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
MediaFire
Score 5.1 out of 10
N/A
MediaFire is a simple file sharing and storage platform. It allows users to store, share, and view media files within the MediaFire online, desktop, or mobile app interface. The vendor says MediaFire's file storage system is private and secure. In terms of collaboration, users can invite friends to share files via Facebook, Google, Twitter, or email. MediaFire's collaboration features include folder and file sharing, and controls for who can view and/or edit particular files. MediaFire…
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.
It is well suited for large file sharing and file syncing. Easy to collaborate the files and provide access. File encryption, some features are pretty limited like the ease of use on front end as well. Customer support can be better and improve customer loyalty. Design can be improved for easier navigation and use.
FileDrop feature. This is an amazing functionality that increases collaboration among our team. People can drop files in a specific folder related to a project and we can keep it organized.
Mobile Apps for Android and iOS. The apps works pretty well and you can carry your files everywhere.
Regular and Instant Uploads - MediaFire checks for the exact same file in the cloud. If it finds it, the upload will be instant. Otherwise, it proceeds with regular upload.
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.
Download Page - When you generate a link to download some files it redirects users to a specific page where they can download the file. The page is sometimes confusing and with a lot of ads which can be a little bit annoying.
Customization Option - you can find a customization section in "Settings", but there are just a few things that you can really customize. Maybe improving this would be nice to allow you personalize your environment (for companies, for instance).
Blocked options for the free version - There are a lot of interesting options that are available just for business and pro versions. If you could at least test it before upgrading your version it would help users decide.
Lack of PC sync client - Would be great if you could install a PC client that would synchronize your files.
Problems when refreshing your files list in the browser. Sometimes it gets slow and you have to refresh the entire page to continue.
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
MediaFire's Pro Pricing is cheaper than Dropbox, although they're less known in the industry. I trust them with important documents, and they [have] never lost a file, whereas I can't say the same about other services like theirs. Customer service is fast and friendly if you need them, and their site is very clean and clutter free, which (to me) is important.
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.
Thanks to MediaFire I have been able to recover information stored many years ago on their servers, since they usually do not delete files after a certain time.
It has helped me to be able to backup sensitive information from long before the existence of massive clouds, so if you did not make these backups you had to lose all the information, but thanks to half fire that did not happen to me.
