FigJam is an online interactive whiteboard from Figma headquartered in San Francisco, presently in beta (2021) but available to the public in a free trial. The vendor states that in 2022, FigJam will have plans for $0, $8, and $15 per editor, per month.
$5
per month per editor
Freehand by InVision
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Freehand, from InVision headquartered in New York, is an online whiteboard that enables teams to plan, brainstorm, and draw together. It aims to give everyone a simple way to visually represent ideas with charts, diagrams, and drawings. Whether for mind mapping, creating a customer journey map, or drafting up an org chart, Freehand can help teams make ideas and plans visual.
I feel like Figjam is great at at what it does. It provides a great overall place to be able to use a virtual whiteboard and help teams collaborate. Especially remote teams. It actually does it better than others. There are some tools such as InVision Freehand that at the …
I do like how InVision has so many more features than FigJam does keeping it well ahead as a virtual whiteboard and collaboration software. At the moment there are not enough features in FigJam to create an entire team switch to FigJam. I do like how easy it is to share FigJam. …
Feels better and more intuitive than Miro, however, FigJam would be my ultimate go-to just because Figma is the software that I am most familiar with. Figma has design, prototyping, and now the collaboration feature, so if I was deciding on the software for collaboration I …
I find the sketching ability a lot easier on InVision Freehand. I find I can move faster and get my ideas across clearer. FigJam offers too many small line options. I often waste time trying to customize my pencil to sketch. In InVision Freehand, it's the perfect balance of …
We were using inVision Freehand at the time based on a team member's suggestion. They were familiar with it, having used it at their prior organization, so we naturally adopted it after they introduced it to the organization. However, the team quickly moved on to other …
I used FigJam for a while and really liked it. It's been almost 9 months in size I've used it so I can't remember precise details, but at the time, I remember it being a little more 'sturdy' - it could handle more (bigger files). They are comparable products. Our organization …
I have found that between freehand InVision Freehand, Miro, MURAL and FigJam, each product does certain things differently. Some of those products execute certain features better than others. One benefit to InVision freehand is that it's sometimes nice to have all of your messy …
InVision Freehand is closing the gap and adding all the functionalities that some of these tools provide separately. In the race towards a one-stop digital design ecosystem, InVision Freehand is well poised to deliver and connect where others can't. I hope that with the news of …
In my opinion, InVision Freehand is worse than every other option I've tried. I would not have selected InVision Freehand if given the choice, but it wasn't my decision at our company.
All products are getting pretty good, but InVision stands out as the most frictionless one to use. A lot of the power is cleverly designed so that it doesn't get in the way of how differently people naturally think and operate. For example, even the presence of a grid on some …
I selected Invision Freehand for my purpose because it is easier to create and doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge to use. For example with FigmaJam, I feel like it's easier for designers to use because they use Figma for creating designs. With Mural I like to use …
I honestly think all the tools mentioned above are pretty well designed and executed compared to freehand. As far as the features of freehand compared to other tools, I do not see anything unique or extra that one software does that the other software does not. So with that …
It is well suited when people use it to sketch the first wireframes of the UX, like the Breadboarding technique from Basecamp. I used to work like that when modifying some UX. Our designers used to sketch over our current experience wireframe, and then we could discuss it by using the comments in Figjam or the Call feature at FigJam. That made it easy to discuss it. When building up group boards to discuss ideas, I use Miro, once it has more native pre-sets that help conducts the discussion.
InVision Freehand has quickly evolved to be a very robust solution for our pre-design process and collaboration with stakeholders and other product teams. It has brought a lot more hands-on workshopping opportunities and created engaging spaces for cross functional teams. Internally to our design org we are able to prototype ideas faster and generate insights or changes BEFORE going into more hi-fidelity design tools or processes.
The resolution: Our webpage designs always pass the resolution threshold to where freehand starts to work its compression. During presentations, it can be a little embarrassing when we can't read the copy because it looks like potatoes.
Embedding videos: GIFs are only good to a certain point, and creating Vimeo embeds is tedious. I wish I could embed MP4s or web assets a lot quicker.
Touchpad panning: I can't tell you how many times I've "gone back" in my browser when I'm just trying to pan across the freehand. Has honestly made me wanna force quit on many occasions.
Sticky notes and text in shapes: Overall, it's really hard to use the sticky notes and text inside rectangles without the text just getting all over the place. It's different sizes, it gets too tiny, it gets way too big, and overall, it just doesn't look professional, even with a lot of fussing.
No ability to crop/mask an image. Nice to have, but sometimes we just need to delete a chunk off a screenshot, and it requires opening PS or taking a screenshot to edit anything.
Wish there was a way to have "internal comments" that are not visible to our clients.
Honestly as in any organization it's up to budget. I feel like every organization I go to I'm constantly striving to keep InVision as part of the main funded tools used by the team especially in a remote environment. I feel there is a push to move to Figma and Zooms new white boarding tool but I'm still not a fan of Zoom's tool. Microsoft also created a white boarding tool which has been buggy.
Color Selection can be tricky when changing colors for shapes and text I've seen other users struggle with creating sticky notes and getting text to fit in the box properly and had to abandon the tool for a workshop for this reason After having a demo, I learned of new features I wasn't using. I don't know it would have been intuitive to find on my own.
For availability, we never have to even think about whether inVision Freehand is going to be available for us to work with. There has never been a time when we have opened up the application and had any issues of any kind. I can't imagine why anyone would work with a platform that is unreliable. inVision Freehand is realibel, stable, and getting better all the time. Whether it's their built-in tools or the expanding of Templates to work with Freehand has been a reliable go-to platform for us.
It is a little slow when bringing artboards from Sketch to Freehand using Craft. I have had some issues loading and redrawing pages when I have a lot of images on my freehand board. It gives me an error message while I am in the file and starts to reload and redraw all the photos again. Not sure if it has a limit on how many images it can handle on a board at a time.
I haven't had to use the support team for anything, which is great news because that means the product usually works as expected! In terms of online support, I've been able to find videos that show how new features work. Also, many of the people I work with have experience with the tools so they are a great resource for me.
The implementation is pretty much easy-peasy and plug-n-play. We simply download the applications and install, signed in and were good to go. I really cannot imagine that there would be anyone who would have any difficulty whatsoever in getting started in more than just a few minutes. It's really how implementing these officewide improvements should always go.
Positive: FigJam is cheaper than Miro and allows connecting with FigJam, where we design our user interfaces. FigJam is more complete and visually appealing than draw.io, although draw.io is free. FigJam allows calls, which both competitors do not. Negative: Miro has more pre-set diagrams than FigJam and they are native and easy to use FigJam is paid, while draw.io is not.
Miro (formerly Realtime Board) is the original product concept for this tool and I used it for 3-4 years for product development. Invision is aesthetically a carbon copy of the tool but lacks in fine usability controls. We actually didn't choose Freehand, it just came as an added tool under our Invision subscription. It's helpful but knowing the previous tool, it's been a hard sell because it's just not as good. Again, it's really fine tuned usability things like navigation, zoom, switching from tool to tool, selecting and deselecting, etc
Getting set up with inVision Freehand was super simple. We figured how many of our team members were going to be using it and we set up our account knowing that. There were no negotiations, contract hassles or anything that would have been a waste of our time, efforts or resources.
Not everyone in the company has access to Invision, and they can't view the links I provide to them. I also wish everyone could view a file without logging in to the enterprise account. It comes in handy when I am doing focus-group studies or other studies with our customers that don't have Freehand. Unfortunately, if that is possible, I don't know how to do that.
