Marq (formerly Lucidpress) compared: brand templates and layouts in the browser

Marq was called Lucidpress until July 2022. According to the vendor, Marq is designed so that everyone in an organisation can create content without breaking brand guidelines. There are no version numbers: Marq is a web app that, according to the terms of service, receives updates continuously.

The reference edition in this comparison is the Pro plan on the annual subscription billed yearly. According to the pricing page, Pro is intended for one user and includes, among other things, 2 GB storage, unlimited projects, the premium template library, brand assets, custom fonts and paragraph styles, InDesign import, profile smart fields, export in print quality at 300 dpi and publishing on the web and by email. Pro is also available with monthly billing; over three years the annual plan costs less. Pro does not include AI features.

The other plans:

• Free costs nothing: one user, 25 MB storage, up to three projects, basic templates and export only in screen quality at 72 dpi.
• According to the pricing page, Team costs the same as Pro and covers one user plus a free second licence. The comparison calculates Team like Pro for one workstation at the full price; the second licence only lowers the cost per seat if it is actually used. It adds advanced locking, custom brand templates, stock photos and icons, brand smart fields and one data automation.
• Enterprise is available on request. Only this plan includes the AI features, an approval workflow, third-party integrations and API and webhook access.

With a location in Germany, the pricing page shows prices in euros and without VAT. According to the terms of service, the currency stated on the pricing page or invoice applies, otherwise US dollars, and you bear taxes yourself. According to the help article on taxation, Marq charges VAT in countries where this is required, depending on the country of your billing address; the comparison therefore adds German VAT. A section further down the pricing page still shows amounts in US dollars, and the page states the saving on the annual plan differently in two places.

Pro and Team come with a free seven-day trial; according to the billing FAQ, billing starts automatically afterwards. According to the pricing page, you do not need a credit card for the Free plan, but you do need a Marq account.

Monthly and annual plans renew automatically. You cancel Pro and Team in the account settings; the account becomes a Free account at the end of the paid term. Your projects remain visible, but afterwards you can only edit them with the features of the Free plan. According to the help, there are no refunds for cancellations.

Marq runs in the browser. According to the system requirements, Marq supports the three current versions of Chrome (recommended), Firefox, Safari and Edge, on Windows from Windows 7, macOS from OS X 10.10, common 64-bit Linux distributions and Chrome OS. iOS and Android are also on the list, but according to the vendor the browser information does not apply to mobile browsers. The help does not describe dedicated desktop or mobile apps. You may be logged in on up to two devices at the same time; different browsers count as separate sessions.

According to the help, the interface is available in nine languages, including German. However, support first has to enable language selection for your account; after that, each person switches the language in their own account settings. According to the help, the switch only affects the interface, not the language of emails and support conversations.

Marq works with projects of one or more pages, which you create blank or from a template. The help does not describe classic master pages. There are two related features:

• Headers and footers, including page numbers, always apply to the whole project. What you place there appears on every page; you can choose different settings for the first page and for left and right pages.
• You save page templates within a project and use them to insert new pages. They only apply in the project in which you created them. The help does not say that changes to a page template affect existing pages.

According to the help, Marq does not import master pages from InDesign correctly.

For text there are custom paragraph styles. You define a style, give it a name and can later redefine it from the current selection; according to the help, all text boxes that use this style then change. You save character styles via the text options and then select them for quick formatting. The help does not say whether changes to a saved character style affect text that is already formatted.

You link text boxes via a small triangle at the bottom corner. The text then flows from one box into the next, according to the help also across several pages. This is how you spread longer texts from Word or Google Docs across several pages. Within a text box you set columns and column spacing, plus line and paragraph spacing, character spacing, tabs and indents, bullets and hyphenation. The help does not mention kerning or OpenType features.

As aids there are grids and guides with columns and rows to which objects snap, and a spread view for brochures. A baseline grid is not documented. Tables support merged cells, alternating fills and formulas.

