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 Omnigraffle is great for documentation, mapping, flowcharting, and other technical diagramming scenarios. It's simple enough to bang out a quick illustration and powerful enough to build complex blueprints for complicated technical systems. If you need cross-platform compatibility, though, you're probably better off looking elsewhere. If you want complex integration with data sources (ala Visio's SQL Server integration for shape metadata), OmniGraffle also falls short — but those scenarios are few and far between in my experience.
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 OmniGraffle is fairly simple to use, but the one thing I think it does best is working with curved lines, particularly if you are using some of the available arc templates. Drop an arc onto your page, then tell it the dimensions it needs to be, and viola! Done. Manipulating the arcs is as simple as clicking and dragging offset points. OmniGraffle has also done an excellent job in stirring up the creative minds of many people who create templates and tools to work with OmniGraffle (not that Microsoft hasn't done so either), and managed to get the bulk of those into well organized repositories. What it all boils down to for me is: it just works. One doesn't need to have a computer science degree to work with it either. It is as simple or complex as you want it to be. 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 There could be more scaffolding to support new users in getting to know how to best use all of the many features and tools it provides. There could be more support for printing. Many of our process flows extend beyond just one page, and OmniGraffle is rather finicky about printing multipage documents. We could use this tool more effectively if there was the ability to have real-time team collaboration. Document handoffs can be a point of missed communication, so it’d be great if we could ever have the option of working together in the same place at the same time. 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 Best product for my needs on the market
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 OmniGraffle is an excellent application for chart and diagrams development. Been using it for a while now and it's a multiple platform application.
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 To sum up:
use Omnigraffle for diagraming or for quick wireframe drafting use Sketch for more in-depth wireframing that you can then flesh out into a high fidelity mock-up, export assets for production, and integrate with prototyping tools like Proto.io and UXPin . 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 Instrumental in smoothly transitioning a 3rd party development team from designs to requirements. Across cultures, US, Chinese, and Icelandic, OmniGraffle allowed our teams to speak the same language. The depth of the software make some elements that are useful less accessible than they should be. Read full review ScreenShots