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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Balsamiq

    Score7.2 out of 10
    N/ABalsamiq is a wireframing tool that helps lean product teams turn early ideas into clear, actionable direction. The tool helps product managers, founders, and engineers worldwide share concepts, reduce rework, and build better products.

    $12

    per month (up to 2 projects)

    Bloomfire

    Score8.4 out of 10
    Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
    Bloomfire provides knowledge engagement, aiming to deliver an experience that connects teams and individuals with the information they need to excel at their jobs. Their cloud-based knowledge engagement platform aims to give people one centralized, searchable place to engage with shared knowledge and grow their organization's collective intelligence.

    $25

    per month

    Pricing
    BalsamiqBloomfire
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Basic
    $25.00
    per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    BalsamiqBloomfire
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup fee$25
    Additional DetailsPay per project, not per user
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    BalsamiqBloomfire
    Considered Both Products
    Balsamiq
    No answer on this topic
    Bloomfire
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    97%
    Would buy again
    158 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    90 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    160 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    54 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    99%
    Implementation went as expected
    73 Answers
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    Zendesk Guide
    Score9.2 out of 10
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    Score8.9 out of 10
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    User Ratings
    BalsamiqBloomfire
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.5
    (31 ratings)
    9.2
    (174 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.0
    (5 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (14 ratings)
    Support Rating
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (15 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    BalsamiqBloomfire
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Balsamiq
    Balsamiq is a great tool for quickly getting ideas into visual form. At first it seems like there are not that many UI assets, but this constraint actually adds to the speed. There are less things for you to fuss over, you can focus on getting your ideas down. This is a tool for lofi rough drawings not a tool for building beautiful prototypes for developers to code to. It is fantastic for ideation because you mostly just drag and drop components onto the canvas and move things around. It's great in a live workshop setting for that reason.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Bloomfire
    Ad testing:
    • PTS: needed to bring a new senior marketing team member up to speed on how we got to our current TV campaign
    • Solution: Series featuring consumer insights, why specific spokesperson, agency brief, the entire creative process - scrips, animatics, rough cuts, feedback, and testing at each step. Including the actual creative from each step.
    • Total time to build: 1 hour
    Concept testing:
    • PTS: things get lost, findable but version control
    • Solution: everything in one placeConcepts, testing, IHUTs, verbatims, videos with transcripts. Reduces the possibility of missing something, helps with any builds (reuse), but gives us a the chance to dig deeper. Example: search on terms like "indulgent", or "crispy" or "share" much faster
    • Total time to build: 1 hour
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Balsamiq
    • Easy to use
    • Produces good quality mock ups and prototypes
    • Mock ups are obviously only just mock ups (this is important as if users see mock-ups in HTML, for example, they tend to think the system is ready to use or not far off)
    • Has a good selection of standard shapes that mock real world fields / controls
    • Allows not for profit organisations use it for free
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Bloomfire
    • Quickly reach out to whatever employee segment you want to reach by posting a topic and it will send a notification to everyone in that group with a link to the posting.
    • Bloomfire saves all of the previous posts so in your free time you can go to the site, and explore the various range of topics others have posted. The information on there will only be as good as the person posting it, but it will be people within your company and industry posting it. So it will always be helpful.
    • Bloomfire is a place to be noticed by your peers. Have a great topic you want to express, my company allows all to post there as long as we keep it professional. So you can share your ideas or experiences in a safe and productive manner. But we do have some fun on there too!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Balsamiq
    • The sketch-like style can be off-putting to some stakeholders, and it’s not initially very clear that there is the option to turn this “off.” While I do think there is benefit to the default style, knowing from the start that this flexibility existed would have helped us be able to use this tool more often in the past and in different situations.
    • There are very limited collaborative functionalities. When it’s early in the design process, it’s often really helpful to have a number of people in the design to offer in-app feedback so the designer doesn’t have the burden of collecting feedback from many disparate sources in order to incorporate the feedback.
    • There are limited UI elements. As design evolves, there are more and more UI elements to consider, and many to stop using. Our Balsamiq wireframes would be a lot more effective in communicating design ideas to stakeholders if there was a wider range of UI elements to choose from.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Bloomfire
    • I would recommend adding a feature to combine different posts/series by job title (so in addition to the Revenue Ops category, there could be a structured walkthrough for Revenue Manager).
    • Live Q+A sessions for group onboarding initiatives.
    • Ability to label bookmarks by priority/job type.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Balsamiq
    I'm not sure how else we would be able to complete our work without Balsamiq or another similar tool. All of my experience with Balsamiq has been positive and they continue to develop new features so that my job gets easier. I would be very surprised if we didn't renew Balsamiq
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Bloomfire
    Most likely we will renew, our team needs a refresher on possible opportunities to advance our usage and learning of opportunities to move this answer to a 10, can't live without it.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Balsamiq
    Very intuitive and easy to understand. It only takes minutes to get the hang of it and get back to work. For new analysts (like, brand new, fresh out of school) it's not difficult and they need minimal to no hand-holding. The training content that is embedded is easy to find and use.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Bloomfire
    Bloomfire is an easy-to-use platform for posting information and asking questions of my peers. It also has a user-friendly search capability. Yet like any other CMS, the secret to success rests in such items as the ability to use metadata to tag content or posts, and Bloomfire provides a wide range of options to make posting content and subsequently searching for it.
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Balsamiq
    We haven't had to use the support feature yet
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Bloomfire
    I have not needed to pose questions to the support team yet, as it is a very simple piece of software to use, however, its help documents and the bot ready to answer questions let me know I am in good hands. The help center could load a little quicker, but that's my only complaint.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Balsamiq
    Creating digital wireframes in Photoshop is a nightmare. Photoshop was not really designed for this purpose. It doesn't have good collaboration options and it doesn't allow pattern libraries, which are essential for consistency and efficiency. We use UXPin and Axure for some time, but found that these platforms were a bit bloated. Balsamiq is much simpler than any of these options. It's a perfect wireframing platform for non-designers or for designers that want to focus on content and element-placement prior to design
    Incentivized
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    Bloomfire
    I like Bloomfire because it is more concise with the work I do whereas Google search engine would provide broader information. It has just been so user-friendly, and easier to use [than] I could have imagined. I would use this program over any other that I have tried in the past.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Balsamiq
    • The product works very well for showing product owners and developers design ideas for purposes of discussion, debate and refinement.
    • The products also works very well for specifying new designs for developers. This is best done in a series of screens that show various screen states and user interactions.
    • I also use the products to document bugs in software products and websites we have developed. This includes outlining and documenting bugs and changes to user interactions and refinements to the usability of completed interfaces and user experiences.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Bloomfire
    • Feedback from users in being able to perform transactions for members has greatly improved.
    • There has been an increase in engagement of material presented in posts by learners in training classes.
    • Reps and agents say they feel confident they can easily locate information if ever there is a need on the front line.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Balsamiq Screenshots

