When comparing Atomic vs FluidUI, the Slant community recommends FluidUI for most people. In the question“What are the best tools to prototype both native and web sketch designs?” FluidUI is ranked 1st while Atomic is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose FluidUI is:
The learning curve is relatively low compared to other software that supports animations/transitions. Both building the wireframes and designing the interactions is all drop and drag.
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Pros
Pro Makes it simple to add basic interactions
Atomic is designed to be a fast and simple way to animate and add interactions to your designs. You can add swipe, hover, double tap, tap and hold and right click interactions.
Pro User friendly
The learning curve is relatively low compared to other software that supports animations/transitions. Both building the wireframes and designing the interactions is all drop and drag.
Pro Tools for team collaboration
Work with your team on a design. Connect on live video calls and chat or add comments.
Pro Supports realistic gestures & transitions
You can simulate all the typical iOS gestures such as tap, double tap, swipe & long hold. These gestures then can trigger animated transitions such as sliding, fading, pop in, & flip. This enables you to create very realistic interactable demos of your app. Checkout the demo page for some examples.
Pro Awesome version control
Every action you or your team takes automatically creates a revision you can easily revert to.
Pro Provides UI assets from all the versions of iOS
The UI library is huge and very high quality. All the UI required to design iO7 apps is included as well as iOS 6 and basic wireframing elements. For example in iOS7 it provides:
- Backgrounds
- Navigation & status bars
- Layouts (list pickers, maps, keyboards, scroll etc)
- Controls
- Typography
- Icons
Pro Fast
Using the app is feels very snappy.
Pro Free forever for a single project & 10 screens
They have a very reasonable free tier with the paid versions starting at $12/month.
Pro Lets you test on an iPhone as well as in the browser
You can preview your designs live in the browser as well as send them to a mobile device to better simulate the UX.
Pro Makes it easy to plan out the app workflow
Fluid isn't just about wireframing static screens. You can plan out all the user flows and then define the transitions between them. This is really handy for planning out the entire user workflow.
Cons
Con Limited to very basic animations
If you want to do more advanced/polished animations to prototype what a polished app/website would feel like this isn't the right tool.