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InVision Freehand has proven to be a valuable tool for various use cases, as reported by users, reviewers, and customers. Its low learning …
Starting at $4 per month per user
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What is Freehand by InVision?
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…
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Pricing
Freehand Free
$0
Cloud
per year per user
Freehand Pro
$4
Cloud
per month per user
Freehand Enterprise
Custom Quote
Cloud
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://freehandapp.com/pricing/
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $4 per month per user
Product Details
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- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Freehand by InVision?
Freehand by InVision is a visual collaboration platform built for organizations. With pre-built templates, organized spaces tor project management, and interactive widgets and reactions. Freehand centralizes the entire workflow so to ensure alignment at every stage of the collaborative process. Teams can work together both in real-time or asynchronously no matter what timezone they're in with, according to the vendor, no learning curve. Freehand is available with flat-rate enterprise pricing options, to alleviate the strain of admin seat license management.
Freehand by InVision Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Freehand by InVision starts at $4.
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.3.
The most common users of Freehand by InVision are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Recommendations
InVision Freehand has proven to be a valuable tool for various use cases, as reported by users, reviewers, and customers. Its low learning curve and real-time collaboration capabilities make it ideal for running UX workshops and collaborating with different teams. The software serves as a hub for UI/UX designers, developers, project and product managers, and key stakeholders to access visual design assets and details. It bridges the collaboration gap for remote teams, providing a space to add to the pool of meaning and align stakeholders. Additionally, InVision Freehand is frequently used in the early brainstorming and prototype phases to quickly collaborate and share ideas with the team. It facilitates clear communication of requirements between clients and the development team, reducing the scope for misunderstanding. Moreover, it serves as a centralized place for collecting and archiving documents and assets, collecting product requirements, and delivering annotated design specs. With its virtual whiteboard feature, InVision Freehand is valuable for remote brainstorming sessions and documenting business problems. Users appreciate the wireframe elements provided by InVision Freehand for customizing and building products efficiently. The software has been praised for its regular updates and enhanced functionality that brings value to designers' work. Overall, InVision Freehand is widely used across disciplines for collaboration, ideation activities, wireframing, project planning, design critiques, and much more.
Users commonly recommend using InVision Freehand for collaborative creative projects and suggest utilizing it alongside other InVision products for a smoother experience. InVision Freehand is praised for facilitating brainstorming, real-time idea sharing, desktop and mobile responsive design, team collaboration, conversations and critiques of work, and post wireframes and screen mockups. Users also highlight its usefulness in sharing work between teams, creating specs with easy-to-attach comments, promoting teamwork, enhancing contact with consumers, collecting feedback and suggestions, improving the workflow of design teams, and working with collaborators.
Additionally, InVision is highly regarded as a great tool for collaboration and communication with customers. It is useful for UI/UX developers to test designs and maintain a consistent aesthetic for their brand. Users also find it valuable for project management and collaboration with stakeholders. InVision is recommended for designers working on website redesign projects, collaborating with external creative agencies, and individuals in the web and mobile design fields. Users advise exploring the trial period to assess if InVision aligns well with the team's needs and encourage team members to provide design feedback directly in the tool.
Craft by InVision is suggested as a companion tool for faster prototyping and importing graphic assets. However, users caution that understanding the pricing structure and permissions for different features is important when using InVision. They also remind others to archive screenshots locally, as projects need to be deleted to start new ones.
Invision Freehand is recommended for various purposes from design workflow to high fidelity prototypes, allowing collaboration between members and improving team designs.
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Reviews
(1-25 of 34)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
December 08, 2022
Research needs more colors for sticky notes.
I use it for brainstorming, user flows, journey maps, and research affinity mapping. It is used by product managers, developers, engineers, designers, and researchers. It is how we collaborate and is useful for gaining consensus.
- I like the templates; they give lots of options that I hadn't even thought of. They also save a lot of time.
- The boards make it easier to organize content.
- I love that you can increase the size of the font by pulling and dragging.
- The limited number of sticky note colors is really annoying. We need more colors for affinity mapping.
- Sometimes it takes forever for images to load. Sometimes they never load. Why does it take so long?
- I often get connecting lines/arrows when I don't want them. I'm just trying to move the sticky or the shape.
- I'm going to mention it again because this is hugely important to me; please add more colors to the sticky notes.
