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
Prezi
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Prezi’s advantage over static slides is that its interactive, zoomable canvas shows the relationship between the big picture and the fine details. The vendor’s value proposition is that this puts ideas in context, and makes them more likely to resonate, motivate, and be remembered.
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.
When you have to present complex hierarchical structures, and if your audience would require navigation in and out of the hierarchy, then Prezi is a good candidate for you. But be prepared, Prezi is not as intuitive as a standard presentation tool, and it may take some time to get used to.
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.
Linux support is non-existent. With Android/Chrome OS being based on the linux kernel but also with lots of tech-savvy and influencers using non-Windows and non iOS platforms, I feel a pariah.
As far as I know for Android phones and tablets you can only present but not edit prezis in its native app. Again an Android users, it is a sub-par experience the app in general is lacking functionality.
Using the browser version (because I have no other alternative) uploading multiple images is very buggy
Having a version history would be great when you are editing a large presentation over several days
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.
Learning to use Prezi and create new presentations is very simple and easy to do. It does not require new skills or a long training process, since in general the use is quite intuitive (and if you have any questions there are many videos on how to use it). Its operation in both the browser version and the app is very good and fluid, managing to perform all the tasks you want properly.
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.
It is a modern and easy-to-use tool (after a while) that allows you to make dynamic and trained presentations without the need to be an expert user. It has allowed me to improve the attention and motivational processes of my students. In addition, it has many [community users] who make videos and teach the many uses that you can use Prezi. And because, despite the restrictions of the free version, everyone can access and make use of Prezi and thus improve their boring ppt and inject some vitality into them.
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
Other solutions for presentations all fall on the typical slideshow paradigm. So far, only Prezi walked away from this path. Its expanding canvas and freeform path are refreshing in this scenario. In this sense, Prezi is unique in its style of presentation, which makes difficult to establish comparisons based on costs. The still ongoing migration to Prezi Next has been a bit troubled, according to some old users, but it seems the company is working to give Prezi Next the same flexibility that Prezi Classic. And Prezi already has a huge user base that do not want to go back working with the limits of slides.
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.
Prezi provided us with a unique selling factor when it came to pitching our services to new prospects.
While creating a presentation from scratch might be time-consuming, Prezi allows you to easily reuse and utilize old designs to create new presentations with a different vibe and content.
An easy way to impress upper management and stakeholders, especially when presenting to the management of our clients.
