Lucidchart vs Visio comparison

Lucid Software and Microsoft are both solutions in the Mind Mapping Software category. Lucid Software is ranked #2 with an average rating of 10.0, while Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.0. Lucid Software holds a 24.0% mindshare in MMS, compared to Microsoft’s 30.5% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Lucid Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Lucidchart

Read 54 Lucidchart reviews

798 Views
686 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Visio

Read 106 Visio reviews

1,308 Views
1,049 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Lucidchart

Visio

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 27, 2025

Visio and Lucidchart compete in the diagramming software category. Lucidchart holds an advantage due to its intuitive design and collaborative features favorable for remote teams.

Features: Visio offers seamless integration with Microsoft Office and a vast library of shapes and templates, supporting BPMN 2.0 for standardization. Lucidchart is known for its intuitive design, collaborative features, and flexibility in creating complex diagrams.

Room for Improvement: Visio could enhance by adding XPDL support and improving pen input capabilities. It also needs better integration with non-Microsoft tools. Lucidchart could improve by adding features for Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) creation and improving process organization layers. Both can enhance third-party tool integration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Visio is mainly used on-premises with a cloud option, catering to enterprise environments with Microsoft products. Its customer service quality varies by support plan. Lucidchart is cloud-based, simplifying deployment for public cloud environments. Customer support is generally efficient, with easy access and issue resolution.

Pricing and ROI: Visio is priced higher, especially the professional version, offering potential ROI through integration with Microsoft tools for process documentation efficiency. Lucidchart offers competitive pricing for individual users and small teams, delivering ROI through collaboration and ease of use.

To learn more, read our detailed Lucidchart vs. Visio Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Lucidchart vs. Visio

April 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Lucidchart

Ranking in Mind Mapping Software

2nd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

8.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Visual Collaboration Platforms (3rd)

Visio

Ranking in Mind Mapping Software

1st

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

106

Ranking in other categories

Business Process Design (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Mind Mapping Software category, the mindshare of Lucidchart is 24.0%, up from 18.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Visio is 30.5%, down from 32.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Mind Mapping Software

Featured Reviews

MichaelChirinian

Data Engineer at Mindmap

Intuitive, integrates well, and is a great way to change text into visual ideas

I'm not a super user, and there might be a way of doing it that I haven't explored, but I was looking for some specific icons that are just standard icons, and I found the icon library to be very focused on architecture icons. It didn't have as many standard or generic icons. Another thing that somewhat irritated me is the fact that there is a paste function in the menu, but when you right-click and select paste, it tells you that you can't use paste. You must press Command-V or Apple-V to paste. They give you a menu option to paste, but every time you use that, they say, "We don't accept it." On top of that, normally, you'd have an option for paste or paste values, but when you use the paste function, you don't have that capability. So, to copy text from one place, I have to use Command-V to paste it, but if I don't like the format, I've got to go back and do copy style and then paste style on top of that. It is a small detail, but when you're doing diagrams, it is annoying that they don't support paste values. It is a small irk. I'm not penalizing it, and I still think it is a five-star product. In terms of other bigger things, I don't really have any comments or criticism so far.

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Tugrul TASCI

IT Professor at Sakarya University

We have seen return on investment in the form of time savings but should have more design tools

I am generally using Visio to create some diagrams Visio should implement more complex tools or graphics to facilitate processing and use flexible templates. It should allow users to easily drag and drop some previously created diagrams. The tools supplied or provided are very basic, and there…

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The interface is really good and it is very easy to use."

"One of the features that I really like is the collaboration aspect of it. During the pandemic, it's very important that we're able to collaborate virtually."

"The wireframe and mock-up features have been the most useful so far. It's easy to create the mock-ups and then communicate to our development team what they need to look like. Lucidchart's capabilities for visualizing and understanding process flows or workflows is very good as well. I'm able to easily use any style of box that I need to create on a flowchart, to effectively communicate to our development team."

"Lucidchart is a lovely tool for creating visual representations of any process or organization."

"Documenting complicated workflows and technology integrations so that we can go back to it has also been a benefit. And without having to dig into a lot of technical, the codes, the documents, I can simply understand on a high level what's happening."

"Lucidchart's capabilities for visualizing and understanding process flows or workflows is excellent. The way that you put together the parts of charts and edit the chart are all very intuitive and easy to use."

"In general, the usability is great. You have a ton of customization options with different colors, different borders, different thicknesses of lines, different types of arrows, et cetera. There's so much variety. You can really make a chart with all sorts of color-coding, and color charts in different colors, link them together, for example, or use different types of arrows for different types of links between the chart elements. That variety, while not a specific feature, is really useful. If you want to make a chart, you can basically do anything."

"The swimlanes feature is one that I use a lot. I have used swimlane diagrams to create business process flows and I think that it does the job pretty well."

More Lucidchart pros

"This is a very straightforward product and I don't think that anything needs to be simplified."

"The ability to visualize a workflow is certainly an advantage over just tracking a process in something like Excel."

