13 Best Free Lucidchart Alternatives 2023

Lucidchart is a web-based intelligent diagramming tool that lets you produce detailed visuals from scratch or from data, templates, or images.

It’s also the best collaboration app for teams that are ready to bring their visual workspace to the cloud. With this tool, you have yourself a solution for your visual communication and cross-platform collaboration needs.

Lucidchart comes with multiple integrations including Google Workspace, Asana, Slack, and Atlassian to help you streamline your processes.

In a nutshell, this software plays a crucial role in the way you present your concepts, how you communicate, and how your teams collaborate.

However, Lucidchart has limitations in some areas. It doesn’t have any desktop apps to use. Its templates are also limiting users from the legal, education, and healthcare industries from getting creative.

So if you need software that meets your specific requirements, check out these Lucidchart alternatives we’re rounded up for you.

Keep reading.

Best Lucidchart Alternatives

1. Draw.io

Draw.io is an excellent browser-hosted diagramming tool to use online or offline. It enables you to create diagrams and charts from its intuitive, drag and drop interface and save them to Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox.

It comes with plenty of pre-made templates, multiple import/export formats, and a library of shapes to choose from. You can access its offline option from the Chrome desktop app to create your UML diagrams, flow charts, ER models, org charts, network diagrams. and more.

Using Draw.io, you can edit your diagrams simultaneously and still stay in sync. You and your team members can share diagrams and feedback through comments. The search functions offer a fast search experience so you can work on projects faster.

Draw.io works well for small teams that don’t occasionally create visuals, unlike Lucidchart, which is designed for both beginners and pros.

The software integrates with popular tools like OneDrive, JIRA Server/Cloud, GitHub, Chrome, Confluence Server/Cloud, Dropbox, and more. It’s available on Chrome, Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems.

What makes Draw.io stand out as Lucidchart’s best alternative is its being free and open source. It also has a desktop app that lets you work offline. You also don’t need to have an account to use Draw.io. Simply select your preferred storage option (Dropbox or OneDrive) and start creating right away.

Draw.io is free software.

2. Cacoo

Cacoo is web-based diagramming software for intuitive use. It is equipped with hundreds of templates for product design and marketing development.

Its intuitive user interface is very inviting, and you can put your creativity into use right away. With a library of templates and shapes, you have everything needed to produce great visuals including flowcharts, wireframes, and network diagrams.

Cacoo also allows you to import images and screenshots into your projects. Its ease of use is quite remarkable. If you’re a beginner or non-tech savvy, this is your tool.

This software offers a number of integrations with apps like Adobe Creative Cloud, Google Drive, Google Docs, Confluence, AWS, Dropbox, Slack, Visio, and Box to improve your workflows. When you need to export your files, it makes it easy to send them in SVG, PDF, or PowerPoint formats. You can also embed them in web pages or wikis.

As a comprehensive charting software, you’ll have no difficulty editing, tracking changes, or collaborating on your flowcharts. To make collaboration simple and straightforward, all you need is to embed and share links with teams and other stakeholders.

Cacoo has the best groupware functionality and cloud connectivity. Your shared project folders help you organize team assets and store your work in Cacoo. It also provides activity notifications that help monitor the status of all projects.

While Lucidchart’s free plan offers limited features, Cacoo allows you access to unlimited sheets, email support, unlimited users, and a shared folder.

Cacoo offers a free pricing plan, a $5 monthly plan, and an Enterprise Plan available on quote.

3. Creately

Creately lets you deliver professional diagrams to visualize your concepts and ideas at a reasonable budget.

It offers professional templates and features that turn your creations into visually appealing, winning projects.

Creately is a multiplatform tool for flowchart collaboration. With its live video conferencing option, you can work seamlessly with your teams to get projects done within the deadlines.

The templates make work easier, helping you immerse your ideas into beautiful, detailed diagrams. Its drawing platform is neat, allowing you to produce flowcharts quickly with the automation feature. Its templates are diverse and meant for different topics and industries.

The interface is also intuitive and clutter-free, making the design process pretty quick, especially with the drag and drop function. You also have a powerful contextual toolbar with shape suggestions to use while drawing. This is something that Lucidchart doesn’t have.

Comparatively, Creately has more powerful real-time collaboration tools which are built into its canvas for convenient commenting and tracking of project changes.

Also, Creately has more than 50 diagram types, thousands of libraries and examples, and supports multiple languages. It also offers a mobile and desktop app and allows you to try it online before deciding on the paid version.