December 02, 2022
InVision Freehand is the Best Way to Collaborate
Using InVision Freehand helps us plan brainstorming sessions or ideation workshops. What we love is the flexibility and ease of use. There are a lot of whiteboarding tools out there that are either working to improve a faulty product or they're just getting in late in the game to catch up with the remote/hybrid workforce needs. InVision Freehand bests all of them through a reliable platform we've trusted for years. Having worked with multiple clients and agency partners over the years, what I love when using inVision Freehand is that they are clearly watching the competitiveness of online whiteboarding solutions and staying ahead of the pack. There's just a better, more intuitive feeling when working with Freehand. Working with inVision Freehand is just a complete no-brainer recommendation. It's fast, nimble and continuously refined to make an excellent working environment and platform even better.
- We use InVision Freehand for brainstorming new marketing campaign ideas.
- We create a lot of Customer Journey mapping ideas and the InVision Freehand environment provides us with exactly what we need to be successful in creating a collaborative workspace to do so.
- For some of our clients and concept campaigns, we work out website wireframes. InVision Freehand proves us with a great blank slate - and provides the intuitive tools to go from an empty page to a completely blocked-out website structure - seemingly in no time.
- For working with clients all across the country, InVision Freehand provides us with an awesome shared board to present and propose new business opportunities for them - and for us!
- The continued improvements and nuances make using Freehand a "Go-To" solution for me and my team every day. There are platform updates made pretty much every month. It shows that the dev team is always looking out and listening for ways that they can improve the user experience and usability.
- More templates being added all the time have been a great way for us to kick off conversations and workshopping with internal and external teams.
- While we love using InVision Freehand, it's not always as intuitive for the non-agency folks we sometimes work with. It's not impossible or hard. Just could be easier to onboard them.
- There are so many great tools that are built into InVision and Freehand takes it to the next level. That said, there are other platforms in this space that are advancing in integrations with many of the other live meetings and sharing tools that agencies, clients, and the general public have become so accustomed to over the last couple of years.
- We would love to be able to use InVision Freehand as integrated or embedded in our sites or gated parts of live sites we work on.
- There aren't too many things that I could point to that would be considered problematic - I might like to see some new movable menus.
- Some additional sharing options might be nice to have. Right now there a lot of integrations with platforms and being able to work/share in those spaces would be interesting. An example might be sharing in Slack and being able to work right within a working team channel.
December 01, 2022
My Favorite White Board Tool in a Fully Remote Environment!
In my organization, we use InVision Freehand to help with the following: brainstorming, wireframing, jotting down notes during initial user sessions and meetings with stakeholders, creating affinity maps and feedback grids, making user flow diagrams to help understand the journey users will take how each decision should affect their path, and collaborating and sharing with the team. It has been a great tool that's helped us, especially in the early planning and later research phases.
- Sticky notes for research analysis
- Collaboration with brainstorming sessions
- Easy-to-create sitemaps and user flows
- Sharable ideas with stakeholders
- A digital whiteboard to use during meetings
- Grouping and arranging objects is tricky for me.
- When I try to change the colors and fills, I feel like it's limited on opacity and color options.
- I would like to be able to change the standard scroll because for me, it feels backwards and I have to mentally adjust.
November 29, 2022
Freehand makes a PMs life easier!
I use freehand for any new product I'm developing that touches the UI. It's quick, easy, and so beneficial for everyone on the team. I hate wasting time creating Hi-Fi mocks that end up getting changed so many times - InVision Freehand solves that! I'm able to create lo-fi product mocks really quickly and I love the comment feature. It allows me to explain what I'm doing and also allows others to comment, too!
- Lo-fi mocks.
- Incredible feature set.
- Shapes for every possible button.
- Collaborating.
- A Product Manager's dream tool
- Make adding new text and sizing it easier.
- Add a better text toolbar.
- More color options!
November 11, 2022
Connectivity, Collaboration and New Design Paradigms
We use Freehand within our design team and with Product managers in a few different ways, primarily as a noodling and collaboration tool. Since most of the team is in different geographic locations and time zones, FH provides and easy collaborative space that is fun, easy and full of valuable features; both for new and power users. In addition, the UX team likes to use it as a planing space for user flows, design thinking exercises and early wireframes of our products.
