Marvel vs. UXPin

Marvel is a very strong tool in scenarios where designers seek to quickly create simple prototypes on their desktops using a simple, intuitive interface. It offers “just enough” functionality to create somewhat realistic designs to present to stakeholders and other designers. However, there’s a limit to how “realistic” those designs can be, given that Marvel has somewhat limited functionality around animations. Marvel is not a strong option for those who want to create very complex prototypes with many animations, or for those who want to edit prototypes on their tablet or phone. Marvel is a jewel for simplicity but starts to be difficult to use when creating complicated designs. For creating more complicated prototypes, I would recommend a more robust tool, such as Axure.

Incentivized

UXPin is an excellent resource for creating website and app flows and to better help our clients understand how their websites and apps will function. It also gives them a visual reference and some real-life application. It can be difficult for clients to truly understand how a website or an app flows from one page or screen to another via a phone call or web conference. UXPin helps us to illustrate these flows in a hands-on, visual format. UXPin also helps our clients understand the purpose of a sitemap. We used to send our clients a sitemap in an outline format. While many understood that the top-level items on the outline were the main navigation of their website and other items were child pages, several did not. We have found that using UXPin to show the main level navigation, how in-page navigation and child pages (drop-down menus from the main navigation) work has been an integral step in getting approval on sitemaps.

Incentivized

• Easy to use with a fast learning curve
• The handoff option allows developers to extract CSS code to copy design styles

• Smart elements are super nice because they allow me to create complicated features that will appear on every page. When the client wants to change something it is very easy to do so in one place.
• Working on grid is important to me. Having the ability to change and manipulate that grid in UXPin is just what I need.
• There are tons of add on features like Font Awesome icons and prebuilt stuff that not only looks great, but also just lets me get ideas across fast without committing to what the final design is going to look like.
• I love the ability to edit things if I want. I can control several details, but it's not too overwhelming. They include various font options from Google fonts as well. You can design as much or as little as you want. The interface doesn't get in the way. It's there if you want it but has a simplicity that is nice.
• Having a link on a live webpage is a necessity. As soon as you make changes, they are live. No more worrying about which is the latest version.
• I'm a photoshop user so it has a few keyboard commands that are familiar like hold 'alt', click and drag to duplicate is nice!

Incentivized

• I really miss being able to duplicate, make a copy of the prototype I'm working on. Sometimes, I want to make a comparison with detail changes and without being able to duplicate it is difficult.
• Compared to other similar services, I feel the animations could be more fluid and smoother.
• It could have more free sophisticated icons and images.

Incentivized

• No search and replace for fonts (missing or just to replace).
• Tool is built for design/dev teams but does not integrate content teams in well.
• If you are not careful you can get lost in designing interactions when you should be just creating building blocks - don’t over animate!!!
• There is currently no “scrub” or click-drag interaction which limits touch capability testing/concepts.
• Editing adaptive versions of designs is very time consuming, edits to not ripple through from master viewport size. All updates are manual, even when creating an adaptive version.
• When a library item is updated, it can revert changes you have made unknowingly.
• Video integration is limited to online video host aggregators such as IMGR, YouTube, and Vimeo.
• Not a ton of info for a designer on how to use the expressions effectively.
• Prototypes with a lot of interactions can get slow, especially on computers with a lot of security software. It’s best to work with UXPin to figure out what is blocking APIs, and JS.

We'll definitely continue to use UXPin. Right now it provides us with everything we need in order to deliver quality projects to our clients. If at any point in time, UXPin doesn't provide us with what we need, we'll start vetting other software out there that may be similar. My guess is that UXPin will continue to make updates and improvements so we'll likely stick with it for quite some time.

Incentivized

As far as I know, my teams have only had to use the UXPin support once. The experience went really well. We just needed a bit of assistance with using the Documentation feature. UXPin's support was quick and helped my team in a matter of minutes. We will definitely reach out to their support without hesitation in the future.

Incentivized

Ultimately, InVision was just a better fit for our company's needs. It's probably faster to create prototypes using Marvel, but InVision's collaboration features (comments, notes, etc.) are much more robust, which was helpful for our large team spread across multiple continents. InVision also offers more advanced features, and Marvel felt a little too limited for our overall business needs.

Incentivized

Adobe XD is so much more than UXPin, with Adobe Cloud you can easily share designs as well. We used Adobe XD before changing to UXPin. At first UXPin seems so advanced and helpful, but don't get fooled. You're heavily limited in the long run, and after all the training and implementation of UXPin (both app-wise for IT but also training designers etc) it is not worth your time.

• It helped me improve my productivity. It took me lot of time to manually design mockups earlier when I used Adobe Photoshop to do it.
• Because of quickly creating mockups, now I provide my clients with more than 4-5 options which is welcomed by clients and make them happy.
• Definitely the ROI and improved, because of time saved and happy clients.

Incentivized

• Saving money by using one tool for lo-fi wireframing, high fidelity wireframing, prototyping, and user testing, rather than four separate tools.
• The ability to create and use team libraries enables us to create visually consistent designs with less effort than creating every single design from scratch, which allows us to save considerable time (and therefore money!)
• In-platform collaboration saves our team a lot of time and energy. With everything in one place (wireframes, prototypes, user feedback, collaboration comments), we can all be on the same page about the design workflow and pinpoint discussion points that are based on up-to-date designs.

Incentivized