Pricing plans for Creately include a free plan, Personal Plan at $4/month, a Team Plan at $4.75/user/month, and a Custom Plan available upon consultation.

4. Visme

Visme is an all-inclusive online design platform offering a wide selection of diagramming options. You can use Visme independently or as part of a bigger project.

Visme has everything your team needs to create visual content. And the sign-up is completely free.

Start creating your flowcharts and diagrams with Visme’s intuitive flowchart builder. It offers a big library of templates that you can customize with your brand assets and colors.

Its dashboard gives you endless options for visual content. All you have to do is let your imagination run wild and get your creativity going.

The templates, content blocks, and built-in elements like icons, photos, illustrations, and shapes are vast, allowing you to unleash the creativity in you.

Include diagrams in your documents, reports, infographics, and presentations from one central place with Visme. You’re allowed to import or save your creations to Google Drive, Dropbox, and One Drive. It integrates with other apps to help you work seamlessly with teams.

Visme is designed for both small and large teams, including startups, bloggers, students, educators, content creators, and more. Besides, Visme allows you to include your documents, infographics, reports, and presentations right on its platform, something you may not be able to do with Lucidchart.

Its collaboration features give you and your teams an easy time diagramming, sharing, and commenting using post-it style popups and annotation features.

It makes it easy to edit, share, resolve issues, and comment on team projects by allowing you to set the edit, view, and comment permissions.

If you want to stay on brand when working on your visual content and diagrams, Visme has a Brand Kit that will help you store your company assets including templates, logo, fonts, and colors.

The best part is that Visme has a very low learning curve. Anyone, with or without skills, will find it easy to get started on creating projects.

For teams that need to stay on brand when creating diagrams or any type of visual content, the Brand Kit is ready to help with storing your company colors, fonts, and templates.

Visme is free to use, but if you want to get the most out of it, you subscribe to its Business Plan at $29/month. It also has a pricing plan for large teams and Enterprise Plan available on quote.

Additional plans are available for students, educators, and nonprofits. Lucky for nonprofits because they get to enjoy a 25% discount.

5. Miro

Miro is an outstanding online collaboration software for flowcharts. It lets you collaborate on your diagrams, including whiteboards and flowcharts.

Miro puts a web whiteboard at your disposal and an infinitely zoomable canvas with multiple diagramming options such as workflow, data, and process flowcharts. It has a range of beautiful templates in its pre-built library too.

It enables you to brainstorm ideas, make strategies, map complex processes, engage your remote meetings, and much more. If you have agile and virtual teams, Miro will fit in well with your workflow.

It gives you access to a robust set of tools for sprint planning, mapping customer journeys, wireframing, and making roadmaps. It comes with vast pre-designed templates and smart frameworks to get your teams up to speed with collaboration tasks and responsibilities.

Miro is the best platform for teams to unravel their creativity by thinking outside the box with its infinite canvas, smart drawing, sticky notes, and embedded videos, among others.

This app integrates well with 70 apps (way much more than LucidChart) including Sketch, Zapier, Zendexk. JIRA, Slack. GitHub, and cloud storage options such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box so you can merge them with your workflows.

These are just a few of the many integrations Miro offers which include icons from Iconfinder Cisco Network Topology, wireframes, documents, file storage, task trackers, design tools, surveys, and CRMs.

All these integrations are meant to help you optimize other aspects of your products. You also access more customized integrations such as API, SDKs, plugins, and iframe.

It supports iOS, Android for seamless access when you and your team want to review your boards, capture ideas, share feedback, and make digital sticky notes on the go.

This app takes your collaboration to the next level by making sure everyone on board is on the same page whether your team is fully remote, collocated, or distributed.

The mouseover collaboration ensures your team concurrently works on one task knowing what the other person is working on and who they are. Collaborators will be able to track and engage with other members on the board. You also have the option of implementing asynchronous teamwork on the whiteboard.

With its robust design toolkit, you will work efficiently without much effort. Templates are designed for different projects including empathy maps, customer journeys, and service design blueprints. You can either customize these templates or start from scratch using the smart drawing mode, mind mapping tools, or digital sticky notes.

Miro offers enterprise-grade security to keep your files, work, and privacy safe and under control. It does this by providing advanced security including SSL encryption, domain filtering, SSL, and audit log. It is also SOC-2, GDPR, and PCI compliant.

