LucidpressReviews of lucidpress.com

User story: I have been a paid Lucidpress user since 2019. I use it to publish a print magazine that averages about 50 pages each issue, and is published quarterly. I am the sole user of Lucidpress on my team and I use it to lay out and render PDFs of our magazine that are handed off to the printer. Summary: Lucidpress is great for beginners but the product is not very well supported and unless your documents are very short and simple, you will find it a bear to work with very quickly. Bugs are common and support is friendly and responsive in email but bugs never seem to get fixed. With the storage fees I have to pay, I could get iDesign for $40 more and not have to deal with being a Lucidpress beta-tester on the side. In detail: I didn't know what I was doing when I started so Ludidpress was useful at first. InDesign and other tools would've taken much longer to learn and Lucidpress allowed me to get up and running quickly. But even during my first week I quickly encountered limitations that make my projects difficult, and over time I have had to adopt an entire suite of workarounds in order to get the job done. Performance is an issue right off the bat. If your document contains large photos, and is over 10 pages, you will be waiting sometimes for minutes for the app to respond. I contacted support and the solution I must use is to create a new document for each article in my magazine and then copy those pages into a master document that I only use to combine them all and export out of. None of the other workarounds like running incognito, or even a faster computer, seemed to work. Then there are the countless issues and bugs that the support team can't be bothered to reproduce, so they ask you for complete steps, screenshots/recordings, sample documents, etc... Even for issues that are 100% reproducible in seconds. This is clearly a triage step to weed out complaints that people don't care enough or are too busy to do their work for them to reproduce. Frankly I am tired of being a Lucid tester on top of all my other jobs. Even after I do all that work to prove to them that the bug exists, they never get fixed. So not only do they ask you for your valuable time to help them test their software, but then they waste that time by choosing not to fix the bugs you help them identify. Examples of these bugs include randomly dropped images on export, a ton of text formatting issues, the random introduction or deletion of characters in large blocks of text that take proofreaders hours to find, and undocumented constraints like resizing large uploaded photos automatically without notifying the user so you have to figure it out yourself, and then break them up into multiple pieces and stitch them back together in your document. The stuff I've learned to do and now do as a matter of practice in order to get the job done is actually ridiculous when I think about it. Oh, by the way, these issues have all been reported, some of them over a year ago, and none of them have been fixed. Recommendation: I have not used Ludidchart or any of their other products, but this seems to be a company that is finding it's way by pivoting every 6 months to something else, and as a result is struggling to support existing customers who have invested in their previous larks. If you need to quickly create a 1-3 page document you probably won't have much trouble with Lucidpress. I get the impression that I am in the top tier of their users in terms of what I'm trying to do with the product, so I am just accepting that I am going to be breaking stuff and pay a tax for pushing the limits of the software. But as soon as I am able to spend time learning InDesign, I am going to happily jump ship before they abandon me first. As a result I will get a whole bunch of time back, and save myself the stress and anxiety created by not knowing what random error or anomaly Lucidpress is going to inject into my already stressful process.

The program was easy to use and helpful. However I canceled my free trial, before it ended, and now they say they are going to charge me. I feel a bit scammed.

The company tells itself that it is making money off companies who use their services but really they promise the world lure in bottom level admins under intense pressure to get something done on nothing with nothing then in the last hour take away all the controls and don't let them do anything with it. So really its the bottom level admins in a panic who end up paying because they know their boss won't approve the purchase.

Crashed 80% of time I used it

Not very effective.

Too difficult to edit, document margins shift too easily and it is nearly impossible to get it aligned. have to log in twice to be able to open document, once to get to it and once to open it.

I use this to e-mail monthly newsletters...It is easy to make the newsletters but a huge pain to get them out and share..