Balsamiq vs. Visily

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.

Incentivized

When building a new product or even a new startup - this tool is priceless, in demonstrating a product's potential without really building it and investing expensive resources before you have users' validation. It's less usable for any backend planning, or when the system behind is too complicated and any user interaction changes the dataset behind the scenes

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Prototype feature: enables to move from one screen to another as if the buttons are real
• Premade elements: makes it easy to build the mockup and give it a professional look and feel
• Easy to edit and change as we go

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• When navigating on the big board, it's hard to track the different screens when there are a few dozen of them
• Prototype mode: there should be an easier way to track the screen that needs to be connected from a specific element
• I'd like to use a proofreading extension on top of Visiliy, such as Grammarly, so I won't have to look for those typos

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We haven't had to use the support feature yet

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The possibility to animate to mockup is very valuable and needed at the product's early stage and validation stage

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Saved us hours of developing the wrong product, since we could enhance validation by demoing a pre-built product by using Visily
• Helped us communicate ideas between Product and Developer roles within our team
• Cost us some extra time in design, because we didn't import the design from Visily to Miro, which created an overlap

Incentivized