Its freemium plan offers three editable boards to start you off. The paid pricing plans include a Team Plan at $10/member/month, a Business Plan at $16/member/month, a Consultant Plan at $15/member/month, and an Enterprise Plan offered on a quote.

6. Coggle

Coggle is a mind mapping and flowchart tool that offers you excellent visuals of your mind mapping with how it creates branches as you brainstorm.

The tool allows you to share your flowcharts or mind maps or invite your team members to collaborate on tasks. With real-time collaboration, you’ll share your projects and make any changes needed. The shared projects appear instantly in everyone’s browser.

If you’re looking for the simplicity that Lucidchart may not offer, you’ll have it in Coggle. This software offers surreal simplicity, making your designing process very smooth.

It has a gallery of templates that save you time to complete your project. Its collaboration experience is great too, ensuring that you and your team stay in the loop to work efficiently.

Features like multiple start points, more than 1600 beautiful icons, and auto arrange branches will offer you the customization you need for your projects. Integrate Coggle with Google Drive to secure your data.

Enjoy other unique features of Coggle including reporting and statistics, search/filter, version control, drag and drop interface, commenting/notes, unlimited image uploads, floating images and texts, and more.

Coggle has a free version and two other pricing plans including the Awesome Plan at $5/month and Organizational Plan at $8/month per user, and Enterprise Plan at a quote.

7. MindMup

MindMup is a web-based software that allows you to store your mind maps in the cloud. Your projects will be accessible anytime from any device. It comes with built-in keyboard shortcuts to help you write down your ideas for later use.

MindMup is great for teamwork and individual brainstorming. It gives you the option of publishing and sharing your maps online or converting the maps to other formats like PowerPoint and PDF.

As an economical diagramming tool, MindMup helps to accelerate your process with keyboard shortcuts. This will take you a shorter time to finish your projects, saving you plenty of time to handle other tasks.

Some of its key features include data import/export, presentation tools, brainstorming, and more. Its interface is frictionless, allowing you to focus. It also offers you tutorials with vast resources on how to print maps, resize nodes, use shortcuts, publish using its atlas, and carry out other functions.

What makes it better than Lucidchart is its user voice forum which allows you to voice your suggestions on what features or functionalities you’d want to be added to the tool to make your work easier.

MindMup offers a Free Plan and two other pricing plans including a Personal Gold Plan at $2.99/month and Organizational Gold Plan at $100/year.

8. MindMeister

MindMeister is another diagramming software that is likable for its intuitive interface. This tool makes the process of creating mind maps fun and exciting. It provides you with a customizable feature to design diagrams the way you want.

MindMeister is also great for team collaboration. Key features of MindMeister include web-based mind mapping with 24/7 backup, project prioritization, team collaboration, setting project deadlines, project management, collaboration tools, integrated time stamps, building tools for presentations, business intelligence, and more.

When it comes to pricing, Lucidchart bills on per user basis while MindMeister bills on a monthly basis regardless of whether personal, pro, or business plan. MindMeister is more affordable as teams can use an account without paying per user.

Also, MindMeister has various layouts to switch from including the org chart layout and classical mind map layout.

MindMeister’s Basic Plan is free. Other pricing plans include a Personal Plan at $2.49/month, a Pro Plan at $4.19/month, and a Business Plan at $6.29/month.

9. yEd

yEd is a free desktop application that helps you create pro-like diagrams at no cost. First, its interface is clutter-free, with plenty of tools to set you off to a good start.

It is a graph editor to use for creating organization charts, graphs, swimlane diagrams, mind maps, family trees, and so much more using its automatic layout algorithms.

You can create your diagrams from scratch or import your own data for analysis. It has automatic layout algorithms that let you organize large data sets with just one click.

With its automatic layout, you are assured of visually appealing diagrams at all times. Compared to Lucidchart, yEd has a more versatile collection of automatic layout algorithms, giving you plenty of options to explore.

This feature makes it easy to arrange your diagram elements. With the interactive web viewer, you’ll navigate comfortably, zoom in and out, and print your diagrams from the web.

The handy group nodes will help you take charge of large data sets. yEd also features BPMN symbols you can use for your business process programs.

Another top feature that makes it a top bet for incompatibility issues is its support for multiple file formats such as GEDCOM, GIF, GML, PNG, JPG, and more.

yEd is a free platform that works well on Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems.

