Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review It's very easy to collaborate on the same file with team members and create simple concepts and flowcharts that you can use in the development process. It is also very handy for creating graphs and tables for presentations. Since this is a web application, we can use it anywhere, anytime and on any device; which provides great flexibility and accessibility. It also offers the functionality to save your work as you develop it, which is very helpful.
Read full review Pros 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 Read full review Draw.io offers a lot of shapes and customizability of how the diagrams are laid out. We've been able to create a lot of different things with it, and have barely scratched the surface of the sorts of things that we could do. Draw.io is fairly intuitive in the way that you draw shapes and connect shapes together, I was able to figure it out without a tutorial. Draw.io is fast and performant for me compared with some of the alternatives. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review One element that was hard to use was converting pre-existing drawings and workflows from Gliffy to Draw.io once our company made the change. While we were able to complete the migration, when going back we noticed, oftentimes, some formatting and dependencies did not make it or were not compatible. While the template repository is vast, it has a heavy focus on network style maps. It would be ideal for added diversity in the templates with a focus on workflows just as much. While the integrations are strong, the cloud collaborative environment could still use some work. While you can save and edit in the cloud. Group editing and live dynamic sharing/editing similar to Microsoft office are still missing. Draw.io could add some version control functionality for ease of rollback, auditing, & comparison. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Support Rating We haven't had to use the support feature yet
Read full review The support for draw.io is pretty decent, considering it is a free website. I had a question one time when I was trying to do something, so I sent an email to their support email and got a response fairly quickly with an answer to my question. They also have some excellent support tools on their support website for helping you get more familiar with their program, and I found that very helpful.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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
Read full review Draw.io is totally free and it has most of the features a commercial product like Visio would have, so I think it is a go-to. It has good integration with Google Drive and it can export to a variety of files. You are not constrained by some commercial proprietary file format. It can be used in a browser on any device or downloaded as a desktop app.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review draw.io has surely impacted our organization positively by saving some crucial time. It has not really impacted much monetarily to be honest. The ROI we got from draw.io is that it has made complex things clear for everyone in our organization. Read full review ScreenShots