DesignProductivity

What are the easiest prototyping tools?

6

Options
Considered

16

User
Recs.

Nov 23, 2017

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

6 Options Considered

What are the easiest prototyping tools	Price	Platforms	Price
-- ProtoPie	99	–	–
-- Sketch	-	Mac	$99
-- Mockplus	-	–	–
-- Balsamiq	$12-249/m	–	–
-- HotGloo	$13	–	–

ProtoPie

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Top Pro

Intuitive UI

Even your 2-year old baby could make hi-fi prototypes faster than your own UX designers using ProtoPie. See More

Top Pro

Sensor-aid Interaction

Easily control the sensors of smart devices in your prototype, such as tilt, sound, compass and 3D Touch sensors. See More

Top Pro

Supports Win & Mac

The best feature for Windows' users. See More

Top Pro

Share file via links

Share your prototypes via links or the Dashboard and customize the playback experience for your prototypes. See More

Top Pro

Interaction between more than two devices

Create interactions that involve two or more smart devices and test a variety of use-case scenarios through prototypes. See More

Top Pro

Design oriented

ProtoPie uses a code-free methodology and instead opt for a visual-centric, design oriented approach making it accessible to a wider audience. See More

Sketch

Top Pro

Designed specifically for web and mobile UI design & workflows

Sketch is essentially a version of Photoshop built from the ground up to suit the workflow of web designers. See More

Top Con

No Windows/Linux versions

Sketch is currently Mac only, which can make it hard to collaborate if you have teammates using another OS. See More

Specs

Top Pro

Makes it easy to export assets

Sketch has a built in exporter that supports PDF, JPG and PNG. See More

Top Con

Limited compatibility with Photoshop and Illustrator

Although it is possible to export certain Adobe file types in Sketch, compatibility is mostly hit and miss. For example, some elements seem a little offset in Adobe products. See More

Top Pro

Active community with a lot of resources

Sketch is hugely popular among designers so there are a lot of well maintained community resources for everything from iPhone frames to iOS/Android UI elements & icons. See More

Top Con

License based payment model

Sketch has recently decided to cease development of major version (2.0, 3.0, 4.0) with free updates in between, and has switched to a license based subscription model. A yearly license costs $99 and includes the latest version of the Sketch software, plus a year of free updates. After this license expires, you can renew for another year of updates - or continue to use the current software without updates. See More

Top Pro

Clean UI

Reactive panels keep the UI for Sketch clean from the sort of clutter the panel system in Photoshop suffers from. The panels in Sketch change based on the object in question, saving you from having to have a multiple separate panels. See More

Top Pro

Vector based yet pixel aware

You can rescale assets without quality loss, easily export x2 assets for retina designs and design high quality icons & artwork. Being pixel aware lets you set a grid and snap objects to it as well as round to the nearest pixel edge to clean up your layers. See More

Top Pro

Built-in grid system

You can set the square grid to whatever dimensions you like as well as set thicker lines every x blocks. You can also configure the color of the lines to make them as obvious or subtle as you wish and toggle the grid with a keyboard shortcut (crtl+g). See More

Top Pro

Easily align layers with smart guides

Holding down alt will show the smart guides that show the distances between any layer you hover over to nearby layers or the edges of the artboard. Very useful for checking your spacing or aligning layers. See More

Top Pro

"Artboards" are great for working on multiple views simultaneously

Artboards let you easily work on multiple views side by side. Great for having a separate artboard on each page for the various responsive sizes. See More

Top Pro

Symbols and shared styles

Sketch lets you re-use the same design in multiple places, with changes synced throughout the various places it is used. You can also create text styles to sync typography changes. See More

Top Pro

"Mirror" makes it really easy to test designs on multiple devices

Mirror lets you connect your iPhone to sketch and see how your current artboard looks on mobile. It's really useful as you can live check changes which lets you rapidly iterate mobile design. See More

Mockplus

Top Pro

Multiple preview functions are convenient

Mockplus has very comprehensive ways of previewing a prototype. There are basic functions of exporting into picture in two formats. Mockplus also has two ways for preview on cellphone app: scanning QR code and entering view code after uploading project to cloud. QR code scanning for preview is really rare in this kind of software. You don’t need to connect to the computer, or upload the project to cloud, just open your app and scan the code. Exporting into demo package is also a rare but useful function which Mockplus has. Reportedly, Mockplus: 2.2 beta version will have the function exporting into HTML, and the launch of 2.2 version should come soon. The HTML exporting of Mockplus has two ways: first one is to export offline package. You could send this package to your colleagues directly or put it on the local sever for downloading and preview. The second way is online HTML previews. After publishing the HTML online, you could send a link to people who want to have a preview of your prototype. See More

Top Con

Can't export to .pdf or .docx

Mockplus can't export prototypes to .pdf or .docx files, which may cause issues if you want to view a prototype locally. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use

As a prototyping tool, it uses the way of dragging and dropping as the basis of operation. See More

Balsamiq

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Top Con

Adobe Air

Balsamiq has been powered by Adobe Air since day 1 and the team are resistant to change that despite it being a dead technology for several years. See More

Top Pro

Usability testing features

You can link together pages to create shareable user demos See More

Top Con

Stifling innovation

Doing anything that is not directly supported by Balsamiq's conservative component library is next to impossible. User is forced to think within the corset of yesterday's standards. See More

Top Pro

30-day trial available

Top Con

No easy way to quickly play with the product

Top Pro

Keyboard shortcuts

You can use common keyboard shortcuts like Shift to select multiple elements or to resize while maintaing proportions, F2 for renaming labels etc. See More

Top Pro

Large & extensible UI element library

Balsamiq has a built in library of over 75 built-in user interface components and 187 icons, as well as community generated plug-ins. See More

Top Pro

Clean and easy to use interface

Balsamiq has a very easy to use drag and drop interface that lets you quickly build and adjust your mockups. The UI is centered around low-fidelity wireframes that help focus the reviews on the core layout and functionality instead of getting hung-up on visual design. See More

Top Pro

Awesome team collaboration features

myBalsamiq has been built with teams in mind and has a variety of featured to support collaborating on the mockups: Notifications - Real-time notifications to enable you to keep track of team member actions Revision Control - All mockups have a revision history to enable reverting to previous versions and keeping track of design decisions. Skype Integration - Easy to use Skype integration to host design reviews. Access Control - Access controls allow sharing projects with team members as well as allowing external reviewers to leave comments on the designs. See More

Top Pro

Low-fidelity UI elements

All the Balsamiq UI elements are drawn by hand and have a really nice low-fidelity design. See More

HotGloo

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