"It is ideal for putting out flowcharts and swim charts. It's really good. It has all the various options to use, particularly depending on what kind of audience you have. It provides you different kinds of options to insert the pictures and explain things."

"The thing I like most about Visio is the stencils. As the product has matured over time, it comes with more stencils and objects that you can just pick out of the menu and go with."

"Very interactive with an intuitive interface."

"The main reason I choose Visio is that it is easy to use. The user interface is familiar and straightforward. Additionally, it offers a variety of templates, such as those for Cisco solutions, which make it easy to create diagrams for specific use cases. For example, we use a Cisco Meraki switch and we can find the exact template for it, then we can easily drop in the components and connect the cables to create the diagram."

"It is easy to learn and implement."

"The solution is finely stable."

More Visio pros

Cons

"The flowcharting feature would be improved if it had some kind of prediction capability that helped to create the diagrams, such as the ability to automatically join components with my database."

"It would be nice to be able to import not just contacts from Salesforce but also leads. In the beginning, when I was still learning the ropes and my way around it, I couldn't find such an option. There might be an option, but I just don't know about it."

"I am not quite sure what different functionalities it provides as well as the difficulties other people are facing. When I have a better understanding of the solution, I will increase my rating of it. No solution is perfect, so I am sure that I will be facing some problems in the future."

"It would be nice to have more features that help me visually present information. Since I use it as a canvas, my use case for it is probably very specific. I use it as a way to present information to people visually on a large mind map. So, it would be nice to be able to have more graphical things to clean it up, like a header, banners, or something to help draw attention to certain areas. I would also like more infographic-like features, because I am kind of limited to float chart shapes. This makes the solution a little cumbersome."

"This might already be a feature, but I remember sometimes when we're just all viewing, if you accidentally click, then there's an arrow that pops up, and you have to go back and delete it. A lot of times there are accidental arrows being drawn when really we're just trying to present to each other."

"One of the major drawbacks is that we have to extract the work in Lucidchart as an image when we want to create a presentation."

"A couple of times when I tried to move a line, connecting two shapes on an organizational chart, occasionally the line doesn't move as intuitively as I think it should. I have to fiddle around with it a few times to get it to do what I want it to do."

"I would really like to be able to set default appearance settings for new documents because I have a set of appearance settings that I always use. I end up setting that manually every time. There may be a way to do that, and maybe I am not able to find it. This is my only major point of feedback for improvement. There are other little nitpicky things, such as being able to lock layers without them looking like a big red line around them would be nice, but every graphic design software does that, so I understand why they have that. All my concerns are nitpicks. They're not big."

More Lucidchart cons

"It thinks that it knows what you want to do, but it doesn't. It has a way of behaving that can be very frustrating from time to time. Either it moves things about because it thinks its placement should be at a certain place, or it's keeping track of things that you don't necessarily see, so it moves something elsewhere."

"It should natively enable importing diagrams or reference architectures from any of the vendors whose solutions are used by the customer or proposed by solution providers such as DXC"

"Lacks the ability to analyze the different relations between activities, positions and roles."

"The only downside to Visio is the learning curve."

"I would like to see included in the next release is the implementation of web publishing."

"From my perspective, Visio could probably add more help guidelines for users, and I would prefer to see more intuitive user interfaces to help with dragging and dropping, using the right components, etc."

"If you look at ARIS, for example, or Signavio, the flowchart combines all the details and with the click of a button I can create a process manager. That would be something that Visio could add. It would cut my workload in half."

"Transferring data was one of the issues that I expected Visio to have resolved. I use the older version."

More Visio cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"At €167 per user per year, the pricing is slightly higher than Visio, but it's worth it."

"I pay $95 a year for it. It seems like a reasonable price."

"Lucidchart's pricing model is not excessive, as compared to similar products. It is pretty much in line with everyone else."

"There is a nominal charge for the paid version of the product. They have a free version available and from what I could see, there was not much difference between it and the pro version."

"The pricing and licensing are fine, though I wish they didn't require you to buy the licenses in batches of five."

"The price and licensing are good."

"Pricing comes in at about $100 for a year's subscription, which is very reasonable if this is a tool that you will use more than once."

"The pricing is very competitive. It is more cost-effective than some competing products, such as Visio."

More Lucidchart pricing and cost advice

"There are some cheaper as well as free solutions."

"There is a licensing fee, but it is fairly priced."

"I haven't looked at the prices lately. We have an older copy, and it was a couple of hundred dollars for this software. That's a huge expense."

"Cloud-based tools are always cheaper since they are subscription-based. I use the on-premises version of Visio hence the price is quite expensive. However, I believe that the cloud version of Visio may not be as expensive as the on-premises version."

"You have to purchase a license to use the solution."

"Visio is about a $180 dollars to purchase. It is a one-time licensing fee."

"It is a free solution for us. It is integrated with our pack. We are trying to use the solutions that we already have."

"The licensing process is actually a breeze. Simply buy the license and download it from Microsoft, enter the license key in Visio to activate the software, and you're done."

