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.
$4
per month per user
InVision
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
InVision is a collaborative design and prototyping platform with features such as freehand drafting mode and interactive mockups, collaboration, idea management, user testing, and integration with Slack and other collaboration tools. According to the vendor, 1 million designers are using the free version.
$0
Pricing
Freehand by InVision
InVision
Editions & Modules
Freehand Free
$0
per year per user
Freehand Pro
$4
per month per user
Freehand Enterprise
Custom Quote
Free
$0
Pro
$7.75
per user/per month
Enterprise
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Freehand by InVision
InVision
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Freehand by InVision
InVision
Considered Both Products
Freehand by InVision
Verified User
Employee
Chose Freehand by InVision
I didn't personally make the decision to use one over the other, but I can say that I enjoy the look and feel of Freehand. I think having it integrate with a tool we're already using (InVision) makes it great for us as well.
I have used Zeplin in the past, and Freehand is by far faster and has a simpler UI. The fact that Freehand is married to the rest of the InVision suite of services makes it a match made in heaven. I have found Freehand's thoughtful progression toward a holistic design service …
Trello has a lot more options for application integration. We can integrate with InVision prototypes, Jira, etc. This makes it easier to share with other colleagues or collaborate using the links as deliverables. Can track deadlines and timelines on a project level. Freehand is …
MURAL is very similar in the type of approach we could use to walk through certain items but it lacks many features that we rely on in InVision, so we typically stay away from MURAL.
Verified User
Director
Chose Freehand by InVision
These products are very similar. MURAL seems to have more fun characters.
I really do like Miro and its features a lot but the fact that it doesn't integrate or live with the rest of our UX deliverables makes it challenging to use.
We've used and evaluated Whimsical, Lucidchart, and Figjam. I think each of these products is comparable, but the ability to have anyone join asynchronously and anonymously on a whiteboard is the key differentiator. There's no paywall or login gate either, so the barrier to …
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.
InVision is well suited for design reviews and immersing yourself in the experience of an app-to-be. As a Product Manager, it's difficult to take abstract concepts, user pain points, and business needs, and produce a vision for an app without a visual aid to communicate a vision. InVIsion offers PMs, designers, and developers the opportunity to sketch a vision, communicate about it with inline commenting, and shareable with other stakeholders.
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.
I didn't need to contact InVision support, as I've never needed it. They have an intuitive UI, and most of the questions are answered in their help portal or in tutorials online. Since many people use it, there a great resources available on for example YouTube. No problems so far with InVision.
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
We only tested out using Adobe XD for similar uses and found it to be more challenging to fit within our processes. It didn't have as robust a set of capabilities as InVision and wasn't as easy to use enterprise wide. I recall also having issues with working with Sketch.
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.
InVision helps our team better and more professionally portray the value and the work we do as designers, leading to more company buy-in in supporting and funding our work. In the past, we would create PowerPoints with screenshots to portray a user workflow that we would share out to stakeholders. Once we began to use this app, where stakeholders could click through and comment as though they were “real” users, stakeholders began to better understand our work, designs, and workflows. This has led to more productive conversations that, in turn, lead to more effective end products that have more consistently served our business goals in tangible ways.
InVision helps us save production time, effort, and cost, as we are able to solve design issues early in the process by having clickable prototypes to show to internal stakeholders and external users. It’s, understandably, difficult for people to provide effective feedback on screenshots. Using the clickable prototypes we created in InVision, we are able to get more effective feedback to solve user workflow issues before we spend time and money developing problematic designs (and later having to redesign them).
It’s easier to market designs to potential buyers with clickable prototypes than with screenshots. With these prototypes, we’ve been able to sell more digital products before product release dates, which has helped to secure many contracts and new business relationships that continue to this day.
