Lucid App Review 2024: Features, Pros & Cons

Lucid creates a handful of apps for collaboration and diagramming including Lucidchart, Lucidspark and Lucidscale. The most popular of the Lucid family’s visual collaboration tools used by businesses small to large is Lucidchart. The founders started Lucid in 2010 and the team continues to improve upon each app and how they work with each other and third-party tools.

The most notable features of Lucidchart include:

• Large object library
• Premade chart templates
• Several integrations
• Import and export options
• Web publishing for easy sharing
• Real-time collaboration
• Data sync

Lucidchart offers many similar features as its competitors in the diagramming software market, but it stands out for a few reasons. It’s easy to use with a drag-and-drop interface and includes some powerful tools not typically available in flowchart apps.

Pros

Diagramming software is generally easy to use, but Lucidchart is designed specifically to be easy to use for those who aren’t tech-savvy. There are tooltips and tutorials to help you learn all the features. There are smart features to reduce your workload too. You can import data to smart containers or sticky note documents that help you organize that data automatically. There’s also a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature that suggests ideas based on a topic you want to brainstorm, for example.

Cons

Although Lucidchart is affordable, you need the team plan to get advanced features, which costs $27 per month for three users, if paid annually. Also, there’s a user minimum requirement on the high-tier plans. Lucidchart is only available on a browser and it suffers greatly from lag. Many times, our sessions were frozen and we had to relaunch the platform.

At the heart of Lucidchart is diagramming. To support the creation of diagrams, charts and visual aids, there are multiple tools included. We tested templates, shapes and collaboration. There are helpful integrations and versioning for some plans.

Templates

Lucidchart has more than 700 prebuilt templates for you to use as a jumping-off point for charts, floor plans, diagrams and more. Most of the templates include the shapes you need to get started with placeholder text and it’s easy to edit the text with what you need. You can also add more text boxes or shapes as needed. Templates are grouped by categories or you can search for a particular template. Alternatively, you can start with a blank canvas and create a custom graph or diagram.

Shapes

With Lucidchart, you get countless shapes to use in your creations. There are thousands of premade shapes categorized by their use. For example, there are specific shapes for flowcharts, Salesforce, mind maps and more. The free and lower-tier plans limit the types of shapes you have access to, so you may need to upgrade to get what you need. Also, not all types of templates give you the same shapes to use, which is a bit frustrating. You can also create custom shapes from images if Lucidchart doesn’t include precisely what you want.

Integrations

Another limiting factor of Lucidchart’s plans is the type of integrations it allows. Basic integrations, such as Google and Slack, are available for the free plan and Individual plan users. More advanced options, such as Jira and Nuclino, are available for high-tier plans.

Document Collaboration

All of Lucidchart’s documents are available for collaboration, so you can create a chart to work with others on together. You can also set permissions to prevent those you don’t want to access specific documents.

Versioning

Revision history is only available for Team and Enterprise plans. You can view the history of edits and revert to other versions of documents as needed. We found it easy to click through different versions without resetting anything accidentally.

	Free	Individual	Team	Enterprise
Starting Price (Billed Annually)	Free	$7.95	$9 per, user per month	Custom quote
User Limit	1	1	Unlimited (3-user minimum)	Unlimited (2-user minimum)
Documents	3	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Storage	25 MB	1 GB	1 GB per user	5 GB per user
Templates	Limited	700	700+	700+
Shapes	Limited	1,000+	1,000+	1,000+
Collaboration	✔	✔	✔	✔
Integrations	Basic	Basic	Advanced	Advanced
Support	Help center and ticket support	Help center and ticket support	Help center and ticket support	Help center and ticket support

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Free

The free version of Lucidchart is usable if you just need it for brainstorming a few ideas. You get up to three editable documents on which you can add up to 60 objects. It’s fairly limited as far as templates, storage and shapes are concerned but it offers some advanced features, such as conditional formatting, publishing and data imports.

Individual

When you pay for the Individual plan, you get unlimited documents, shapes and templates. It costs $7.95 per month for one user if you pay annually. You also get premium visual activities to help engage with reports, coworkers or customers. Otherwise, features are similar to the free plan.

Team

The Team plan includes many more features and allows for multiple users. It costs $9 per user, per month, if paid annually, but it also requires three users at minimum. This plan unlocks revision history and versioning. You can publish your charts online with any plan but it’s at this level you can require a password for viewing. Also available are premium integrations, such as Microsoft 365, Jira and GitHub.

Enterprise

If you’re looking for fewer limits and better integrations, there’s the Enterprise plan. Although it says on the site you must contact sales for a quote, you can see the cost if you sign up for a free trial and choose to upgrade; it costs $18.25 per user, per month (billed annually) with a two-user minimum.

This plan allows you to fully integrate with Salesforce, add sharing restrictions, create team spaces and use a universal canvas for better collaboration. Perhaps the biggest benefit of this plan is that you can refresh data sets as often as you need (all other plans only allow a single data import). You’ll also get access to Lucidspark, a collaborative whiteboard app.

Setting up Lucidchart is simple. After you sign up for a trial or plan the software walks you through creating your first document. You can create a custom diagram with a blank canvas or start with one of hundreds of templates. Depending on how you answer a few of the introductory questions, you may get help with navigating the features.

We found that Lucidchart is one of the easiest apps to use for collaboration. The interface uses drag-and-drop functionality, so it’s fairly intuitive. When working on a document, there’s a left-side menu that may take some time to adjust to. The icons aren’t immediately recognizable and you have to be patient with a hover over the icons to get a label for what each are.

