Organizations that support remote work need tried and tested collaboration apps. Lucidspark is a visual collaboration app, more specifically a whiteboard app. You and your teammates use it to brainstorm ideas, present during meetings, and even play icebreaker games. Collaboration can happen in real time or asynchronously. Lucidspark is related to the app Lucidchart, an Editors' Choice winner for making diagrams and flowcharts—the two apps even share a main interface where you access all the boards and diagrams you've created. If you already use Lucidchart and love it, it makes sense to use Lucidspark, too. But overall for whiteboard apps, Editors' Choice winner Miro offers more for about the same cost.
How Much Does Lucidspark Cost?
Lucidspark has four plans: a free limited plan, Individual ($9.95 per month or $95.40 per year), Team (starting at $11 per person per month, less if you pay annually), and Enterprise accounts with custom pricing.
The Free plan gives you enough of an experience to try out the app, but you can have only three editable boards at any given time. You may co-edit boards with others and create shareable links, comment on tasks, join visual activities, and try out some collaborative AI features.
The Individual plan is for one person only. It includes 1GB of storage space, and you can have as many boards as you want. It includes Presentation Mode, Timelines, and a dynamic table, to name a few features you don't get in the free plan. Since it's for a single user, you don't get a chat tool, but you can still write comments. You cannot invite guest collaborators, however.
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The pricing for a Team account is a little tricky because you can't choose the exact number of licenses. They come in sets of 3, 5, 10, and 15. It starts at $33 per month for three licenses or $324 if paid annually. That works out to be $11 per person per month if you have three people—and if you pay annually, it's equivalent to $9 per person per month. Teams with more than 15 people must contact the sales team. The Team account includes everything in the Individual plan, plus collaboration features and a revision history. You can invite guest collaborators and track changes people make. You also get tools for voting, a timer, and a laser pointer. The timer is merely a countdown clock, not one that logs time spent working.
Enterprise accounts come with custom pricing. They include everything in Teams plus team hubs, SAML authentication, enforceable sharing restrictions, enforceable guest collaborator restrictions, and other tools for administering the account. This account can also integrate with Jira Cloud, Jira Data Center, Smartsheet, and Azure DevOps Cloud integrations.
Lucidspark's prices are about the same as most whiteboard apps. Miro's paid accounts start at $10 per person per month. Miro gives you more, though, such as integrated video calling and great features for creating charts and graphs, which Lucidspark doesn't have. Mural, another high-scoring app in this category, charges $12 per person per month. Stormboard's paid options start at $10 per person per month. As with most software, you get discounts for paying annually.
What makes Lucidspark's price less competitive, however, is its method of billing. You might be paying for more seats than you use.
Apps and Integrations
Lucidspark runs in a web browser, and there are dedicated apps for both Apple and Android mobile devices. That said, Lucidspark is really meant to be used on a reasonably large screen. While you'd be able to use it without incident on a tablet, we wouldn't recommend using it on a phone.
You can use Lucidspark in tandem with other collaboration apps; for example, you can use it while on a video call in Zoom or Microsoft Teams. Both Zoom and Teams have their own built-in whiteboards, however, so you could also consider them competitors to Lucidspark.
Other integration options are geared toward productivity. For example, you can integrate with Jira to import issues from that system, or conversely brainstorm ideas as notes in Lucidspark and push them into Jira where they show up as issues. You can also integrate with Slack, Smartsheet, Google Drive, Dropbox Dash, Asana, and Azure DevOps. These integration options are nearly on par with Miro's and are much better than what some other whiteboards offer, such as Conceptboard.
Getting Started With Lucidspark
The first thing you do with Lucidspark is create a free account either with an email address and password or by authenticating with a Google account, Microsoft 365, or Slack. You do not need to provide any banking details. If you already have an account with Lucidchart, you can use the same login to access Lucidspark.
After you login, you land on a welcome page with a list of all the boards you've created in Lucidspark and Lucidchart. From this page, you can also preview available templates, access your user settings, and, when applicable, access administrator settings.
Switching between Lucidspark and Lucidchart in this single, unified canvas is pretty easy. In fact, even when working on various boards, you can swap and edit with the help of the other app with a couple of clicks.
Creating a Board
To make a new board, you either start with a blank canvas or choose a template. Templates are grouped by theme, such as Brainstorming and Project Planning, Organizing teams, Wireframing, Meetings and Workshops, Agile (for people who use the Agile development method), and so on.
Some templates are more than standard; quite a few are interactive team-building exercises that look like simple tabletop games. It's not unusual for whiteboard apps to offer these interactive games. Mural does it, too.
Once you have a board, interacting with the elements is straightforward if you have any experience with visual collaboration tools or vector drawing software. The most basic objects are sticky notes, arrows, lines, and other basic shapes, which you drag from a toolbar onto the board and then resize or move around as you need. You can also add images and animated GIFs and draw freehand.
When you select several objects at once and then right-click, a menu appears with several options for arranging, aligning, and otherwise working with those objects as a group.
Special Features
Lucidspark gives you a few special features to make it easier to work with the content of your whiteboards. When we last reviewed Lucidspark, there was a feature we enjoyed called Magic Sort, which was in beta at the time. Now it’s just the Sort tool, and it's still great. It lets you select multiple sticky notes and sort them into groups by color, tags, or the number of votes.
