Best UI/UX Design Tools

If you are a UI/UX designer or beginner and looking for the best tools for your design work, then this article will help you.

Today UI/UX design, which is an abbreviation of User Interface and User Experience, holds greater significance than just creating a website.
Good design allows users to feel an enhanced experience, which makes UI/UX superior.

As Steve Jobs once said, “The design is not just what it looks like and feels like. The design is how it works”, this, to date acts as an explanatory quote to the basics of UI/UX design.

Furthermore, in the user and consumer-centric market UI/UX acts as a tool to strengthen your brand value and gain an instant edge over your competition.

It’s clear that UI/UX design field is really in demand right now, and will be more in near future.

So now let’s look into the best tools for UI/UX design.

FIGMA

If you have some experience in user interface design, you may have heard of this tool. It is one of the best and widely used free tools in website and app design.

Pros

• Ease of use, compatibility, and flexibility.
• Excellent team collaboration.
• Prototyping is a great.
• Copying Styles (to CSS) for React projects.
• Figma Community files and plugins are the excellent feature as it saves a lot of UX and UI design time.
• It allows plenty of people to participate in the design. You can invite many people on a single file and make any of them an admin.

Cons

• Not ideal choice for wireframing jobs , mainly for those who call for several different factors.
• Paid plans are quite expensive.

Overall it is great Software to work on . So the only thing is you need to visit Figma to create a free account, and start creating your projects on it.

BIG NEWS : Figma has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Adobe! With access to Adobe’s deep expertise and technology, I hope figma will be able to achieve our vision of “making design accessible to all” even faster.

FRAMER

Framer is an interactive design tool for websites and prototyping. It supports every part of the design process, from visual mockups to interactive prototypes.

Same as Figma, InVision & Justinmind, you can use Framer on any browser and create online designs, prototypes, web frames, flow charts, and mind maps.

One of Framer’s main benefits is the sophisticated route editing it provides, which lets you create anything that is web-optimized. Additionally, the tool gives designers the appropriate symbol and style they need to create top-notch prototypes.

Pros

• Prototyping for mobile apps is much easier.
• Enables the integration of design and programming.
• Some advanced features like magic motion animation, live inputs, advanced interactions, and interactive components from the start.
• Good community interaction and willing to expand it.

Cons

• Missing pre-made components.

Note : one more thing you can do is create your designs on Figma and import it to Framer with the “Framer Copy Paste plugin” easily.

SKETCH

Sketch is a vector graphics editor. It is primarily used for user interface and user experience design of websites and mobile apps and does not include print design features.
Sketch has more recently added features for prototyping and collaboration.

Pros

• It is easy to use.
• Utilizing reusable UI material and components keeps UI uniformity.

Cons

• Only for mac user
• For numerous functionalities ,Plugins are occasionally necessary.
• Paid tool that costs you $9/month or $99/year.

But it offers a 30-day free trial so you can definitely give it a try if you are a MAC user.

JUSTINMIND

Justinmind is best alternative to figma.

The platform comes with User Interface (UI) Kits, which allows users to design beautiful interfaces and functional UI prototypes. JUSTINMIND also covers transitions, animations, gestures, and more. Simulation of ideas can also be made more realistic with the aid of data tables, dynamic behavior, and smart forms.

Pros

• Contains collection of pre-made wireframes for websites and mobile applications.
• Offers all the tools a user needs to create a mock-up or a fully functional prototype of feature-rich mobile and web applications, enterprise-grade software, website products, and more.
• Features a Reviewer Management that gives users complete control over who can review or even access the prototype. The feature can also be integrated with widely used testing tools.
• AIO package includes web UI elements and custom libraries, iOS and Android UI elements.

Cons

• Small storage.
• It can be expensive if you have a large team.

As it is free of cost. You can give a try.

INVISION STUDIO

InVision Studio is a prototyping and animation tool that lets you create advanced, vector-based screen designs fast . It’s considered one of the best high-fidelity prototyping tools.

Pros

• Speeds up your workflow, create interactive prototypes and communicate your designs to the team and clients.
• Provides quick tools to draw wireframes.
• Easily access on any browser.

Cons

• It is not the quickest and easiest experience.
• Integrations can be unreliable
• Its challenging to navigate.

Compared to tools like Figma and Sketch, InVision XD is slower and sometimes has errors. However, prototyping is the biggest strength of this tool.

ADOBE XD

Adobe Experience Design is a dedicated vector editor for UX designers. It offers a variety of tools for interactive prototyping and wireframing. The auto-motion aspect of 3D images makes stacking them quite simple.

Pros

• Simple and clean interfaces.
• Explicit feature of software prototyping.
• Helps in the rapid production of high-fidelity wireframes.
• With live preview, you can view how your design will look in real-world settings.

Cons

• Little expensive.
• UI is unattractive.
• No way to design customized shapes.
• No way to get the CSS.

Though even after having these cons it is still highly favored because of the good side of the software that is undoubtedly not seen in any other software.

CONCLUSION

These were the few best tools for UI/UX designing.

As per my Personal experience , I would prefer Figma and Framer as these are free to use with excellent features.

If you want to go for paid software then the best option is Adobe XD.

Hope it was helpful !!