Ease of use comes in different forms. For example, the search function in Lucidchart is incredibly helpful. We weren’t sure of the location in menus for publishing, but a quick search pulled up options including a useful arrow pointing to where it lives in the menu.

Lucidchart is laggy, which speaks more to functionality than ease of use, but it fits here because it makes it much harder to stay in a flow if the app is freezing or sluggish. We had to refresh or restart our browsers because of lag or freezing. One helpful tip is to turn hardware acceleration on in your Chrome browser to help keep things running smoothly.

We were impressed with Lucidchart’s commitment to security and privacy. Lucid uses standard encryption for all data at rest and in transit and it maintains General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) compliance. Additionally, the Lucid umbrella has security certifications including as a level 1 Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) service provider. Admins on your account can set user permissions for different levels of users as needed. Depending on the plan you choose, you can also set permissions or passwords for specific documents and published content.

Customer support is a bit lacking in avenues but support agents respond in a timely manner. We contacted support via the ticket system around 5 p.m. Eastern time and received a response only 20 minutes later. The issue at hand was dealt with quickly and there was no pushback from support. It’s worth noting that email and the ticket system is the only way to contact support.

Although most collaborative diagramming software include some of these features below, they’re not always standard. With Lucidchart, you can publish your work online, import and export data from various sources and get storage for what you create, although it’s a bit limiting. The latest feature from Lucidchart is collaborative AI, which you can use to help brainstorm ideas and problem-solving.

Publishing

All of Lucidchart’s plans allow you to publish your work online. You can also download documents, print them and embed code to your own websites. There are options for link sharing and emailing too. The Enterprise plan lets you create a password for your published content, so you can protect your work from others who have a link but not a password.

Import and Export

One of the most useful abilities in Lucidchart is importing. You can import a data set from various sources (CSV or Excel, for example) and automatically place the data in charts. However, there is a caveat. Most plans only allow one import of one data set with no refreshing. Only the Enterprise plan allows unlimited data into the platform.

Collaborative AI

Lucidchart has jumped on board the AI bandwagon with its collaborative AI brainstorming tool. Once you pull it up, you can type in a topic to kick off a deluge of ideas in sticky notes or a table. These can help spark conversation and get the ball rolling on a brainstorming or problem-solving session.

Document Storage

This is a tricky category because there’s conflicting information online and in our experience. When we signed up for the Team plan, we saw that we had 4 GB of storage available. To increase document storage, we’d need to add more users. That’s fine, but in Lucidchart’s documentation, storage is limited to 1 GB per user for the Individual and Team plans and 5 GB per user for the Enterprise plan. Free plan users are supposed to be limited to 25 MB, but when we used the free option, we still had 1 GB of storage.

	Lucidchart	Visio	Miro	Figma
Starting Price (Billed Annually)	$7.95 per user, per month	$5 per user, per month	$8 per user, per month	$12 per user, per month
Free Trial	7 days	30 days*	14 days	X
Free Plan	✔	X	✔	✔
Real-time Document Collaboration	✔	✔	✔	✔
Versioning	✔	✔	✔	✔
Templates	1,000+	80+	300+	300+
Shapes	Advanced	Basic	Basic	Basic
Custom Shapes	✔	✔	✔	✔
Import Data	✔	✔	✔	✔
Publishing	✔	X	X	✔
AI Tools	✔	X	✔	✔
Integrations	80+	20+	130+	30+
Support	Help center and ticket support	Help center and ticket support	Help center and email support	Help center and forum

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*Only available to Microsoft 365 users.

Comparing other diagramming software to Lucidchart in this Lucid app review comes down mostly to specific features, the number of integrations and templates and pricing. Lucidchart lands in the middle of the pack for pricing but it includes features and templates not found in cheaper competitors. Take a look at how Lucidchart stacks up against some of the top choices in flowchart software.

Lucidchart vs. Visio

Visio is the standard choice for Microsoft users because it comes with Microsoft 365 subscriptions. There are upgradable versions available that start at $5 per user, per month, which is more affordable than Lucidchart’s entry-level plan. However, Lucidchart offers more templates and integrations than Visio and there are tons of advanced shapes you can use (on the high-tier plans).

Lucidchart vs. Miro

Miro is a well-known diagramming software that costs about the same as Lucidchart. Where it differs mostly is in functionality. You can’t publish a chart the same way you can in Lucidchart, but you can export as an image to share with others. There are fewer templates and curated shapes in Miro than in Lucidchart. However, there are more integrations available in Miro than Lucidchart.

Lucidchart vs. Figma

Figma is often used for website mockups but when compared to Lucidchart, it’s lacking in a few areas. Lucidchart allows you to try its software for seven days while Figma offers no free trial. They have comparable features but Figma is a bit more expensive, starting at $12 per user, per month (Lucidchart starts at $7.95 per user, per month). Figma gives you basic shapes and hundreds of templates but Lucidchart still offers more.

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Lucidchart is great for individuals or teams that need a visual way to brainstorm or view data. It’s flexible enough to use for wireframing for websites or to design an office layout. The free plan is suitable for one person who wants to create simple flowcharts but the high-tier plans are packed with enough advanced features to warrant the steep cost.

Lucidchart can be as simple or complex as you need with its wealth of features. Using Lucidchart was much easier than we expected. The multiple templates make it quick to get started with almost any type of visual aid, such as diagrams, flowcharts, wireframes and org charts. We liked how many shape options there were too and many of them are specific to designing an office layout or for use in Salesforce, for example.

The new generative AI tool is fantastic for prompting brainstorming sessions. For data-driven companies (read: all companies at this point), the data set import is a huge timesaver. We think it’s worth it to opt for the Enterprise plan if you want to visualize data often.