Solid online diagramming with excellent live collaboration capabilities
November 09, 2021

Solid online diagramming with excellent live collaboration capabilities

Peter Popov | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Lucidspark

I have several major use cases for Lucidspark: * As a mind mapping/brainstorming tool for my own use * For process workflows and diagrams - anything from a value stream map to a continuous delivery pipeline * For collaboration on content - for example, for KPI / OKR trees * For interactive collaboration - from Sprint Retrospectives to Planning Poker. Lucid is available for all users within DraftKings following a simple but obligatory license request and approval process. SSO works out of the box but the license request and approval process are somewhat confusing and it's not immediately clear to most users. Also, the whole Lucidchart vs Lucidspark thing is utterly confusing. As just another user I have to ask - why?! Why the need for two products, licensed separately, and not particularly interoperable, when one would suffice? It's confusing, to say the least, and I've had more than one user request the wrong license and only find out they did so when they tried to join a collaborative session. The new Join Codes seem like a step in the right direction. I have yet to try them but it looks like the right approach.

Pros

  • Decent support of input methods (mouse, touchpad, touch, and pen) on Windows 10, including automatic detection.
  • Good collection of shapes, libraries, and templates.
  • Collaborative tools. Voting is implemented particularly well!

Cons

  • Lucidhart vs Lucidspark. It's really confusing for first-time users and we had a bunch of them get the wrong license only to find out at the last possible moment.
  • Sharing and inviting, although intuitive, seem to confuse people at times. We've had multiple cases where some people can access a canvas and others can't (so they show up as guests,) even though they're in the same org and can access other content shared in seemingly the same way.
  • This is minor but some shortcuts that should be there, aren't. Ctrl-D for Duplicate, Ctrl-Shift-C / V for Copy/Paste Style
  • Selection rectangles selecting partially covered shapes is counter-intuitive for most users. Either give it a preference toggle or make it Autocad-style (drag right to fully enclose, drag left to partially cover).
  • When selecting multiple shapes (especially with a drag rectangle,) give the option to filter out shape types. Miro has this and it's an amazing feature that I use all the time in complex diagrams.
  • 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.
The overall UI is clean and easy to understand, and the initial guided tour makes the learning curve even smoother. I was literally up and running with it in less than five minutes once I got my license approved.
We don't use these particular features. Slack integration is there and that's the most I can say about it. If there's more to it than notifying me about board edits, I haven't been able to find it.
It's been rock solid, not a single crash that I can recall. The one thing that has been randomly problematic is sharing - sometimes people simply can't access a shared board with their account and they log in as guests. Now, they always do so at the last possible moment and we never have the time to debug it at the call, so I'm sure it's something they do wrong, but the fact of the matter is - it happens often enough for me to consider a part of this user flow counterintuitive to a significant percentage of our users (who are all engineers, so quite tech-savvy.)
I haven't had to reach out to Support, so I can't comment on its effectiveness. I've spent quite a few years in Support myself so I would be in a good position to rate my interactions with them if the case arose. However, one side effect of my tour in Support is that I fix most problems myself, so I'm not a reliable source for this question.

Do you think Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

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

I use Miro in my own business, but I have two clients who use Lucid. I find them to be pretty much on par in terms of feature sets, with Miro having a very slight edge in diagramming itself, and Lucid having the upper hand in real-time collaboration. Miro has Projects and Lucid has Templates, both of which I like. Overall, the two products are so much neck-to-neck right now, I'll have to do my evaluation all over again when the time comes to renew my license.
Great for diagramming, including collaboratively. Awesome facilitation features - join codes, facilitator mode, voting, all very good. Integrates within Teams and with Slack. I know there's Atlassian integration (JIRA cards, Confluence embedding) but I haven't personally used that side of it so I can't comment. My biggest gripe with Lucid is licensing - not pricing (I am not the one buying so I don't know) but the actual licensing of Lucidchart vs Lucidspark separately. I understand why they might be conceptually different from the vendor's perspective, and there might even be technical legacy reasons why they are, but from a user's perspective, they're just online collaborative diagramming tools. One just happens to have pages while the other does not, and they have different template and shape libraries. I'm sure it's more complicated than that but from my first-time user perspective, the distinction made zero sense (and still does.) Licensing aside, both are excellent at what they do. There are minor UI improvements that could be made but they're being updated constantly and if you don't switch between tools on a daily basis like I do, you get used to missing shortcuts and other quirks pretty quickly.

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