You upload your own fonts as TTF, TTC or OTF files. According to the help, they only apply to your account; anyone editing a shared project has to upload the fonts themselves. You manage images in an image manager with folders, plus SVG graphics and images from Dropbox. The pricing page lists stock photos and icons from the library only from Team. With Pro you use the premium template library. According to the help, Dynamic Resize, which transfers a design to other formats, is still a beta feature and does not count as available here.

In Marq, projects are RGB by default. You assign CMYK colours to individual elements, and when downloading as PDF or JPEG you choose a CMYK colour profile. The help gives U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2 as an example and advises agreeing the profile with your print shop. As an administrator of a Pro, Team or Business account you can set brand colours to default to CMYK. According to the help, Marq does not currently support Pantone swatches, only their CMYK values, so there are no spot colours. The help does not describe soft proofing, assigning ICC profiles to images, PDF/X, a separations view or overprint settings.

You set the bleed in the project settings and drag backgrounds past the red line. When downloading, you add bleed marks and crop marks. For print shops that do not want links in the PDF, there is a print-friendly PDF without links.

Before a download or a print order, according to the help, the Smart print check checks bleed and safe area, whether images have at least 270 dpi at their placed size and whether CMYK and RGB are mixed. You switch the check on or off in the brand settings; the help does not say which plans it applies to. The help does not mention missing fonts or overset text boxes for this check.

You can export as PDF, PNG, PNG with transparency, JPEG, MP4 and GIF. According to the pricing page, Free only exports in screen quality at 72 dpi, Pro and the higher plans in print quality at 300 dpi. For accessibility, Marq creates tagged PDFs, detects elements without alternative text and sets the reading order from upper left to lower right. The print FAQ only names the United States as the delivery area of the Print & Ship service, and Marq does not offer international direct mail shipping; so for print products in Germany you hand the PDF to a print shop of your choice.

For digital output, you publish a project on the web. Marq creates a link that people without a Marq account can also use to view it and, if you like, HTML code for embedding it in your website. According to the pricing page, publishing on the web and by email is included from Pro, posting to social networks in all plans. According to the help, buttons are intended for embedded projects and emails, while links work in published projects and in PDFs. The help does not describe form fields for interactive PDFs or an EPUB export.

Marq barely documents features for long documents. According to the help, you create a table of contents by hand: you type chapters or pages into a text box, enter the page numbers yourself and link the entries to the pages. If the length changes, you have to adjust the table yourself. Page numbers, on the other hand, are set automatically by Marq, via the header or footer or as a system field. According to the help, Marq does not take over footnotes from InDesign. Index, cross-references, a book function made of several documents, conditional text and XML structures are not documented. In our view, Marq is therefore not intended for books, extensive catalogues or manuals.

Marq offers more for templates with variable content, the so-called smart fields:

• Profile fields take details from the user account such as name, email address, title and phone number. According to the pricing page, they are included from Pro.
• According to the help, team fields with details of the whole organisation, such as company name, address or slogan, are only available in Team and Business.
• With data automation you connect Google Sheets, CSV files, XML or an MLS real estate service and fill the fields from a selected data row; according to the help, XML and MLS are only enabled by the customer success manager. The pricing page lists one data automation in the Team plan and any number in Enterprise; a help article, by contrast, only names the Business plan, which the current pricing page no longer lists.
• Mail merge links fields to the columns of a CSV file and downloads a separate file for each row. The help does not say which plan it applies to; it is not verified here for the Pro plan.

The help does not describe scripts or plug-ins in the classic sense. Connections exist as integrations, for example for images from Dropbox or automatic backup to Google Drive. The pricing page lists API and webhook access and third-party integrations only for Enterprise.

The reference edition Pro does not include AI features. According to the pricing page, the AI Writing Assistant, AI Marqet, Brand Guardian and an MCP server with an AI agent, which is marked as beta, belong only to the Enterprise plan. The writing assistant generates text from a prompt, summarises, expands, rephrases and translates, according to the help for example into Spanish, Portuguese and French. Administrators enable it for everyone or only for certain teams. AI Marqet bundles workflows, forms and playbooks; according to the help, Brand Guardian uses AI to check projects for issues with colours, typography, logos and other brand elements. Usage runs on quotas: a project in which an AI feature was involved counts as an AI Brand Creation as soon as you download, export, print or publish it. The help does not describe generating or editing images with AI.

