Hey There! Are you looking for the best wireframe tools online? There are many wireframe tools available online, but not all of them allow you to create prototypes online for free. In fact, some wireframing tools look great at first glance but you need to buy a premium account in order to use them or add features. Some of the best wireframe tools can be expensive and you might not want to invest money into something that won’t yield immediate returns.
Nevertheless, If you’re looking for best wireframe tools, then I am here to help you. This post will cover The Best Free Online Wireframe Tools for your reference which are very easy to use and make the quick mockups.
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.
Best wireframe tool for handing off design documentation to developers
UXPin (Web, macOS, Windows)
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
Balsamiq is all about the traditional values of prototyping online, expect fast speed and smart features, especially when it comes to collaboration on projects. You can expect the Balsamiq app to reflect an experience of using a whiteboard to create your prototypes, easy to use, smooth and a ton of fun! Some of the biggest names on the web use their platform to create mockups.
Axure
The Axure platform is one of the most versatile standalone apps out there that provide a big variety of features, and allow the creation of the following:
- Mockups
- Wireframes
- Flowcharts
- Prototypes
- Web Designs
- Presentation Slides
- iPhone Mockups
- iPad Mockups
and a big number of Fortune 500 companies believe in Axure to use them on a daily basis.
Figma
Figma is a free cloud-based design platform. It is an amazing platform to collaborate & share among team members. The free version comes with 2 editors and 3 projects. They have their premium version available for free only for students. The best part about working with Figma is the creative freedom for designing anything. It follows a design-centric approach, which makes it a wonderful tool for your wireframing ideas.
NinjaMock
NinjaMock is a collaborative wireframing application & is used for mockup. The free version provided by them gives you 1 project with 200 elements. A platform that lets you make wireframes efficiently as it is easy to learn. The most outstanding feature is its speed that allows you to spend less time learning and you can utilize this time to get creative with your wireframe. It’s available for IOS, Android, Windows phones, and the web.
Adobe Xd
Part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Xd lets the user wireframe as part of its suite of prototyping tools which takes you through the entire process of sketching wireframes, collaboration with the team, creating story-boards, site maps and flowcharts, building functional prototypes and so much more. You will need the creative cloud subscription to enjoy the entirety of Xd’s vast collection of amazing features.
Pidoco
Pidoco offers an easy to use solution to building fast prototypes that your clients will adore. Not only that, it is extremely simple to start using and results can be achieved within minutes of launching the app. For me, one of the best features is definitely the ability to perform offline and online user tests quickly and easily using our convenient HTML export or conferencing or screen-sharing tools.
Best wireframe tool for team collaboration sketches on a whiteboard-like canvas
InVision Freehand (Web)
InVision Freehand is the most basic app on this list, but it’s worth a try, especially if you prefer creating or marking up your wireframes on a whiteboard where everyone can contribute and revise.
Invite your team to a wireframe collaboration, where you can add images and basic shapes or draw the wireframe with your mouse cursor. Since it’s a cloud app, multiple designers and stakeholders can be signed in and writing at the same time.
By itself, Freehand makes a good, albeit simplistic, wireframe tool that seems like any other whiteboard app. But since it offers real-time syncing with Sketch and Photoshop, your team can opt to draw and annotate directly on polished prototypes, making the iteration design stage much easier. And, since it’s a part of the InVision suite, your collaboration sketches are stored alongside working prototypes and mood boards for quick reference as you move through your design project.
Freehand will work well for designers who want to collaborate with team members on an initial wireframe sketch and/or comment on more refined wireframes/prototypes.
InVision Freehand Price: Free
Best wireframe tool for detailed pixel-based wireframes
Adobe Photoshop (macOS, Windows)
Photoshop is the industry heavyweight when you’re looking for advanced pixel-based design software. It can handle almost anything, from photo editing to digital painting, and is beloved by the majority of graphic design professionals for that reason alone. The advantage of using Photoshop for your wireframes (especially web-based design, where you will depend more on pixel graphics) is that you can easily create a high-fidelity mockup without switching design systems.
To create a wireframe, you can add any number of artboards that correspond with your screen size dimensions (and add a grid layout that corresponds with your responsive breakpoints, if you want). You can either design UI components yourself with Photoshop or download a kit from online for standard elements like iOS keyboards. And, while the vector design tools (Sketch, Illustrator, Designer, etc.) are great for a lot of design work, no tool beats Photoshop for its raster image editing capabilities, which is invaluable when you eventually turn your wireframes into mockups and start adding photos and other graphics.
Despite the array of features, there are a few downsides to using Photoshop for your wireframes. Not only is the learning curve fairly steep, but it can also be a little clunky to use if you need to wireframe multi-screen flows, site structure, etc. Fortunately, many prototyping tools (like Proto.io, InVision, or Adobe XD, for example) let you import Photoshop files directly, so you can move back and forth between tools to create a more polished design that can be used for prototyping, user testing, or simply passing to developers for implementation.
Photoshop Price: From $9.99/month for the Creative Cloud Photography Plan that also includes access to Lightroom.
If you find yourself in need of a powerful pixel-based design tool but shy away from the Adobe suite (whether because of subscription cost, software “bulk,” or some other reason), check out Affinity Design, which allows you to create both vector and pixel-based designs on your desktop.
Conclusion
Wireframes are a fairly old concept in web design. But things have changed in recent years. With the emergence of mobile and the internet of things, we now need to create wireframes that can be used on any device or in any context. That’s why there has been an explosion in wireframe tools in recent years. Yet it can still be difficult to find detailed information about all these different tools, more so if you are new to wireframing. I enjoin you to make do with all the available tools you have.