Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Notion is good for a plethora of use cases. The templates that it offers give just a few established pages for common uses but these are some of my favorites:
Kanban board: we use it a lot in my company to manage tasks and meetings Note taking: whether in a professional or academic environment, Notion is well suited to take notes of everything regardless. Software documentation: the "code" component to insert code snippets is perfect for creating tutorials and documentation for software development. Finance control: I use the "my finances" template to have a proper following of my monthly transactions, which allowed me to be more responsible with my money. Inventory management: Since I own multiple peripherals and general equipment, being able to have a portable inventory of all of it that includes their original value, warranty length and current state has been perfect to know when clean, maintain or straight up replace everything. Read full review Pros Bring in and embed external files and view them on the board without having to move out of freehand. eg. pdf's, power point, youtube etc. Creating wireframes, flow maps, all and any kinds of created art boards to share with team members. Ability to create text and link to external sites Can format and create pages with text and bullet points right in freehand, rather than having to go to another software to do the same. Collaborate with Team members all on the same board and project at the same time and get feedback live in a meeting and/or even later. Love the different templates that have been provided for me to use as a starting point. Read full review Team Collaboration. In Notion's software is the ability to see precisely who is working on a project and where. This eliminates any confusion when on calls or when working on the same project simultaneously. It is easy to tag co-workers to precise moments and build conversation streams. Text Coding. When transitioning text from our Notion ideation and drafting boards to our website backends, the coding holds on all of the text. Organization. Whether it's utilizing a "pin board" set up or nestling pages within pages, it is possible to keep everything organized and easy to find for every member of your team. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review The increase in integrations with third parties will always promote the adoption of the platform in companies. Personalization with logos and corporate colors sometimes makes the difference when selecting a tool in a corporation. Having multiple functionalities for working in manufacturing companies and with devices developed by third parties encourages other companies to select Notion as their flagship tool to offer implementation packages under alliances that favor its use. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Art Stiefel Adjunct Professor - Digital Media & Advertising
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Art Stiefel Adjunct Professor - Digital Media & Advertising
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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
Read full review Trello only has the Kanban board feature and is great for task management, while Notion has a vast array of features, is easier to use, and has a more visually-appealing interface. I choose to use Notion over
Trello due to its increased versatility and greater customization capabilities.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model 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.
Art Stiefel Adjunct Professor - Digital Media & Advertising
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Professional Services We didn't use an outside vendor - that's why I gave this option a 10.
Art Stiefel Adjunct Professor - Digital Media & Advertising
Read full review Return on Investment Positives all around. Everyone is able to see and collaborate. Granting access is sometimes a pain. Sending the link does not always work, and I get emails as people try to access boards. No negatives really, I love learning all of the different ways it can be used. Read full review In just a short amount of time, the majority of my course draft has been transferred into an interactive online course, always live Sufficient control over page structure gives a clean look, with sufficient means to add some personal touches After a learning period, I could concentrate on the content rather than the tech A huge motivational drive to learn more about no-code platforms (enthusiastic learner!) Read full review ScreenShots