    Screenshot of the Balsamiq user interfaceScreenshot of the commenting feature, which supports collaborationScreenshot of where to export wireframes to PDF and PNGScreenshot of where to add wireframes to Confluence pages to clarify ideas, make specs visual, and align teamsScreenshot of where to add wireframes to Jira issues to clarify specs, reduce rework, and help teams build the right thing

    Bloomfire Screenshots

    Screenshot of You are provided with a variety of options to brand your Bloomfire community, such as customizing its colors, displaying your organization’s logo, and building a custom Promo Bar. This creates an aesthetic that truly reflects your company’s culture.Screenshot of Bloomfire features an AI-powered search that makes sharing and searching for information a lot easier. It deep indexes every word in each piece of content, regardless of whether it’s a PDF, slide deck, video, or any other file type. The platform also creates tags for your content automatically. And if a video is uploaded, Bloomfire automatically transcribes it, making the spoken words searchable and allowing users to jump to the exact part of a video where certain keywords appear.

All of those features result in an easy and smart searching experience. There’s no need to navigate through folders or guess file names. All you need to do is perform a search like you would with Google. When searching, you can further narrow down your results based on categories such as author and content type.Screenshot of Bloomfire's AI enables you to search and find the video you are looking for based on its audio contents.Screenshot of Use Bloomfire while you work seamlessly across your favorite apps.