Wondering about the web wireframe tools, and wondering about what wireframing tool is best for you? Wireframe is the first step of the website development process. And before that, it’s a background check of your website. In some cases, you might want to check some online website wireframe tool before you code it out. As a result, some online website wireframe tools can help you do the job.
Want to become better at using wireframe tools? Or just want some ideas on which wireframe tool you should use for your next project? Take a look at this article and discover some of the best wireframe tools available today.
Sketch
Since its release in 2010, Sketch has maintained a premier spot as a powerful yet lightweight vector design tool for macOS users. By itself, it can be used for anything from wireframes to modern UI and icon vector design (on a pixel-based canvas, no less) and some interaction design. Its interface is far simpler and more intuitive than vector design heavyweights Affinity Designer and Adobe Illustrator. Thanks to this simplicity, Sketch can be used to create wireframes quickly with a combination of artboards and vector design shapes.
When you download the Sketch app to your Mac, you’ll notice that there are no built-in UI components. While you could certainly design your own components to use as part of your wireframe process, there is a vast online community of designers that have created and shared many free wireframe design kits. A single click to download, and you have a wealth of buttons, icons, and other design elements that can be used inside your Sketch file.
Like most desktop apps, Sketch makes collaboration a bit tricky, as there’s no way to allow multiple designers to work simultaneously within a design file. However, you can sync your design to Sketch Cloud, which allows you to share a link to the most recent version of your design, collect comments and other feedback, without having to waste time with a lengthy export process.
When it’s time for hand-off, you can use the Export option to save your full designs and/or individual elements. Or, take advantage of the large variety of integrations to send your wireframe further down the design process.
Sketch Price: $99/year for individual users (when the year is over, you can continue to use the tool, but you’ll no longer receive software updates), or $9/month for team members utilizing Sketch Cloud.
Figma
Figma takes our top spot because of its combination of powerful cloud-based design software and the fact that users can build three projects for free before you have to select one of their payment plans.
Using Figma is as simple and straightforward as you could want it to be. While Figma doesn’t have its own built-in UI components, it does come with the option to upload your own or use a pre-designed kit.
It is, however, remarkably easy to create artboards, add in basic shapes and text, and do a certain level of prototyping.
All of the design organization is handled in one panel, allowing you to quickly move between different artboards, layers, and pages without getting overwhelmed.
The built-in Figma constraints show you how each element will respond on different sized screens, making it much easier to optimize your user experience for mobile devices.
When it comes to collaborative working, Figma allows multiple team members to access and edit the design and leave comments. Once the mockup is completed, you can access the CSS code and export individual elements.
Adobe XD
Creative teams can design at scale with the Adobe XD toolkit, which includes a unified assets panel for brand consistency, features for easy replication of lists and other elements, responsive resizing of content, collaborative presentation and chat features, tooling, and APIs to enable custom integrations, and more.
As for our evaluation criteria specifics, it doesn’t get much more well designed and functional than Adobe software. While Adobe tends to have a steep learning curve, they are also top-notch at providing training videos and written tutorials so you will never feel left in the dust.
App integrations and/or plugins include Airtable, Trello, UserTesting, Google Sheets, CloudApp, Overflow, Stark, Angle, UI Faces, and dozens more.
As for some minor critiques, the animations and auto-animations features are not as fully-functional as they could be. Also, there is no way to include micro-interactions and links between prototypes, which leaves users piling artboards into a single file, significantly slowing down the program as it grows.
Adobe XD starts at $9.99/user/month but also has a freemium version.
Moqups
Moqups is a simple to use prototyping tool that helps you collaborate in real-time on wireframes, mockups, diagrams, and much more. It provides support for native support for drag and drop or copy/paste to import images from your desktop or other apps.
Features:
- Drag and Drop elements from a comprehensive library of widgets and easy to configure smart-shapes.
- Turn your wireframes or final designs into live prototypes by adding interactions or hotspots.
- Professional diagramming features for creating flowcharts, decision trees, sitemaps, use-cases, and more.
- It offers a built-in library with thousands of icons from the most popular icon sets.
- Guru99 users get 20% off with coupon “GURU20”
UXPin
UXPin is a perennial favorite with interface designers, and typically one of the first tools recommended for anyone who’s learning how to wireframe. While its rich feature set can be a bit challenging for a new designer to pick up, the effort spent learning UXPin definitely pays off.
With UXPin, you’re able to start your wireframes with a built-in library of UI elements that you can drag and drop directly onto your canvas. The benefit of this slightly higher-fidelity wireframe is that you can do more fine-tuning of the flow and functionality without spending a ton of time redesigning the screen’s components. And, since UXPin can read Sketch and Photoshop files, you can always use those tools to turn your basic wireframes into high-fidelity prototypes, before importing the polished design back into UXPin to take advantage of the tool’s other features: adding interactions, presenting to a team, and handing off the design specs to a developer.
Despite the great wireframe and interface design features, it’s the live presentation and documentation abilities that make UXPin stand out in a crowded field of wireframe > prototype tools. While many apps allow you to snag CSS, HTML, or even JSON from your design, UXPin makes it easy for you to present a working prototype of your design, collect feedback, and include specs/documentation all at once through the Preview mode.
To use this feature, click the Preview button on the top toolbar, decide what kind of access you’d like to grant viewers (e.g., the ability to view comments, specs, documentation, etc.), then share the link provided. This all-in-one sharing option means that the final review, approvals, and design documentation hand-off can all be done in the same place, so no one is left in the dark when your design hits the home stretch.
UXPin Price: $23/user/month (billed annually) for the Prototyping plan that includes basic wireframing tools; from $39/month for the System plan that includes advanced collaboration features and documentation hand-off.
Balsamiq Wireframes
A simple web-based tool available on both Mac and Windows, Balsamiq Wireframes is a simple and effective wireframing tool that lets designers create quick wireframe designs.
Compared to some of the more complete tools on this list, Balsamiq Wireframes could best be described as quick and dirty with its hand-drawn style harking back to the design drawn on a napkin idea.
Most of the elements in Balsamiq Wireframes are drag and drop, and designers have the option to use a drag-and-drop editor to arrange pre-built widgets, which really lowers the learning curve.
Plenty of example stretch and wireframe skins are available for different designs, such as desktop apps, mobile apps, and websites. Balsamiq Wireframes also boasts a huge library of UI elements.
The primary downside of Balsamiq Wireframes is that the lack of high-fidelity animations makes it unsuitable for doing any form of large-scale prototyping.
Conclusion:
Nowadays, there is a great demand for the services and products of UX and UI designers. This can be explained by the fact that we use more and more applications and websites every day. Moreover, we do not want to waste our time or get bored when using them. And it’s obvious that UX and UI play a great role in this process!