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 MockFlow is a great tool for low-fidelity wireframing for quick validation & contextualization of UX & UI hypotheses. It is not a substitute for full-fledged designing tools such as
Figma or Adobe XD.
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 Ease of use. The UX is great. A decent number of pre-built UI elements such as browser frames, dropdowns, buttons, etc. Good prototyping ability. We can create decent prototypes using links. Collaborating capability for multiple members in a team. Ease of exporting the wires in different formats. 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 Grouping the similar elements together to further enhance the UX. Detailing the wires is still clumsy. Monochromatic UI can be improved a bit. Icon availability is limited. More collaboration features. Grouping of elements in the wires is cumbersome. 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 Easy UI & good UX makes the usability very convenient.
Read full review Support Rating We haven't had to use the support feature yet
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 Figma is a high-fidelity designing tool and provides too many features which would be overkill if we are looking for basic prototyping. Also, if you are not a designer and just want to create basic wires or prototypes as a Business Analyst or Product Manager, MockFlow would suffice your needs. But if you are focusing on pixel-perfect designs then I would suggest going for
Figma . The ease of usability with MockFlow is very convenient as there would be a steep learning curve for
Figma .
Balsamiq is very similar to MockFlow but the wires created in it look a bit sketchy & clumsy.
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 Low turnaround time for creating wireframes resulting in aligning the team on a single path. Validating UX & UI hypothesis quickly leading to less rework & quicker results Saving to & fro time with parallel collaboration feature. Read full review ScreenShots