As a designer, you probably know the importance of user testing, visualizing, and iterations of a digital product for the best user experience. Therefore, UX tools allow designers to visualize their ideas seamlessly by focusing on a user and how they will experience a product.
In this blog, I gathered the 10 most popular UX design tools of recent times so you can look at their abilities, compare them, and pick the best one per your needs.
What are the Best UX Design Tools?
From thorough research on the internet, I have collected the best user experience-focused design tools down here. Read the quick overview, pricing plans, pros and cons of each of these UX design tools-
1. Figma
Free Plan- Available.
Pricing- Costs from $12 per editor/month to $75 per editor/month.
Overview
Figma is one of the most popular UX tools that help UX designers create, test, and deliver better designs faster. This free tool lets designers design digital products like icons, logos, presentations, apps, and web pages.
Besides, UX designers can create mock-ups, and wireframes, test high-fidelity prototypes and send them to the development team from the Figma app. Its team library allows users to publish components on the library for others to use. To make smoother employee collaboration, it also sends notifications to team members when any project changes are made.
Moreover, Figma also offers intuitive interfaces along with a set of plugins and features so you can make more optimal workflows!
Pros
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The dynamic component library makes prototyping easier.
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Allows multiple designers and developers to work on the same file.
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Provide easy real-time collaboration for teams with file sharing, live chat, and live-voice conversation.
Cons
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Selecting and running a plugin takes multiple clicks if many plugins are used.
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Limited offline functionalities.
2. Adobe XD
Image source-eleken
Free Plan- Available.
Pricing- From $9.90/month to $33.99/month.
Overview
Adobe is a vector-based design tool that helps solo designers and teams to create web and app designs. Its built-in drawing functionalities provide tools like- pathfinder expression, blur brushes, and many more. Besides, its outstanding well-resourced features allow you to create designs from scratch or templates.
Moreover, UX designers can create interactive prototypes and animations using components, install third-party plugins, resize designs for responsive screens, and do many more tasks to make design faster and better.
Pros
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Clean design layouts.
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Drag-and-drop and pinch-to-resize functionalities help people to design without any struggle.
Cons
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The software is basic for advanced users.
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The most significant downside of Adobe XD is it does not provide multiple pages and makes it challenging to manage large projects.
3. Framer
Free Plan- Available.
Pricing- From $5 per month to $20 per month.
Overview
Framer is a no-code software that provides all-in-one solutions from designing to publishing websites. It is a handy tool for creative professionals like people who are creating artist websites.
Besides, it Supports several tools that help to build prototyping and usability testing wireframing quicker. Framer assists designers in designing exactly how transitions and interactions will work in the production without writing codes. It also provides kits for integrating social media channels to embed an extensive collection of media, grids, and other necessary elements.
Pros
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Helps to create quick QR codes and share them with other team members to preview design.
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Saves time and boosts efficiency by simplifying the design process.
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Automatically turns designs into responsive web pages.
Cons
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The vector drawing tools could be more helpful.
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Integrations are pretty technical, with a steep learning curve.
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Supports for graphic elements is limited.
4. Sketch
Free Plan- Free for only Students and editors.
Pricing- From $9/month to $20/month per editor.
Overview
Sketch is a powerful vector-based design tool. It helps designers to design anything they need, from designing a simple icon to building an entire complex design system. Sketch provides a robust vector editor, Artboards, built-in prototyping tools, and a robust collection of plugins and integrations, allowing designers to turn their ideas into life. Its huge features and functionalities help designers make stronger designs by creating high-fidelity mock-ups, wireframes, and many more.
Users can share their design files online by using its web application. Sketch also provides designers accessibility with its tremendous resources and support.
Pros
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Easy to use.
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Helps to work on large files without interruption.
Cons
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As Sketch does not support animations, designers need to use other design tools for visualizing their content.
5. Marvel
Free Plan- Available.
Pricing- starts at $16 per month and also has a custom plan.
Overview
Marvel helps everyone to turn their design into life with its robust functionalities and features. This platform allows users to create interactive mock-ups, wireframes, and prototypes with ease. Marvel also supports design file formats from popular tools like Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD.
This innovative design tool makes designing digital products easier with a large number of assets, icons, and stock images. It also provides various UX design features and tools like drag-and-drop functionality, customizable templates, feedback, and collaboration features. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, Marvel helps all with its vast resources and support.
With Marvel's other feature, Handoff, designers can turn and download designs into codes and export them into CSS, Swifts, and Android XML codes within clicks. And hand over the design to production faster.
Pros
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Easy to use.
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Provides flexibility on syncing assets from other tools to Marvel.
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Users can leave comments and can share boards between teams.
Cons
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Prototypes take time to load, especially while on a freemium version.
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The software design looks outdated.
6. Balsamiq
Free Plan- N/A but provides a 30-day free trial.
Pricing- From $9 per month to $199 per month.
Overview
Balsamiq makes it smoother and more accessible to design low-fidelity wireframes with its intuitive and user-friendly interface. Mainly, it is a rapid wireframing-focused design software that helps designers to create wireframes with its drag-and-drop interface.
This cloud-based design tool offers a comprehensive collection of templates and elements, feedback, and collaboration tools by streamlining the design process.
Besides, Designers can use their created wireframes for usability testing, clarifying their design vision, and inviting collaborators for review. Users can also share their wireframes with clients or stakeholders using private and public links or exporting their works into PDFs or images.
