World Labs for a separate business unit

This is the where Lucidspark has some opportunity to have improvement, the learning curve can be not as intuitive as Lucidchart. The main area of improvement would be to have a similar interface as Lucidchart. For example, to scroll between the x and y axis can be difficult until the user discovers the tab on the left hand side that has the arrow and the hand. Until the user discovers that tab on the left hand side, the chart is difficult to navigate around.

There are a multitude of options to configure the exact user experience you want and what you want to emphasize.

Uptime has never been an issue.

Speed is not an issue.

From the sales team to the online training resources, there is so many ways that you can get information and questions answered the people over at Lucid really go out their way to ensure you and your teams success not to mention all of the help and support in app. Its the attention to detail and understanding of their user base that puts them over the other companies.

Incentivized

The people at Small World Labs are very accessible. I can email, open a ticket, or call and they are there. I'd also point out that senior management is quite available too. We frequently have talks about potential strategies and new things we might be doing, which is great. I think the whole organization genuinely likes what they do and likes helping us succeed.

In-person training is more ad-hoc based on if they are traveling to you or you are going to visit them. I imagine that if I paid for in-person training that it would be set up as well, but I've just used the standard training that comes with the initial set up and ongoing support.

Online training is through online webinar & how-to posts and videos in the client community.

We had staff turnover at our own organization during the implementation. We were able to get the community up and live in a good timeframe even though that happened and we had to switch some people around for managing the project on our side.

It is a very accessible and wide range of tools to help kick-off any projects and brainstorming sessions. It is user-friendly in terms of content sorting and collaborative ideations. It is also loaded with good quality export options and colours for a very practical client presentation and team understanding of the content across boards.

Incentivized

We evaluated a few different community platform vendors over the course of a couple of months. I believe we also evaluated Jive, Lithium, KickApps, and Powered.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Our community has been very active since the re-launch of our site. Have seen some increases in member engagement.
• Feedback from our membership has been nothing but positive since we transitioned off of our older Sharepoint community. Look and feel and ease of use have been real pluses for our members.
• Having the Small World Labs community is allowing us to be more creative with the way we integrate our community into all aspects of our online presence, web-site, social media, etc.