The Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite empowers teams to ideate, plan, design, build, and launch game-changing solutions from a shared infinite canvas.
$0
Mural
Score 6.5 out of 10
N/A
MURAL (formerly Mural.ly) from Tactivos (DBA MURAL) in San Francisco is described by the vendor as a digital workspace and visual collaboration tool, designed for creative teams to make the process of design more efficient for distributed teams, working remotely.
It is hard to think of ways in which Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite would not be best suited to provide an effective tool for any organization to find success in its use. Whether it is a visual display to map an organizational structure, a collaboration to find an answer of how to improve workflow, or even to display the upcoming budget needs, working in Lucid can seamlessly provide that!
Remote Collaboration: In a remote or distributed work environment, Mural shines. It enables teams to collaborate effectively in real-time, bridging geographical gaps and facilitating virtual meetings, workshops, and brainstorming sessions. Workshop Facilitation: For facilitators leading workshops or team-building activities, Mural provides interactive templates and tools for engaging participants and achieving specific objectives.
Serverless. You don't need to install another program to create diagrams, you just open a new tab and there you are, ready to go.
Collaboration. You don't need to update your colleague diagram by creating a new file and creating a new file version, you both are in the same diagram and you and all the team are free to update it at any time, at the same time, you are seeing the same thing. That is really helpful and time-saving.
Shapes. It has any shape that you can think of and Lucidchart is always updating them, I can create an Azure solution architecture, an AWS one, an old on-premise solution. Or just put standard shapes to describe a business process. Providing so many specific shapes help the diagram to express specific information, and for specific teams, that's less text and more visual information, you don't need to put a text below a standard database shape (this is an Azure SQL database), you just put the azure shape and done. That....is beautifully helpful.
The interface is easy to use and understand and most features feel very familiar from the start. There are so many features and functions that users may not know it can be done without some instruction. Lucid's champion network is a great, fun resource to learn more about the product.
Overall, MURAL is really easy to use, but there are a couple downsides. It's really easy to make areas of the board consistent because double clicking adds stickies that match those around the current one. It's really easy to connect the elements. And it's really easy to organize elements. Inconsistent controls, Panning, Line Connections, and latency are the only issues I had. My biggest issue is that the MURAL mouse buttons are very different from most similar software. This always causes me problems switching to a graphics software or 3D modelling software. Because MURAL uses the same button to pan and move elements, it's really easy to move things when panning around. The lines can also be a (sometimes huge) problem because thew will occasionally disappear or connect to things incorrectly. I think this is tied to latency issues which, in addition to causing phantom lines, can sometimes cause confusion to your team.
I would rate the overall support for Lucidchart as a 9. The support provided is generally robust and responsive. Their help center, tutorials, and webinars offer extensive resources for users. The ticket-based support system is effective, providing timely resolutions to most issues. Moreover, they actively gather user feedback, demonstrating a commitment to continuous improvement
Based on my personal experience, Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite is head and shoulders above any other competitor. Canva is good, but not intuitive at all. Miro is good as well, but not nearly as appealing and still lacks some of the logical functions that LucidSpark has. I’ve also used Apple FreeForm quite a bit, which is a free software with Apple. Once again you can accomplish the same things in any of these software, but Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite is so much better to the point that it is 3-4 times faster to use Lucid than Free Form or Canva.
I like it better than Miro because MURAL's more informal feel makes it encourage conversation and use. Miro also let's you bury too much information "inside" the notes making it really easy to lose sight of important data. I like MURAL better than Lucidspark because of how fast the pages load, especially links within the board. Any app is better than Microsoft whiteboard which is appalling unusable and feature incomplete.
Though I can't necessarily provide hard numbers, I can confidently say that Lucidchart has saved countless hours for myself and my teams as we don't need to try to develop some type of complex diagram using markup or any kind of code.
I have previously been able to build a complete ERD using Lucidchart in a past position, which the company never had before. It ended up being used by countless teams in the company and ultimately in a large-scale data stack migration effort.
