If you believe numbers have special meanings, you might know that 23 is associated with progress, innovation, and collaboration. Maybe that’s why 2023 was a banner year for Lucid—or maybe our product roadmap and customer feedback led us in the right direction.

We spent the past year ushering in the next generation of visual collaboration with powerful new capabilities focused on AI, hybrid work, and helping you build the future by adapting to the changing competitive landscape.

As you start brainstorming, planning, and building new initiatives for 2024, take a look back at Lucid’s best of 2023.

Introducing the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite

We kicked off the year with a big launch: the Lucid Suite. This Enterprise offering combines Lucidspark for virtual whiteboarding and Lucidchart for intelligent diagramming. The result: Entire orgs can collaborate visually at every stage of their workflow.

To further expand the power of the Lucid Suite, we added new Lucid capabilities to make collaboration seamless, connected, and engaging. They include:

Universal canvas

With universal canvas, your team can move seamlessly between Lucidspark and Lucidchart and use the most appropriate feature sets for each use case. This capability helps eliminate silos while creating a truly connected Lucid experience.

Team Spaces

Effective hybrid collaboration requires a virtual home base for centralizing communication and resources. Lucid’s Team Spaces allows you to go beyond messaging apps and shared drives with a virtual—and visual—space for not only sharing and organizing resources but also for launching into work within docs and apps linked from your shared workspace.

Visual Activities

A common challenge for teams working and meeting virtually is keeping everyone engaged and getting input from the entire group. The solution is Visual Activities.

Visual Activities can be used in Lucidspark, Lucidchart, and Team Spaces as icebreakers, decision-making tools, or simply as a fun way to check in with individual team members and gauge group sentiment.

The year of AI

At Lucid, we’ve been incorporating intelligence into our platform for over a decade, so it was a no-brainer to continue the momentum with AI. Our new AI features were designed to help you do more by automating busywork and keeping your focus on creative, high-impact work. Features include:

Collaborative AI

Use an AI prompt in Lucidspark to generate, sort, and summarize ideas. As its name suggests, Collaborative AI was designed to help your entire team get inspired, explore divergent ideas, and uncover more innovative solutions faster.

Lucid Custom GPT

Available to ChatGPT+ users, our Lucid Custom GPT allows you to create prompts for auto-generating diagrams in Lucidchart that your team can edit or keep building upon.

AI Prompt Flow

The AI Prompt Flow extension allows you to visually interact with large language models (LLMs) without leaving the Lucidchart canvas. Enter your API key and start experimenting with different models, prompts, and inputs. All iterations are saved in your Lucidchart document.

FedRAMP authorization

In addition to expanding Lucid’s features and functionality, we also expanded access for public sector teams by becoming FedRAMP® Authorized at the Moderate impact level.

The Lucid FedRAMP environment enables government agencies and contractors with heightened security needs to collaborate with confidence that Lucid GovSuite:

• Complies with local and federal regulations such as NIST CSF, NIST SP 800-171, FIPS 140-2, and DFARS 252.204-7012
• Is U.S.-based and managed on the most secure AWS GovCloud infrastructure
• Offers best-in-class migration and implementation services that enable agencies to realize value quickly

Lucid integrations

If we hadn’t already called 2023 the year of AI, we’d call it the year of integrations. That’s because we launched the Lucid integrations marketplace, where you can browse and sort more than 100 connected apps by function, team, or Lucid product.

We also launched the Lucid developer platform, enabling developers to see and build new possibilities for visual collaboration with their own custom apps and workflows.

Throughout the year, we added 33 new Lucid-built integrations to the marketplace, including Confluence Cloud Embedded Links and Lucid + Microsoft Office. 

But wait, there’s more! We also added 14 new partner-built integrations, including Slack Workflow Steps for Lucid.

Lucidchart updates

We could dedicate a whole blog post to Lucidchart updates, but here are some quick highlights:

Diagram keys

With diagram keys, you can clarify the meaning of shapes and colors in your Lucidchart documents. Find the diagram key shape within the standard shape library or auto-generate a diagram key by selecting the link under "Shapes in use" after building your diagram.

Org chart enhancements

Our org chart capabilities were already functioning well above the paygrade of a typical diagramming platform, but we gave them a promotion anyway. You can now change shapes right from the canvas, star shape libraries to make them favorites, and collapse tiles to make staffing changes more visible.

Lucidspark updates

Same story: 2023 was a big year for new capabilities in Lucidspark. Here’s a brief summary:

More Collaborator Colors and colors for sticky notes

You now have 33 options for Collaborator Colors and sticky note colors. Add a permanent preferred collaborator color to your user profile and let your true color shine through.

Dynamic Table

Formerly called Dynamic Matrix, our new Dynamic Table gives you even more power to organize ideas so you can start planning and take action faster. It is now 2x2, has global controls for text and colors, and makes it easier to add sticky notes.

Offline mode

Now, you don’t need Wi-Fi to keep adding to your Lucidspark board. With offline mode, you simply open your document while you’re still online, make changes offline, and then keep your browser open until you go online again.

Show authors

Lucid is all about making information and insights visible. In keeping with that objective, we added the option to show authors and editors of sticky notes in Lucidchart, Lucidspark, and Team Spaces. That way, you can easily see the collaborator behind the idea.

Awards and customer impact

Of course, we knew that Lucid was on a streak in 2023, but it seems the business and tech communities knew it, too.

For the fourth consecutive year, Lucid was ranked in the annual Forbes Cloud 100 list of the world’s best private cloud computing companies. We were also named one of G2’s top 100 Best Global Software Companies. Meanwhile, Lucidchart was ranked as the 13th most-used business application in the world by Okta’s 2023 Businesses at Work Report.

Not only is Lucid the most used visual collaboration platform, but it continues to provide significant value for its 70+ million users around the world. In 2023, we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ study to explore the potential ROI that enterprises can realize from using the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite.

Through six customer interviews and data aggregation over a three-year period, the study concluded that the Lucid Suite offered these benefits:

• 410% return on investment
• $9.7M net present value
• 692,000 hours saved

More to come

Tune in next year for Lucid’s best of 2024. Numerologists say 24 brings the power of possibility, harmony, and true infinite potential.