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.
Cost effectiveness and while Miro is good for collaboration and sprint and PI planning, I think its too open-ended. Easy to get lost in a board. Snagit is my go-to tool but it is not a collaborative tool. If I could combine Snagits tools with Invisions look/feel...that would be …
For real-time collaboration and whiteboarding Comparable to Mural and Miro Better and more flexible than Figma For written documentation: Different features and more limited than Google Doc Similar to Notion in editing experience but more limited in features For creating …
The two other platforms that people have tried to get us to use are Figma and Miro. Since we have been using InVision Freehand it works much better for our teams and is within the InVision environment that we are familiar with. The InVision Freehand tools and user interface are …
Honestly, Zoom and Teams don't compare for their whiteboarding. Mainly because those are glitchy and unreliable. I've tried using them in meetings and especially with Zoom (maybe because they are newer) it loads and freezes up. I like to be "on it" in meetings and can't have …
We use Miro as well and I like it also but it's been a bit more complicated to learn and doesn't fit as well in situations where we need to create and update things quickly.
I didn't select Invision Freehand. I have used Miro the most in the past and I feel like you are dragging behind what they offer. From my experience, their text editing tools are easier. They provide the ability to vote on activities. Attaching emojis to things actually works. …
I chose InVision because others on my team were already using it! I still use other alternatives, but I love the simplicity of InVision and what it allows me to do.
They seem quite similar in a lot of ways but I tend to slightly prefer Invision overall. Seems like it is easier to use and offers much of the same feature set. If it were up to me I'd probably just use InVision Freehand going forward and stop using Figma altogether.
I actually have access to all three. And I use all three for different things, though truthfully, I could probably get away with just using Figma. I'm not sure how InVision Freehand is better than Miro or Figma. But we already own it, so it has made sense for me to use it in …
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 …
The sharing/accessibility of the mocks. It’s hard for someone not on the design team to see their mocks unless the links were shared but this might be by design or license based.
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 …
The collaboration in a real-time manner is incredible at InVision Freehand, and arguably the best I've worked with to date. With the way work is getting done today, top-notch tools for discussion, alignment, and idea generation make a huge impact on the bottom line & the …
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 …
Freehand is the least polished of the bunch. It doesn't instantly make your thoughts and design look sexy. It doesn't open up your designs to be edited live, inspected, and sliced up for export. It doesn't let you interact with flow charts, like showing or hiding long pieces of …
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 …
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.
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.