- Provides great templates for a multitude of activities, ceremonies and meeting objectives. Allowing team to save time and use proven methodologies.
- Survey tools for design reviews and other feedback tools are easy to use and provide rapid direction and insights.
- Presentation frames allows designers to have design Playgrounds and experiment freely yet rapidly clean up and show only the most relevant variants and design options.
- The search function sometimes does not find the right files, particularly when naming conventions are not clear amongst a big group it can sometimes be challenging to find documents.
- The archive/library can also be hard to visualize the complete set of files and experiments. Discovery and browsing can be challenging.
- Notifications could be easier to follow as somethimes we receive a lot of notes and corrections and need an easy way to check off/close comments and notes.
November 08, 2022
Like a magic whiteboard that nobody can accidentally erase
It's a great way to collaborate remotely as well as share screens with the client and allow them to make notes
- Flexible ideation
- Easy sharing of numerous screens
- Note-taking
- Archiving ideas
- Organization of large boards with many images
- Load time
- Sometimes frequent refreshing is needed to get things working again
November 07, 2022
A good option for large teams
In such a large team, it is very important that we all have access to everything: designs, feedback... InVision allows us to have it all in one place. Also, this tool favors teleworking since no matter where we are, we are always connected. I think InVision is a must-have tool for large teams.
- Organization
- Live View
- Loading time
- to make the images look better
- be able to upload gifs with fewer restrictions
October 21, 2022
A Collaboration Tool for the New Way of Working
We use InVision Freehand as a collaboration tool; a virtual whiteboard. It's a space to brainstorm, to drop inspiration, and is especially important with remote work. We also use it as a pinboard for creative work that allows for an at-a-glance look at what's in-market across all channels.
- Simple, easy to use
- Works well for multiple users to be collaborating at the same time
- It can house a lot of content
- Loading issues - doesn't always work the best with a lot of images
- It would be fun to be able to insert gifs or have a larger variety of stickers
- More UX charts would be nice
October 14, 2022
Great free option to collaborate with others!
We utilize InVision Freehand in order to collaborate between team members. It is great to facilitate team thinking, and have a sort of "parking lot" where we are able to park ideas and also organize our ideas in a structured way while thinking across problems and solutions. Our team is very pleased with InVision Freehand.
- Collaboration
- Easy to use - user interface
- Easy to learn
- Id like to see functionality for outside users to log into a board without making an account, to facilitate workshops
- I'd also like to see some features that make it easy to take photos of handwriting and translate into text
- Ability to have a mobile app.
We use Freehand to do many tasks like
- quick Sketch of ideas
- low-fidelity wireframes
- exploration of user flows for digital products (desktop, mobile, app, and kiosk)
- reference spaces for handoff across teams (marketing, developers, loyalty, etc.)
- information architecture diagrams
- presentations of work in progress items
- Giving/receiving feedback
- Roughing out ideas
- Sharing ideas/work across team members or groups
- Collaborating on ideas with team members or groups
- Communicating blueprints/plans for product features
- If many artboards from design are uploaded, it may run slightly slower or only focus on an image at a time – not ideal for overly complex user flows and blueprints.
- Requires an account in order to view/give feedback.
June 14, 2022
Not too keen on Freehand
We use InVision Freehand to collaborate in real-time with teams around the world. We also use it to post UI designs and gather feedback and comments from internal stakeholders and end-users.
- Nothing comes to mind
- From my experience, sharing boards with guests makes them log in to edit, even if you select the option to allow unregistered users to edit. We waste 10 minutes at the beginning of each meeting trying to help people figure out how to log in and edit shared boards.
- Launching a board in Safari brings my new MacBook Pro with 32gb+ memory to a standstill even when nothing else is open.
- Selecting and aligning shapes is a pain. You have to click the border or else you'll end up editing the text instead of selecting the shape. There are no distribution options, only top/bottom and left/right align.
June 06, 2022
Not a Stand Out, but a Perfectly Solid Solution
In a time of distributed work, our company used InVision Freehand to cultivate collaboration and recreate both formal and impromptu "white-boarding sessions". We often used InVision Freehand for brainstorming, workshops, or other real-time collaborations and discussions, where visual ideation and conversation were necessary. As a Product Designer, I often used InVision Freehand for quick wire-framing, particularly real-time wire-framing with a peer designer or product partner in design reviews or co-designing sessions.
