Even as a common dirty pirate; I donated to all of those.
(former employee)
(disclaimer: employee of Lucid Software)
Last time I used it, before switching to draw.io, it became slow to the point of being unusable once you had a few pages in a document. And I was making an animation where each page showed the next step in a process, so there were a lot of pages.
This was a couple of years ago, so things may have changed since.
My diagrams may have a bunch of elements on them, but I don't think I use any advanced features (irrespective of whether it's Visio, LucidChart or draw.io). From that perspective, these isn't much difference between any of these programs, so there's just no reason to use a paid product.
Yes, Lucidchart's performance has improved in the past couple years. And we now have resources dedicated to improving performance.
> From that perspective, these isn't much difference between any of these programs, so there's just no reason to use a paid product.
That's fair. I think Lucidchart's main advantage is more advanced functionality. And if you don't need that functionality, why pay for it?
Things I liked were that I could have a quick collaborative diagram with a friend for some bs project and not pay for it, and I could have a reasonable SAAS offering for a commercial team that wasn't expensive enough I got pushback. It was always a bit slow, and sometime quirky about connection placements but the diagrams were acceptable quality. Early on it was a lot less polished but you could make it work. And it was never a tool I'd use every day or realistically even every month, so it needed to be fairly low cost but I was happy to pay for when I did need it.
Now it is effectively impractical without a subscription so I can't use it for the former case. And the team offering are more enterprise-y and about double the price without adding any functionality I care about, so I tend not to do that either.
At some point I moved companies and didn't suggest a new team subscription, where previously I was usually the advocate for it. And the upsell messages and limitations of the free tier led me to find draw.io, which meets my needs for one-offs and little side projects as well as Lucid Chart ever did.
I'd say functionally they are mostly on par currently for my usages ... but that's the crux of your problem as a 10/month/head subscription.
Oh, and fwiw I use the offline version of draw.io most of the time, it's very responsive and also I like to work sometimes offline.
draw.io is like the In-N-Out of charting software. The menu is short, but you know exactly what you're getting each time and the price is right. It may not be the best at everything, but I'm almost never disappointed.
Lucidchart feels like that neighborhood restaurant that has a six page menu that tries to be everything to everyone. It feels like they should have anything I desire, but they're spread so thin across so many options that they can never really perfect any of the individual entrees. I can usually find something in Lucidchart that looks like it would solve my problem, but it always feels half-finished. I waste hours each month learning to work around the quirks and limitations of the different components. I always leave slightly dissatisfied that Lucidchart almost did what I needed, but due to the limitations of the component I would have been better off just drawing a simple chart in draw.io or even in Sketch.
For example: The Lucidchart iPad app sounds like a dream come true. I would love to make charts on the go with a great iPad interface that properly utilizes the Apple Pencil. However, every time I use Lucidchart on iPad I spend all my time accidentally moving the page when I wanted to drag the corner of box, failing to select text for editing, switching between fingers and Pencil, and so on. I end up walking back to a computer to finish the chart. I want to believe the Lucidchart iPad app would be great, but I always spend so much time fighting it that I'd be better off sitting down with draw.io and making a basic chart in 10 minutes.