Another unique feature is Lucidspark’s Collaborative AI tool, which is in beta as of this writing. Here, the content of your sticky notes is analyzed, and the notes are sorted accordingly. To test this feature, we created nine sticky notes in multiple colors and wrote on them words related to story creation. The AI sorted them quite well. "Plot twist,” “plot,” “storybook,” “villain,” and "characters” went into a container called Story Elements. A second container, Visual Design, held “background color,” “image,” “character portrait,” and “theme color.”
Another tool, Gather, works similarly to Sort, pulling together notes that have something in common, in this case, the same color, keyword, tag, and so forth.
Presentation Tools
Some teams use whiteboard apps not only to collaborate but also to create presentations. You can indeed include any whiteboard that you make in Lucidspark as part of a presentation. A Presentation Builder tool helps you organize material from the board into individual slides. You lay a frame around the material you want on each slide, which is a simple enough way to go about it, though it can require some additional adjustments to your board contents to make them fit the dimensions of the slides correctly. Still, it's fast and easy to turn your board into a slideshow, while some competing apps use a process that's less clear and more difficult to master.
No Easily Editable Tables, Charts, or Graphs
One set of tools that Lucidspark doesn't have (but Miro does) are those for creating tables and charts from data that you enter. Miro supports pie charts, column charts, bar charts, and funnel charts. We find that the ability to incorporate data dramatically expands what you can do with Miro as opposed to other whiteboard apps.
The most you can do in Lucidspark is select your data and organize it into a Dynamic Table. Then, you have to manually create columns and rows and arrange the notes into them. It’s more difficult, but not impossible.
Excellent for Collaborating
Whiteboards are commonly used collaboratively, and as such, Lucidspark has plenty of tools for a group to generate and discuss ideas in real time or asynchronously.
When you invite people to join your board, you can see who else is contributing in a way that's similar to collaboration in Google Docs. Lucidspark assigns each participant a color, which you can see in a little panel. You can text-chat while you collaborate. Although Lucidspark does not support video or audio calling, you can integrate the app with video calling software, as mentioned previously. If you'd rather have video calling supported natively, Miro offers it. Mural includes its own calling feature, but it's audio only.
There's a timer you can enable for all to see, which is handy in meetings when you want to brainstorm or do an activity for a set amount of time and then move on with your meeting agenda. A voting tool is also included for quickly polling participants.
Breakout boards are similar to breakout rooms in video conferencing software. They let you divvy up a large group of people into smaller groups who then get their own board for collaborating. It's a tactic commonly used to make large meetings more productive and interactive. After an amount of time has passed, as determined by the meeting host, everyone leaves their breakout boards and rejoins the main board. The meeting host can then copy the entire contents of any breakout board to share on the main board. Miro and Mural both offer breakout board functionality as well.
Another thing that can help boost team morale are Visual Activities. The idea is to have fun with silly icebreaker games by, say, having your team choose the best vegetable or, more seriously, collaboratively figure out how urgent everyone believes certain tasks on a board by arranging them accordingly. Once everyone has submitted their response, Lucidspark creates an average. There are loads of Visual Activities.
AI
It comes as no surprise that since our last review, Lucidspark has added artificial intelligence. It shows up in a few places. The first is generative AI used to help teams come up with ideas, spark creativity, sort ideas into themes (as previously mentioned with Sorting), summarize ideas from working sessions or set next steps for the team.
Another application of AI comes when creating mind maps. Once you set down a base for what you want to create, you can use AI to expand your mind map with new ideas or questions. Then, for each item it creates, you can expand more and more. Whatever options you don’t like, you can simply delete them.
To take things further, you can optionally integrate ChatGPT. The ChatGPT+ plug-in lets you generate editable diagrams, for instance, while adding your API key helps you easily interact with whatever AI language model you prefer.
If you link your Lucid account to your Microsoft 365 account, you can retrieve Lucid documents in Copilot and have the AI generate summaries, for instance. This should help cut down on time spent on tasks and create a better workflow for the team.
Accessibility
The Lucidspark app has decent accessibility support for languages. You can set the display language to Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish, or Swedish. Because Lucidspark and Lucidchart share a central interface, you set the language in a central setting for both apps.
The company tracks other ways it conforms to or fails to meet web accessibility standards in a report that it makes public. Most other whiteboard apps don't go so far as to make their web accessibility efforts transparent, so this is a win for Lucidspark. And very few have any language support other than English, except Conceptboard, which is also available in German.
Verdict: Among the Top Whiteboard Apps
Lucidspark is one of the better whiteboard apps on the market, with a range of helpful templates and an easy-to-use interface. We appreciate its accessibility support and find that some of the more difficult features, like turning a board into a slideshow, are simple to master. The app's pricing could be simplified to a standard per-person rate, though roughly speaking, the rates are already competitive. Head-to-head, Lucidspark does not edge out Editors' Choice winner, Miro, which offers native video calls and support for making charts and graphs. But it's a fine option that doesn't disappoint.
Lucidspark is a reliable whiteboard app for collaborating in real time or asynchronously.
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