Balsamiq is a wireframing tool that allows users to sketch out user interfaces for websites and web and and mobile apps.
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iRise
Score 6.0 out of 10
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iRise offers a prototyping and design platform for software development.
$19
per month
Pricing
Balsamiq
iRise
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iRise
$19
per month
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Pricing Offerings
Balsamiq
iRise
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
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No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
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Balsamiq
iRise
Considered Both Products
Balsamiq
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iRise
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Chose iRise
Balsamiq and Sketch are great choices for the solo UX/UI designer looking to generate quick and good looking prototypes, but they lack the business requirements documentation and extensive collaboration abilities of iRise.
You need 3-5 other tools, that iRise incorporates into one platform. There's really only one good choice for enterprise software prototyping. Balsamiq, inVision, Visio, and Sketch would need to get together, have a kid, and you may come close to the prodigy that iRise already …
Balsamiq is very well suited for mocking up / prototyping UIs for systems or apps. The really good thing about it is that the wireframes it produces do not look like real screens but all the same do look nice, neat and tidy. This allows you to express and design how your interface will looks and even work, but it also expresses that these are just wireframes. I have had problems throughout my career when I have mocked up UIs with HTML, often users and stakeholders think that the system is ready to be used or not far off, they can't seem to grasp that there is nothing behind it. Balsamiq helps here because the wireframes are in a hand drawn style, so they can't be confused with a near-ready or working system.
I can keep up with our UX/UI designer using iRise, and he's on a Mac and loves the Sketch, inVision software. I often trump him, by having all the direct customer feedback in place. This also works well with Pragmatic Marketing's approach to software. Requirements can be coded in line with Pragmatic's Strategy to Tactical framework. Love this software!
Low-fidelity wireframing—Balsamiq offers tools to create lo-fi wireframes without the messiness and confusion that often comes along with other types of lo-fi wireframing (e.g. hand-drawn wireframes). This helps us avoid the need to heavily “translate” our designs to the people we’re showing them to.
Easy-to-use interface—We have never had to spend time training anyone on how to use Balsamiq. Drag, drop, arrange—that’s it! This is helpful in getting non-designers and less experienced designers to communicate their ideas of what the finished design should sort-of look like without asking them to spend a lot of time learning a new tool.
Ability to convert a design to a PDF—This is definitely a plus! Whereas other design tools require stakeholders to log into a design tool account or view designs on a web page, Balsamiq makes it really easy to just download a design as a PDF and hand/email it to a stakeholder. Lots of our stakeholders don’t want to deal with visiting a website or logging into something. However, they’re typically happy to receive a PDF and not have to ask questions such as, “How do I access that?” and “What’s the password again?"
Recently my client has to have hovers as an enhancement to the current app. I used irise to show them how it would look in the future and they didn't like it. Finally because of the irise wireframe they decided not to have the hover - which was good before it was too late.
Client wanted a new interface to import Excel docs into the interface. I used irise to prototype the whole functionality.
Although it's not meant for sketching processes, it could be improved a bit for doing this (a bit more support for some more arrows or diagrams).
Sometimes it's possible to get a bit lost in different propositions. It's interesting that it's only propositions, but the offline desktop version works faster for me (lot of coping attributes and screenshots into my sketches).
It's using flash or something like that in their offline version, it keeps asking for updates.
When working on a complex page that has multiple sections with multiple views of each sections, it gets difficult to navigate to the section you want. It would be easier if there was a search functionality for searching the sections or components within the page.
Drag and drop controls to have more properties. e.g. for a button. It would be easier if the properties included BorderStyle, BorderWidth, Color, BackColor etc. Currently, these options are not available on the properties and we have to use the formatting tool bar.
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
This platform solves the problem that enterprise software sales teams encounter, and iRise cuts to the chase. Sales people often say "do your magic thing with the prototype" and the customer gives immediate feedback, we change it on the fly
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.
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
We have used iRise instead of tools like Word, Excel, Visio, and other diagram tools found online. iRise is good because I think it captures the good parts of all these packages into one. I am able to easily create diagrams and mockups in one software package instead of cobbling together a bunch of other solutions.
It has definitely saved time when negotiating interface changes with a large variety of stakeholders
Building a new layout is very quick and saves a lot of time when prototyping any clean basic interface
All of this eventually leads to better functionality for less money, which while hard to quantify is very useful
The only potential negative impact is that the design features are limited so may discourage the use of custom features which would have been particularly useful.