10. Figma

Figma is an excellent app with a user-friendly interface and a low learning curve. It makes collaboration a breeze by providing team libraries, making it easy for every team member to access files and work on them fast. It’s easy to sort files in these libraries for even distribution of projects across the team.

Figma lets you explore ideas with your teams through sticky notes and its workshop in FigJam (online whiteboard) where you can brainstorm together. Here you can present, share and gather feedback on various prototypes with dynamic overlays and smart animations.

Figma has scalable and reusable elements to help you speed up work. This tool also comes with a set of grids, colors, professional tools, and very impressive effects. It supports iOS, macOS, Windows, and Android operating systems.

It offers live previews for mobile where you can mirror your designs in real-time. You’d want to use Figma in place of Lucidchart because of this.

Figma offers a free pricing plan, a Professional Plan at $12/editor/month, and an Organization Plan at $45/editor/month.

11. Moqups

Moqups makes it easy for you to communicate with your teams on mockups, prototypes, wireframes, and diagrams, making it a better alternative to Lucidchart. You and your teams will easily conceptualize and visualize your projects by sharing refined mockups.

This tool allows you to integrate your prototypes, diagrams, mockups, and wireframes with Dropbox, Slack, Google Drive, and other software with ease, unlike its competitor.

This will ensure a simplified experience for all. Its tools are pretty flexible and will help you enjoy seamless workflows since you can adjust your tools to fit your schedules.

Moqups also has an incomparable selection of fonts and styling options. What’s more, its fonts are integrated with Google fonts, giving you unmatched variety. Its design tools are well curated too.

Moqups supports the web, so you can use it anywhere, on any device. It has a free plan and two more pricing plans including a Solo Plan at $22/month, Team Plan at $32/month, and Unlimited Plan at $89./month

12. XMind

XMind is a mind mapping software and it’s really good at it. It has enough features to ignite your thoughts without struggling to remember them. It allows you to organize your thoughts and ideas to create a productive workflow.

With features like org charts, matrix, fishbone chart, and timeline, you’ll be able to visually arrange your ideas and concepts in much more appealing ways to make your data evident.

XMind has an edge over Lucidchart when it comes to mind mapping features. It is a full-featured app for mind mapping offering multiple ways of capturing your thoughts. It also lets you structure your thoughts in a way that they’ll stay organized.

This software supports various modern formats to enable you to export your ideas flexibly and effortlessly. It also supports multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux. This lets you distribute projects seamlessly across platforms, allowing for more efficient workflows and enhanced productivity.

XMind has a free version and other paid pricing plans including the XMind Zen & Mobile Pro Plan at $39.99/six months and the XMind 8 Pro Plan at $129/year.

13. FreeMind

FreeMind is a free, open-source, and cross-platform mind mapping tool for creating structured diagrams. It works well on Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems.

Freemind offers quick keyboard shortcuts to help you visualize your concepts, ideas, internet search, brainstorming, projects, and other functionalities that leverage the benefits that come with a structured view.

It is built for various industries such as business, government, education, and more – with teams that collaborate in generating ideas, task management, project tracking, and presentation making during mind mapping.

It is a simple tool but with a robust feature set including file and web hyperlinks for nodes, color formatting options, find a facility, built-in icons, graphical links connecting nodes, and folding branches.

It also offers fast one-click navigation, smart copy & paste, undo, smart drag & drop, and other impressive features.

You can export your maps to HTML with FreeMind. It has the flexibility you need to organize your ideas on one page while they link to each other and the key picture.

You can also edit XML/HTML documents, mind maps, and directory trees with just a click, follow link, and fold & unfold operations for fast navigation. This gives it an edge over Lucidchart.

FreeMind also gives you a project workplace that includes executables, sources of information, links to vital files and data.

Its intuitive drag and drop feature and versioning capability will improve your note-taking and allow you to visualize your projects and processes hassle-free. You also have multiple formats like HTML, PDF, and JPEG to export your project to.

For a free tool, this is pretty impressive.

Conclusion

FreeMind is our best pick. Not only is FreeMind free, but it also packs plenty of features to turn you into a professional in an instant.

It offers quick one-click navigations, smart drag & drop, keyboard shortcuts, and copy & paste to make every process effortless.

Once you are done creating your structured diagrams, you can visualize them easily before exporting them to HTML and other formats for effective distribution.

This app provides you with a project workplace full of information sources, executables, data, and links to vital files. It is the ideal software to use as a Lucidchart alternative.