- I liked the "no-fuss" sharing of boards for collaboration, especially with non-InVision Freehand users.
- The pen tool felt accurate and intuitive for freehand sketching.
- The interface feels simple, easy-to-use, and familiar.
- There could be a more intuitive or helpful management structure for InVision Freehand boards rather than just relying on search or filters.
- Features could go beyond basic functionality and be innovated to improve the experiences for which InVision Freehand is used. For example, we're often using InVision Freehand for real-time collaboration and workshopping, which isn't always fun in the remote setting, but it could take opportunities to create moments of fun and delight for users/participants.
June 02, 2022
InVision Freehand is great for easy and fast collaboration, but falls short on more complex projects.
The entire UX team used InVision Freehand as our primary collaboration/brainstorming tool. From building out wireframes to affinity mapping, or even as a digital repository/mood board we used it on a daily basis. InVision Freehand allowed us to work together effectively once our team went completely remote. It also turned out to be a useful tool for collaborating with our external partners.
- Realtime collaboration
- Brainstorming
- Expressing new ideas & concepts
- Flow diagrams
- There need to be more options for layering or alignment. Currently, you can only place things all the way in front or in the back. In large complex diagrams or wireframes, this can make it very difficult to build efficiently.
- The licensing structure is complex and confusing, especially when you just want to be able to allow external partners to view InVision Freehand boards.
- Pasted images sometimes take an incredibly long time to load, or only load in after refreshing the entire board.
- I wish there was a way to download images from a Freehand. Copying them from InVision Freehand to another document is unreliable.
We use InVision Freehand for virtual collaboration in place of a whiteboard and have found the functionality has exceeded our ability to be efficient and innovative.
- Collaboration
- Easy transitions between activities
- Maintains data that can be leveraged elsewhere
- Visualization for design thinking innovation
- Better integration with Figma
- More easily allow anonymous users (clients) to access and collaborate in real time
- Allow for cropping/masking of images so another tool isn't needed when making collages, etc.
May 27, 2022
Great tool for design and research collaboration
As a UX Researcher who works remotely at a large company, I use InVision Freehand to collaborate with other researchers and designers. I've found it extremely helpful for holding brainstorming sessions. My teammates and I had a lot of fun using Freehand to do a Crazy 8's exercise. The tool has also been easy for analysts and developers on other teams to pick up and collaborate with us during ideation sessions.
- Remote collaboration
- Ideation sessions
- Brainstorming
- Idea mapping
- Text customization
- Shape customization
- Color customization
May 25, 2022
InVision Freehand - Reliable but limited
I used InVision Freehand for holding virtual retrospectives for teammates. Also, story mapping and other agile ceremonies. Lots of team use it for UX design and brainstorming. Many times we need to draw out a mock up and have the teams work around it or with it. The UX person will walk us through the mock up.
- Easy to use.
- Lots of plug in options.
- Better formatting options.
- Easier to share boards where people do not have to sign in.
- Do not limit the amount of boards companies can have.
InVision Freehand is used to help us layout business problems and link them to UX design concepts. We typically use InVision Freehand to "whiteboard" reconfigure our interface. For example: deciding how best to organize current templated user interfaces, menus, and navigation architecture, in a way that aligns with how our customers think about the products that we support.
- InVision Freehand allows rapid reconfiguration of visual elements
- InVision Freehand is useful for real-time team collaboration
- InVision Freehand makes it easy to quickly mock up a concept and get feedback from others
- InVision Freehand could be further integrated with our UI, populating with templates and controls unique to our software
- InVision Freehand could automatically capture, compile and publish insights to users
- InVision Freehand could add more collaboration and design elements to whiteboarding sessions, such as nested lists, color coding, etc.
May 23, 2022
An efficient way to share visual design details
Our designers use InVision to share their visual designs with the developers and managers in our team. From a developer's point of view being able to see the details of the visual design is critical for software development. In InVision I can see information like color, spacing, font, font size, etc. all those details on the app without checking directly to the designers over and over.
