Balsamiq vs FluidUI

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

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.

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

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.

You can link together pages to create shareable user demos

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

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.

Work with your team on a design. Connect on live video calls and chat or add comments.

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.

Every action you or your team takes automatically creates a revision you can easily revert to.

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

Using the app is feels very snappy.

They have a very reasonable free tier with the paid versions starting at $12/month.

You can preview your designs live in the browser as well as send them to a mobile device to better simulate the UX.

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.