Many designers still use Photoshop for literally everything. I decided to compile a list of the most common UX design tools that every beginner should know about. In this list, you can find prototyping, UX / UI software and collaboration tools. Many of them will be familiar to you, but I hope you will find some interesting ones for specific tasks. My recommendation is to choose the appropriate tools for the task and don’t restrict yourself to one product.
Every UX designer needs a wireframing tool, but not everyone uses the right one for their requirements. Let’s see what you can find on the market…
Invision is one of the best choices when we are talking about prototyping tools. And it’s not just a prototyping tool, it’s also a collaboration and workflow platform. InVision is ideal for creating fast click-through prototypes of web, desktop and mobile applications that can be easily shared.
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Price: starts from $15 / month
Axure is the most used prototyping tool at our UX company. So it’s no question that we highly recommend it. You can do literally anything with Axure. The complexity gives you many possibilities to expand your mind.
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Price: $29 / user / mo
Many designers and product teams use UXpin. Perfect choice for a collaborative UX design tool.
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Price: starts from $19 / month
Mockplus is a fast, easy and smart way for prototyping. It works on multiple platforms and has multiple export options. Definitely has to be on this list.
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Price: $10 / month
With Proto.io you can create fully interactive hi-fidelity prototypes. And it will work exactly like a real application. Give it a try!
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Price: starts from $12 / month
“Life’s too short for bad UX design software! With Balsamiq Mockups, anyone can design great” – One of my favourite sentences from Balsamiq. 🙂
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Price: starts from $12 / month
JustinMind is designed for web and mobile app prototyping. To be honest we haven’t tried it, but we read positive feedback about it. If you have any experience regarding JustinMind please share it with us in the comment section!
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Price: starts from $19 / month
Don’t need to waste a lot of words on it. One of the perfect, all-in-one UX design tools approaches from Adobe. If you have’t tried it, then it’s time to download!
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Price: N/A
Marvel is a simply designed prototyping and collaboration UX design tool.
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Price: starts from $12 / month
Principle is one of our favorite ones when we would like to test animations in the prototyping phase.
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Price: $129
Origami is a new tool for designing modern interfaces, built and used by designers at Facebook.
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Price: N/A
“Big ideas often start with a simple drawing. Whether it’s a new business idea or the solution to a problem. The same is also true for great User Experiences.” We at UX studio deeply believe in that. We start every design project on paper. Do you use a pen and a paper at the beginning of the design?
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Price: from $1
When you have to create a pixel-perfect UI design then you need a perfect tool. But hold on. But hold on, for decades PS has been the industry standard for UI design. But in the past few years many challengers, as well as new tools to edit images seamlessly, have appeared on the market. Let’s see them!
We still use Adobe Photoshop even though there are many better, faster and cheaper options on the market. The reason is that Photoshop is still the industry standard. You can do everything with it and many developers only accept projects in .psd files.
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Price: $19.99 / month
It’s no secret. Sketch is our favorite. It’s fast and flexible. Designed for UI designers. Unfortunately, it just works on Mac.
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Price: $99
Affinity Designer is a professional graphic design software with perfect UI and a cheap price. Take a look!
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Price: €39.99
The twin of Photoshop. Illustrator is the industry-standard tool for vector graphics. Don’t need to introduce it if you have been in the business for a while.
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Price: $19.99 / mo
When you have to work together with other teams you need collaboration tools. We’ve recently written a blogpost about remote work and recommended many tools there. Here are some more:
We use Zeplin for handing over our design projects to developers. I’d say this is the best option.
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Price: starts from $0 (only 1 project / month)
A competitor of Zeplin. We tried it as well but we found Zeplin was better. But maybe you’ll like it. Or have you tried it? What was your impression?
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Price: starts from $6.75 / month
Inspect is a pixel-perfect design handoffs and engineering collaboration tool. It’s new and very promising.
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Price: from $15 / month combined with Invision
“A messaging app for teams who put robots on Mars.” Slack is the most commonly used messaging app nowadays. If you haven’t used it, now is the time to start.
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Price: starts from $0 (limitations)
Trello is a free, flexible and visual way to organize anything. We use Trello in almost all of our projects. And clients love it.
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Price: $0
Basecamp is one of the most common web-based (UX) project management tools.
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Price: $99 / month
Prevue is a stunning design presentation tool. You can get fast client feedback through it. Get familiar with Prevue.
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Price: $5 / month
It’s a visual collaboration tool for creative works. You can discuss design and video pieces visually, track changes and prototype together with your team and your clients.
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Price: $14 / month
This is just great. Red Pen is the fastest feedback tool for visual teams.
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Price: $20 / month
RealtimeBoard is an online whiteboard tool. It’s very easy to use and is a fast collaboration platform for agile product teams, UX/UI designers, project leaders, marketers and creatives.
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Price: starts from $0 / 3 team member
Disclaimer: this article was created in December, 2016. Some prices and features might have been updated since then.
I am interested in finding out what you use for particular cases, so leave us a comment down below and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn and share this list!
Also interested in Product Design processes? Check out our free e-book, the Product Manager’s Guide to UX Design.
For additional reading, check out our Product Design book by our CEO, David Pasztor. We ship worldwide!
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