Marq’s AI addendum names model providers such as OpenAI or Anthropic, so the features run online. According to this addendum, Marq may use customer data to train its own instances of its AI features and the models in them, but not external language models outside Marq. The addendum does not describe an objection to this; administrators can switch off individual AI features.

Marq runs in the browser, and you need an account. The help names a slow internet connection as a common cause when work is not saved. The help does not describe offline use. According to the privacy policy, the provider LPS Holdco LLC is based in the United States and may process data in the United States and in other countries.

For collaboration, you invite others to a project and grant rights to edit, comment or view. Invited people edit the same project at the same time as you, and according to the help, changes appear immediately for the others. Each person needs their own Marq account for this; without a team account, they first have to accept the invitation. Anyone who should only view gets a link to the published project. The help also describes comments, a chat in the project and notes. The pricing page lists a dedicated approval workflow only for Enterprise. According to the help, the revision history with restore is only available with a paid subscription.

You store brand guidelines as brand assets: colours, fonts, images and logos, paragraph styles and smart fields. You protect templates with locks. According to the help, with Pro you can only lock elements fully or unlock them; finer locks, for example only for style, size and position or content, are available in Team and Business. Anyone with an administrator role may unlock. The pricing page lists custom brand templates for the team only from Team, and according to the pricing page every person who creates or uses templates needs a licence.

Your projects are stored in your Marq account. For backups, you download a backup of your projects on the Backup/Restore page in the account settings, or Marq automatically places an LAF backup file in your Google Drive every week. You can restore these backups in your Marq account. The help does not describe an open exchange format or an IDML export for InDesign.

To pass on your work, you export PDF, optionally in CMYK and with bleed and crop marks, as well as PNG, JPEG, GIF or MP4. In addition, there is an export as a PowerPoint file, which administrators enable in the brand settings. For print shops, the PDF is the usual route.

The InDesign import helps when you move to Marq. You package the file in InDesign with the option Include IDML and upload the IDML file from the package folder. According to the help, paragraph styles usually come along unless they are based on another style; linked text boxes should be preserved. Things that are not taken over include master pages, footnotes, drop caps, anchored objects, clipping paths and table, cell and shape styles. Fonts must be OTF or TTF, and Marq does not support EPS images. The plan card lists five free design imports for Pro, more as an add-on; the pricing page does not explain what exactly counts as a design import.

Marq only takes over other formats to a limited extent:

• PDF: each page becomes an image, and you cannot edit the PDF afterwards.
• PowerPoint: the help advises saving the presentation as a PDF and inserting the pages as images.
• Word: you copy the text and paste it into linked text boxes; the help does not describe a direct import of DOCX files.
• Google Docs: you import text from Google Drive into linked text boxes.

If you want to leave Marq, you export your projects as PDF or images; apart from the PowerPoint export, the help does not describe an export as an editable file for other layout programs. After cancellation, the projects remain visible, but you can only edit them to a limited extent. According to the terms of service, Marq does not actively delete data after cancellation; to remove it, you have to delete your account permanently.

In our view, Marq suits you if:

• you want to design flyers, brochures, social media graphics and digital documents from templates in the browser,
• you want to store brand colours, fonts and logos centrally and work on projects with others at the same time,
• you want to take over existing InDesign templates as IDML and use them for simple adjustments,
• you need print PDFs with CMYK colours, bleed and crop marks, but no spot colours,
• you want to publish projects as a web link or embed them in websites.

In our view, Marq is less suitable if:

• you typeset books, magazines or manuals with master pages, automatic tables of contents, footnotes or an index,
• you need prepress with spot colours, PDF/X or a separations view,
• you want to work without internet or store your files locally,
• you want to use AI features without booking the Enterprise plan,
• you have to pass on files in InDesign format to print shops or clients.