Balsamiq vs UXPin

• Balsamiq makes wireframing and prototyping very fast and easy. You have a lot of pre-defined assets such as buttons, icons, titles, text, labels, placeholder items etc. that you can drag and drop, letting you finish an idea for a landing page or app quite quickly.
• I use Balsamiq not only for wireframing, but also sketching processes or business models. The visualization is sketchy enough to keep discussions in the idea-phase, instead of wasting time on detailed discussion.

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• Smart elements are super nice because they allow me to create complicated features that will appear on every page. When the client wants to change something it is very easy to do so in one place.
• Working on grid is important to me. Having the ability to change and manipulate that grid in UXPin is just what I need.
• There are tons of add on features like Font Awesome icons and prebuilt stuff that not only looks great, but also just lets me get ideas across fast without committing to what the final design is going to look like.
• I love the ability to edit things if I want. I can control several details, but it's not too overwhelming. They include various font options from Google fonts as well. You can design as much or as little as you want. The interface doesn't get in the way. It's there if you want it but has a simplicity that is nice.
• Having a link on a live webpage is a necessity. As soon as you make changes, they are live. No more worrying about which is the latest version.
• I'm a photoshop user so it has a few keyboard commands that are familiar like hold 'alt', click and drag to duplicate is nice!

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• Transition to design: In recent years, we have started to move away from Balsamiq to do wireframes in Sketch. By using Sketch for wireframes, we can establish our design patterns and symbol library early. When it's time to add colors, graphics, fonts, and more, our designer simply layers on top of the wireframes. This saves the design team a lot of time. We still use Balsamiq for quick mock-ups, but when building from scratch, we typically use Sketch. If there were some kind of easy way to transfer the Balsamiq symbols library to a design platform like Sketch, we might use it more often. Sadly, I think Sketch makes Balsamiq a bit irrelevant for experienced designers.
• Rulers: The lack of rulers in Balsamiq is very frustrating. The design does have a "snap to grid" as well as arrangement features like horizontal and vertical distribution, but this is NOT enough for my perfectionists out there.
• Icons: The icon library in Balsamiq is pretty limited. We typically use font-awesome to source icons for design projects. It would be great if Balsamiq tied in directly with font-awesome to offer a more complete set.
• Opening projects: Balsamiq changed it's software significantly a few years ago. Previously, each page of a project was saved as a .bmml. Now, each PROJECT is saved as a .bmpr, and can have as many pages as you want. This means in the past, you might have 10 separate files for a single project, and now you only have one. This is definitely a change for the better; however, I find that it's way too easy to accidentally save pages to the incorrect project. Why? Because when you open Balsamiq, it loads the last screens that you were working on rather than a blank new project. To me, this is confusing.

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• No search and replace for fonts (missing or just to replace).
• Tool is built for design/dev teams but does not integrate content teams in well.
• If you are not careful you can get lost in designing interactions when you should be just creating building blocks - don’t over animate!!!
• There is currently no “scrub” or click-drag interaction which limits touch capability testing/concepts.
• Editing adaptive versions of designs is very time consuming, edits to not ripple through from master viewport size. All updates are manual, even when creating an adaptive version.
• When a library item is updated, it can revert changes you have made unknowingly.
• Video integration is limited to online video host aggregators such as IMGR, YouTube, and Vimeo.
• Not a ton of info for a designer on how to use the expressions effectively.
• Prototypes with a lot of interactions can get slow, especially on computers with a lot of security software. It’s best to work with UXPin to figure out what is blocking APIs, and JS.

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• 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.

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• It helps us work faster and collaborate if your team members are scattered around the world.
• It's a quick way to mock-up designs so your team can "converge" and "diverge" during design sprints.

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