Lucidspark vs. VMware Socialcast (discontinued)

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.

Socialcast has been a great tool for FactSet. I would recommend it to any firm looking for an easy-to-use tool to centralize communication and collaborate on a global scale.

• 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

• Socialcast has an exceptional user experience. With very few idiosyncrasies, it works well on every platform I've tried.
• The platform has such a high level of ease of use, it becomes somewhat addicting.
• Social analytics are superb.
• The platform is highly intuitive and requires zero training or coaching in order for network members to become productive with it.
• It's extremely reliable. Only once in 4 years, was the product not available, and that was only for about a half-hour. In that half-hour, we realized how dependent we were on it. (Very.)
• The multi-device and deployment options are excellent. On-premise, Private Cloud, and Multi-tenant SaaS all available.
• The mobile apps for iPhone, tablets, and Android render well with a beautiful UI/UX. The desktop AIR app is equally highly usable.

• 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

• The software is a little bit pricey because it is charged by user/month and depending on the deployment method.
• For companies with a lot of workers the price can increase significantly.
• The mobile app usability and notifications are poor. Need to be improved.
• If there were more administrative features available the product would be improved

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Beyond the value FactSet derives from using the platform, Socialcast (the firm) has been a good partner to FactSet. We've experienced very little downtime with the service and they have been responsive and fair with enhancement requests and questions

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.

Incentivized

The UX is its best feature

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.

Incentivized

Excellent support; of course not perfect. :-)

Not applicable, as it is a SaaS platform with minimal implementation

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.

Incentivized

Socialcast is great for collaboration & light project management, but anything complex doesn't work well.

Using it as an email notification curator works nice for us.

Incentivized

• 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

• Definitely more organized project management and team collaboration.
• Efficiency in carrying out tasks.
• Creates a spirit of collaboration and friendliness among colleagues.

Incentivized