As you know full form of wireframe is an outline of the interface design for a website or application. It helps to build the website or app with greater usability, clarity and efficiency. Wireframing is not an easy task; you should choose the best wireframe tools for web design that could be used by everyone at any level. Below are some wireframe tools that might be helpful to you now or in future if you are not aware of them yet.
Sketch
For macOS
Price:
- $9 per month or $99 per year
Hot Features in Sketch:
- Intuitive vector editing tools
- Iterate your work with non-destructive Boolean operations
- A variety of exporting options, including drag-and-share
Sketch was first released in 2010 and has made a name for itself as a lightweight vector design tool. While it’s a fairly basic tool for modern UI and icon vector design, it integrates with other design tools and promotes the building of integration plugins.
Sketch costs $99/year for an individual license. If you don’t renew your subscription, you can continue to use the tool, but you won’t receive software updates or be able to save files to the cloud.
Figma
For web, macOS, Windows, and Linux
Price:
- Starter Plan: $0
- Professional: $12 per editor, per month
- All Apps: $45 per editor, per month
Hot Features in Figma:
- Draw freely with a modern pen tool that automatically merges points
- Incorporate plugins to speed up your workflow
- Use Figma libraries to store, find, and add new assets
Figma is known for real-time collaboration. It’s a robust, cloud-based tool that rivals Sketch, Adobe XD, Studio, and others on this list of wireframe tools. Although comparatively inexpensive, its features were designed to work efficiently whether you’re working alone or as part of a design team.
Figma’s free offering can be used for three projects and two editors, and you’ll get unlimited cloud storage with it. The Professional plan includes unlimited projects and goes for $12 per user per month, billed annually.
Canva
For web
Price:
- Starter Plan: $0
- Pro: $119.99 per year
- Enterprise: $30 per person, per month
Hot Features in Canva:
- Canva teams lets groups design mockups together in real time
- Create precise compositions with Canva’s crop tool
- Create charts easily with numerical and percentage-based editable charts and graphs
Canva helps non-designers create simple, high-quality graphics — and you can also use it to create wireframes. It features drag-and-drop illustrations, photos, charts, and other ready-made templates and shapes for quick mockups.
Proto.io
For web
Price:
- Solo: $12
- Freelancer: $24 per month
- Startup: $40 per month
- Agency: $80 per month
Hot Features for Proto.io:
- More than 250 UI components to mimic the behavior of their native counterparts
- Design virtually any web or mobile event or action
- Preview, share, and get feedback on designs with user testing integrations
Proto.io is popular for its prototyping and wireframing capabilities, and it’s especially useful for user experience (UX) testing. You can gather data from users before sending your final design to developers, which helps everyone make informed design decisions.
Proto.io is cloud-based and allows multiple users to access the same document simultaneously, making collaboration not only possible but easy.
Moqups
For web
Price:
- Pro: $16 per 3 users, per month, paid annually
- Unlimited: $49 per month, paid annually
Hot Features in Moqups:
- Free plan comes with 5MB of storage
- Drag-and-drop user interface
- Integrates seamlessly with Dropbox, Google Drive, and Slack
Moqups is a web-based tool that allows you to build wireframes, mockups, and prototypes within the same environment. You can make designs such as wireframes, diagrams, flowcharts, sitemaps, mockups, graphs, and charts.
It has a built-in library with thousands of design elements and it’s easy to organize your projects with search and drag-and-drop features. It also permits integrations and facilitates collaboration with tools such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Slack.
Moqups offers a free plan with 1 project and 5MB of storage. Upgrading to the Pro plan for $16/month (billed annually) gets you unlimited projects for a single user.
Lucidchart: Create and edit in offline mode
Lucidchart equips designers with tools that help them communicate their complex ideas through design. You can assign stages to each file such as draft, complete, pending review, approved, rejected, and no status for effective collaboration.
The online wireframe tool gives an option to invite collaborators and the creator can edit, share, view, and comment access to collaborators. You can also embed design copy to your intranet or webpage.
With the tool’s cloud infrastructure, you can visualize how your new plan will affect your present infrastructure. You can leverage the conditional formatting option to set rules to change shapes, icons, and designs based on your rule criteria.Lucidchart4.5 (1289)Read reviewsVISIT WEBSITE
Key Features:
- Feedback management
- Flowchart
- Graphical workflow editor
- Interactive elements
- Access controls/Permissions
- Diagramming
Trial/Free Version:Free TrialFree VersionDevice Compatibility:
Screenshot:
BPMN shape libraries in Lucidchart5
Marvel: Receive user interaction insights
Marvel is a no-code prototyping tool that allows designing, testing, and developing on one platform. It provides all the functionalities required to create digital products. Apart from stock photos, and icons, Marvel provides a range of pre-made wireframing elements such as navigation bars, widgets, and buttons.
