Documentation and Communication
June 23, 2021
Documentation and Communication
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Lucidchart
My company is starting to use Lucidchart in our engineering department, and it has already begun to help us address two key issues. The first is documentation, which unfortunately is lacking across the board at the moment. However, with how quickly Lucidchart allows you to create flowcharts and diagrams to document algorithms and application architecture, it is becoming easier for developers to document their own work in a way that is easily shareable with other team members, and able to be worked on collaboratively.
The second issue it addresses it communication. As a fully-remote employee, I don’t have the luxury of walking up to the whiteboard in the room and drawing out ideas during a brainstorming or debugging session, as all my communication is done via video calls. However, with Lucidchart I am able to collaborate on a digital canvas just as quickly as I could using a marker and whiteboard. This has helped me be more included in engineering discussions with other team members, and has increased the value I can add to the team. I’ve become a strong advocate for the tool amongst my peers!
The second issue it addresses it communication. As a fully-remote employee, I don’t have the luxury of walking up to the whiteboard in the room and drawing out ideas during a brainstorming or debugging session, as all my communication is done via video calls. However, with Lucidchart I am able to collaborate on a digital canvas just as quickly as I could using a marker and whiteboard. This has helped me be more included in engineering discussions with other team members, and has increased the value I can add to the team. I’ve become a strong advocate for the tool amongst my peers!
- Speed, as it takes much too long to draw with a mouse on a digital whiteboard
- Collaboration, as I can seamlessly share diagrams with teammates
- Customization, as the huge list of options and tools allows me to create exactly what I am envisioning
- Expensive, as there are (albeit simpler) free alternatives
- Hard to learn, as there are so many options thrown at you all at once
- Improved real-time communication, especially with remote employees
- Improved documentation, as speeding up the process makes engineers more likely to do it
- Improved development speed, as having detailed planning decrease the amount of actual engineering time
The Slack integration has been helpful for sharing documents with teammates, as sending links prompts sharing options so everyone can get involved. While I have not used the Atlassian feature, I think it’s something I’d advocate our senior engineers and product managers utilize more when [spacing] out development tasks.
Do you think Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite's feature set?
Yes
Did Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite again?
Yes
- draw.io and Google Drive
draw.io has most of the base features that Lucidchart has. However, where it is lacking is in the collaboration space. I cannot share documents with people, and allow them to edit or comment on a living document. That makes keeping multiple versions of files very tedious and difficult to keep track of. Google Drawings (which wasn’t an option, so I picked Google Drive) has very similar collaboration features, but the diagramming tools themselves are seriously lacking. Both these alternatives are much cheaper than Lucidchart (as they are free) but aren’t true substitutes in any way. Finally, neither of these tools have any of the advanced features that Lucidchart has, such as importing database schemas or live data feeds.