More Visio pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

15%

Government

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

LucidChart vs LucidSpark for brainstorming sessions over Zoom

Hi @Krista Thompson - Yes, LucidSpark is a much more nimble and, in some ways, user-friendly tool than LucidChart. LucidSpark is designed to do a better job managing multiple users participating ...

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Do you recommend Lucidchart?

I definitely recommend Lucidchart. I feel it is one of the top visual collaboration platforms that’s available on the market. Out of all the solutions I have tried, it is by far the best for diagra...

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How easy is it to migrate process flow charts (modeled using tools like Visio) into Bizagi?

I have been using Bizagi with a major project for a state government agency for about four years now. It is pretty straightforward to load in files that are BPMN 2.0 compliant. The option to load V...

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What do you like most about Visio?

The diagrams Visio creates are quite impressive in the sense that we can cooperate with more colleagues in one task and see the flow of the process.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Visio?

One of the main problems with Visio is its licensing options and associated issues, which lead to discussions about the price with a Microsoft representative. If asked to rate the price, I would gi...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Visual Paradigm vs Lucidchart

Compared 9% of the time

erwin Data Modeler by Quest vs Lucidchart

Compared 8% of the time

Bizagi vs Lucidchart

Compared 8% of the time

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Bizagi vs Visio

Compared 21% of the time

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect vs Visio

Compared 12% of the time

Visual Paradigm vs Visio

Compared 9% of the time

SAP Signavio Process Manager vs Visio

Compared 8% of the time

Camunda vs Visio

Compared 6% of the time

More Visio Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Lucidchart

May 2025

Download Lucidchart product report

Buyer's Guide

Visio

April 2025

Download Visio product report

Also Known As

No data available

Microsoft Visio

Overview

Our online diagram application makes it easy to sketch and share professional flowchart diagrams. From brainstorming to project management, we support all of your communication needs. That’s why millions of users choose Lucidchart.

Lucid Software

Visio is an innovative collaborative solution that enables users to quickly visualize data-connected business process flows with a host of integrated intuitive features that bring the power of Microsoft 365 to Visio. Visio allows users to easily create professional diagrams, graphs, and other visual data, easily anywhere, anytime, and with anyone. Users are able to confidently and easily transform data into creative powerful visuals. Visio provides dozens of easy-to-use templates along with thousands of customizable colorful shapes that bring a user's best ideas to life. Visio is available for all Microsoft 365 commercial users and is available on desktop and Web applications.

Visio Features

Visio can easily create visual data for today’s business needs. Some of its most useful visual data include:

Flowcharts: Users can easily bring business concepts to fruition with Visio’s robust flowchart features. Visio provides a huge library of shapes, stencils, and templates to transform numbers and data into impactful, easy-to-understand business stories.
Organizational charts: Visio makes it easy to design articulate org charts to better visualize team, reporting, and hierarchy structures. Users are then able to seamlessly share the charts with stakeholders, teams, and employees.
Network diagrams: Users are able to creatively display how a system design processes function and visually illustrate how devices and networks interact with each other using a variety of network shapes, templates, and connector tools.
Brainstorming: Visio makes brainstorming simple and actionable with a wide range of templates designed specifically for interpreting problems and mapping out solutions, including fishbone and Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) diagrams.
Floor plans: Users can design ergonomic workspaces, retail store layouts, new homes, and more with accurate, scalable templates and tools to help them better visualize function, flow, and overall aesthetic appeal.
Accessible: Visio is able to integrate with a wide variety of accessibility tools, such as Narrator, Accessibility Checker, and high-contrast support, to ensure Visio diagrams are available to your entire team.

Reviews from Real Users

“Visio has improved my workflow by making it easy to create charts, diagrams, and essential illustrations to use in my client reports and proposals. It has saved me a lot of time I would otherwise spend creating visuals for clients manually.” - Michael B., Principal Consultant at Lexington Consulting

“I use it for diagramming networks, racks, data centers, data flow applications, etc. It is a useful tool to map data flows, network objects, and computer science technology and to show to clients. It does what I need it to do. It's a tool I've used the longest, so I know it the best, and that's probably the claim to fame.” - Greg S., Director of Solution Architecture at Winslow Technology Group

“We use Visio for architecture modeling. We also use it to facilitate communication with other people. The feature I like most about Visio is that it acts as a facilitator of communication, as it displays information in a way that's easier to understand.” - Guy M., IT/Business Architect at a financial services firm

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Google, Salesforce, Adobe, Whirlpool, Uber, Wal Mart, Pearson, Twitch, Riot Games, Western Union, Trimble, Starbucks

Thomas College, Hamburg Port Authority, Portigon AG, Conseil G_n_ral du d_partement des Hautes-Alpes, AAA Auto a. s., Commonwealth Financial Network, ICA, Abu Dhabi National Energy Company

Buyer's Guide

Lucidchart vs. Visio

April 2025

Free Report: Lucidchart vs. Visio

Find out what your peers are saying about Lucidchart vs. Visio and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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