Marvel’s design handoff tool enables developers to get access to specs of each element added in the design copy. The tool generates CSS, Android XML, and Swift code for elements so that you can copy and expedite the development process.
The tool gives you an option to record how your users interact with your prototype. Get access to analytics that provide insights into how your users interact with your design in order to improve the overall prototype and experience.Marvel4.5 (80)Read reviewsVIEW PROFILE
Key Features:
- Collaboration tools
- Customizable templates
- Prototype creation
- Usability testing
- Software prototyping
- Offline access
Trial/Free Version:Free TrialFree VersionDevice Compatibility:
Screenshot:
Miro: Enables real-time and asynchronous collaboration
Miro offers a collaborative, online whiteboard platform that helps in brainstorming, design thinking, mapping, drawing, running team meetings, and more. The wireframe software allows users to build a roadmap starting from creating a buyer’s persona to designing web pages.
With Miro, you can perform scenario mapping that allows for you to think through goals you want to achieve in each page. Accordingly, create a user flow, and how you want users to interact with your page to achieve the set goal. At each stage of creation, your teammates and account managers can give real-time suggestions on what you should start, stop, and continue doing.
The software solution offers templates for each stage of creation and designing such as mind maps, sitemaps, service pages, registration pages, customer journey maps, etc. Miro also works as a task management tool as you can check which team member is handling which task of the designing process.BEST FUNCTIONALITYMiro4.7 (543)Read reviewsVIEW PROFILE
Key Features:
- Agile methodologies
- Asset library
- Backlog management
- Calendar management
- Change management
- Action management
Trial/Free Version:Free TrialFree VersionDevice Compatibility:
Screenshot:
Balsamiq
For web, macOS, and Windows
Price:
- 30-day Trial: $0
- 2 Projects: $9 per month or $90 per year
- 20 Projects: $49 per month or $490 per year
- 200 Projects: $199 per month or $1,990 per year
Hot Features in Balsamiq:
- Explore hundreds of UI components and icons from the Balsamiq community
- Use the drag-and-drop interface to build mockups and wireframes in record time
- Create interactive prototypes with the Balsamiq Linking feature
Balsamiq helps developers, designers, and creatives visualize their ideas quickly with low-fidelity wireframes. Instead of focusing on finer details that are characteristic of higher-fidelity sketches, Balsamiq’s interface sticks to the basics — its interface and elements imitate a hand-drawn style to emphasize content and structure over other aspects, making it handy for the beginning stages of a build. All plans allow unlimited users, and Balsamiq also offers a 30-day free trial.
UXPin
For web, macOS, and Windows
Price:
- Starter Plan: $0
- Basic: $19 per editor per month
- Advanced: $29 per month
- Professional: $69 per editor, per month
- Enterprise: email for custom pricing
Hot Features in UXPin:
- Advanced interactivity lets you more actively simulate the user experience
- Use built-in libraries to incorporate interactive elements, colors, and icons when you’re short on time
- Show conditional flow logic with UXPin’s embedded user flow capabilities
UXPin is a powerful prototyping and wireframing tool. With it, you can construct maps from a library of user interface components that you can combine into UX patterns, run tests on your wireframes and collect feedback from subjects, and collaborate with teammates in real-time.
Many of UXPin’s elements incorporate advanced interactivity, so you can more actively simulate the user experience as you build out your interface.
All plans allow unlimited prototypes and viewers, and each increasing tier enables more advanced features like conditional logic, variables, and design systems (style guidelines for your whole team).
Cacoo
For web
Price
- 14-day Trial: $0
- Pro: $5 per editor, per month
- Team: $5 per month
Hot Features in Cacoo:
- Track changes to review previous versions of your diagrams
- Export the most popular file formats
- Integrate your favorite programs like Slack, AWS, and Microsoft Teams for collaborative work
Cacoo is a wireframing and diagram tool built for collaboration. You can easily select and place elements from desktop, iOS, and Android libraries, and team members can track and comment on live changes to their wireframes. While a purely web-based tool, Cacoo lets users export to PNG, SVG, PDF, and PPT formats. It also integrates with applications like Microsoft Teams, Dropbox, and Adobe Creative Cloud.
Conclusion
When we think of wireframe we automatically think of a drawing, but in my opinion, the best way to do it is through different (much easier to add inside) tools like: storyboard or mindmeister (both free). For me, I’ve tested several tools when I was making my own website and found that when they were created by real designers, they were pretty basic and had too many useless features. So, why not try these tools.