Hi Alex thanks for posting. Although it is necessary for someone to have a Lucidchart account before you can add them as a collaborator on a document an alternative would be to publish the document instead. This allows anyone to view and interact with your document even if they don't have a Lucidchart account (although they would need an account to edit or comment on the document.) Please check out our Publish Your Document article for more information about this and feel free to let me know if you have any questions. 

Regarding your second question- commenting is a feature that is only available to users on Team and Enterprise level accounts. However a user with a free Lucid account may be able to make other changes to the document if they have edit access. This depends on the content of the document. If someone from a higher level account shares a document that they used paid features on with a free account the free user will automatically be a view-only collaborator since they don’t have access to those paid features. For more information about the features available to free users and other account types please see our Account Types article. I apologize for any trouble this might cause you. 

@emma d I've published my document and the team still can't edit without requesting access. I've looked through the choices and I am able to publish as a URL PDF etc. but there isn't a place where I can identify what type of access they are allowed - I'm using this collaboratively so it defeats the purpose if they can't edit the doc.

I agree - requiring an account for collaborators is counterproductive.

Hi Shana thanks for following up on this thread. If your collaborators need to edit the document you will need to share it with them rather than publishing it. Think of publishing as a more interactive version of exporting your document- unlike a static JPEG or PNG image file a published document allows any to zoom in and out and click on interactive elements within the diagram.

This is different from sharing your diagram via email or shared link which requires the user to have a Lucid account and allows you to specify the type of access they need (view-only comment edit or edit and share.) For more information about sharing please review this article from our Help Centre. 

This doesn't directly relate to your question as this feature is not currently available for Lucidchart but as a side note- you may be interested in the Anonymous Guests feature in our newest visual collaboration tool Lucidspark. Lucidspark is a virtual whiteboard designed for collaboration and Anonymous Guests can collaborate on a Lucidspark board without needing a Lucid account. You can read more about this feature here.

Hi @emma d I have stumbled upon this older conversation when searching for the solution to my need. For anyone working primarily with external customers not the internal users of their own organization there is no collaboration possible and it is indeed fairly frustrating. Please mind that customer's organization may not be a Lucid customer at all and I can't force them to become a Lucichart customer. Yet the need to receive the feedback from my customers in a form of comments is vital for the value I am getting from the tool. With the current pricing model of Lucidchart my type of collaboration is not possible.

Why not to sell sort of Day Passes which would enable certain functionalities for a limited period of time and which the owner of the diagram could purchase for their customer?

PS: Posting from my private free account as my company's account seems to have the forum comments disabled.

Hi Peter thanks for your comment. I apologize for any frustration caused by this. Unfortunately we don't have any features similar to what you described in Lucidchart-- although we do have an Anonymous Guest feature in Lucidspark which allows a user to collaborate on your Lucidspark board without needing to sign into a Lucid account. If this is something you would like to see in Lucidchart would you mind adding your thoughts to the product feedback area of the community? This is the most direct way to promote a change you would like to see as this feedback goes directly to our product development team. 

You may already be aware of this but just in case- one thing to note is that it is not necessary for a collaborator to actually purchase a Lucidchart subscription in order to comment on a shared document. If you share a document with a user on a free account and you grant that user comment-only access to the document they can reply to any comments you leave (although they cannot initiate a new comment). Feel free to let me know if you have any questions about this. 

I have published my document and I have shared it with colleagues to show my work.  Some can open without any issues and others are getting a pop up box about upgrading.  Why is this.  I can't seem to get answers

Hi Stacey thanks for continuing this thread. I've address your question in full in your other post here!