The most exceptional built-in music feature maintains a Promodoro music track to help you keep focus while working, and 'What Should I Make for Dinner' provides users with a bundle of quick recipes they can watch while leaving the office in the evening!!
It's fun, right?
Pros
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Easy to use drag-and-drop editor.
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Provides a 'duplicate' shortcut and makes the editor time-saving.
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Has a low learning curve that helps beginners get into UX with ease.
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Provide predefined templates.
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Offers flexibility, including single sign-on and Auto-hibernation ability.
Cons
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Do not provide onboarding instructions.
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The software design looks outdated.
7. Axure
Free Plan- N/A but provides a 30-day free trial.
Pricing- Starts at $25/month per user and also contains a custom paid plan.
Overview
Axure is a popular and powerful UX design tool for creating wireframes and dynamic prototypes.
With Axure, designers can create wireframes, user diagrams, customer journeys, and prototypes. Besides, designers can publish their created prototypes on the Axure clouds and share them with their team members. Their bonus points include password-protected published prototypes that protect users' data.
On a shared prototype, designers themselves and their teams can leave direct comments from its 'Add Comment' span. After working on a prototype suggestion, a designer can update the same prototype, and the shareable link will remain the same.
Not only do these merits, but this user-friendly prototyping and the wireframing tool also provide team collaboration. For instance, teams can create a workspace on Axure Clouds for a specific project and share all their prototypes flexibly in real time.
Pros
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The dynamic panel helps to prototype any design faster.
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Provides a pre-built widget library.
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Easy to use drag-and-drop editor.
Cons
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There is no image processing tool to get images from the web.
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Sometimes get slow and need to be more responsive.
8. Optimal Workshop
Free Plan- Available.
Pricing- Starts at $208 per month and also contains a custom-paid plan.
Overview
Optimal Workshop helps both small and big businesses to improve the user experience of their products, apps, and websites. As a powerful Information Architecture (IA) tool, Optimal Workshop helps designers and organizations build standard user experiences with its baked data analysis and user research. This multi-powered UX design tool makes the process of creating quality design faster with its various tools.
UX designers can get speedy insights into their designs by quickly creating studies and testing prototypes. Besides, Optimal Workshop allows first-click testing with Chalkmark, tree testing with Treejack, and qualitative UX research with Reframer. In summary, this expertly focused platform provides a package of efficient UX tools with user research functionalities.
Pros
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Its unique UX tool brings a new touch to the design.
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Unmoderated tree testing saves time and does not cost extra!
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Provides quick data collection.
Cons
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No free trial is available.
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Do not provide data exportation to other tools.
9. FlowMapp
Free Plan- Available
Pricing- Starts at $9.90 per month.
Overview
FlowMapp helps users to design beautiful products, apps, and websites by allowing them to do all the foundation tasks of UX design. It assists in creating interactive sitemaps, user journey maps, and plan structures for better user-experience design.
There is a cluster of design tools on the internet that has both UX and UI functionality. But, FlowMapp is a focused UX design tool allowing users to do all the fundamental tasks on UX.
Creating user flows helps designers to create an intuitive interface in the fastest way, and a sitemap allows you to draw the structure of your product for web-development projects. In FlowMapp, these two features are the core pillars of this UX design tool, keeping it well-established for the best UX functionalities. Besides, this deliberately created tool also allows users to create user journey maps and personas and provides client sharing, project archiving, and other team collaborative capabilities.
Pros
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Have a low learning curve.
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The interface is friendly and intuitive.
Cons
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Do not allow template customization.
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Users need to export their entire large flow map instead of its specific parts.
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Do not provide integration with other design tools.
ProtoPie
Free Plan- Available
Pricing- Starts at $67/editor per month and also has a custom paid plan.
Overview
ProtopPie, a no-code prototyping tool, allows users to turn their UX design ideas into functional prototypes in the easiest way. Without seeking help from engineers, designers can discover, investigate, and analyze their design ideas and solutions by making credible mock-ups. As all interactions, regardless of complexity, are made up of Objects, triggers, and Responses, these 3 components are featured on ProtoPie to help users create interactions easily.
Designers can import their assets from popular design tools like Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD by simply installing the ProtoPie plugin.
Pros
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Users can share clickable prototypes with URLs.
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A complex prototyping tool to create high-fidelity prototypes.
Cons
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Takes time to understand how to make high-definition prototypes.
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Complex to set up shared components.
FAQs on Best UX Design Tools
1. What are the best web-based UX Design tools?
Some of the best cloud-based UX design tools among many are- FlowMapp, ProtoPie, Axure Cloud, and Balsamiq.
2. Are there any free UX design tools available for designers on a budget?
Yes, there are many UX design tools that you can leverage on a budget.
But, some of these tools that is available for under $10 includes- Framer, FlowMapp, Balsamiq, Marvel, Sketch, and Adobe XD.
Final Wrap-up
As a UX designer, it is vital to know the web design principles and laws before jumping into your design journey. Web design principles and laws will guide you and your design team to structure better design by keeping essential values on the front.
When you are aware of the fundamentals of web design, it will be easier for you to understand the web design trends and validate which trend your users are in need off. Thus, web design principles and trends will help you gather better and brainstorm quality ideas that you can later give life using UX tools.
Explore these best UX design tools, as they all provide a freemium version. Speed up your design process and add new heights to your digital product's user experience.
On top of that, if you are running a web design agency or working alone for clients, you can showcase all your robust designs on a portfolio site. Build your portfolio website with Dorik's powerful collection of more than 120 templates, and let your clients get amazed!