- Sharing content with the team
- Showing product workflow
- Showing visual design details
- Inspecting details of specific element can be challenging sometimes
- Zooming isn't very smooth
- Inspect mode has limited display area
May 19, 2022
Freedom of Freehand
Being an all-remote team we use freehand to collaborate in real-time in different scenarios. We have used it to produce quick ideas which have become some of the foundations of a UX team. We have also used it to make presentations of ideas that were really complex but we were able to break them down by having a virtual whiteboard on freehand. I know the team has also used it to create various whiteboard challenges.
- Brainstorming
- Collaborating
- Handling Multiple Document Types
- Text Customization
- GIFS
- Creating quick components that can be reused
I used freehand InVision to collaborate with my teammates and brainstorm ideas around human-centered design qualitative research sessions.
- Ability to collaborate with multiple team members.
- Ability to add ideas like on a whiteboard.
- Ability to add low fidelity wire frames.
- More proactive way of helping user add sticky notes.
- It could improve how the zoom in and out works by adding a bigger button to zoom in and out.
- It could improve the way we change the color of the sticky notes by making it simpler to edit the sticky note.
May 18, 2022
It does the job
I use InVision Freehand for taking notes during research interviews. After the sessions are all concluded, I am able to synthesize my notes across all interviews to find the patterns in the research. It was also very simple to tag-team the note-taking and to identify who wrote each note in case there were questions about the notes after-the-fact.
- Tags the notetakers
- Color coding
- Ability to re-organize the sticky notes
- Better resizing options for stickies
- More template diagrams
- More colors or custom colors for stickies
We use Freehand mostly for brainstorming in a remote setting across the US. Usually, one person will share their screen while others join remotely. We'll start with a problem statement, then give free minutes for everyone to write in their thoughts. It's a great way to collaborate online - and we've found it more interactive than meetings in person. It allows for all personality types to feel comfortable sharing.
- Collaboration
- Team Building
- Providing simple designs to limit visual overload
- High energy hog when running (laptop sounds like it's working HARD)
- Small lags when multiple people are interacting with the board
- Higher res images when uploading artboards from Sketch
InVision Freehand is our go-to collaborative tool that helps facilitate design thinking through to working software. It's a hub for UI/UX, developers, project and product managers, and key stakeholders to access visual design assets and details that steer towards a singular vision. We leverage it across remote, cross-functional teams for purposes of brainstorming and whiteboarding, and low-res wireframes which can be evaluated in real-time.
- Co-collaboration
- Low-res wireframes
- Template library
- Direct sync from Freehand to Prototype
- Robusting Jira integrations
April 10, 2022
A safe space for design exploration.
As a product designer in a fast-paced startup environment, I use Invision Freehand to quickly ideate and iterate ideas. Sharing an Invision Freehand link helps communicate the concept that we are still in “noodle mode” and that no idea is too wild! It also helps keep things low fidelity to ensure we are focused on the workflow and use cases, rather than the visual design layer. Over the last several months, I have grown more excited than ever about the value Invision Freehand drives in both my solo and collaborative work. Newly released features and functionality continue to make this tool a regular part of my life as a designer.
- Facilitates Collaboration.
- Facilitates ideation.
- Facilitates communication.
- Brings teams together.
- Buggy
- Super Limited Color Palette.
- Unable to share Freehand with a link with a specified area of focus for collaborators to open to.
- Difficult to grab right object in a group.
- Unable to lock specific objects within a frame. Limited to full frame lock only.
April 08, 2022
Invaluable tool for remote teams
Having mainly gone remote in response to Covid, having a virtual whiteboard to do brainstorms has been valuable. I recently used it to document a business problem I was attempting to solve for a client, with 'current state / future state' swim lanes and screenshots of potential design solutions. This helped me gather my thoughts, define the resolution, and then use it as a visual aid while reviewing the solution with the client. Finally, my creative team used it recently to compile and then check our ideas about our 2021 retrospective and 2022 goal-setting.
- Quick and dirty wireframes - a digital version of a napkin sketch
- Multiple contributors operating real-time
- Great templates as the basis to get started quickly
- Playful colors and a generally whimsical feel to the artifacts created within Freehand
- Slightly awkward to resize text, often requiring a two-part process of resizing the text box width and then diagonally shrinking or expanding. It would be great if there were small/med/large text shortcuts or numerical text sizes—A similar challenge for resizing stick notes.
- I'd love more options when inserting a shape to blank Freehand. Options now include rectangles, triangles, ovals, and lines. I'd like to have more to make quick illustrations of brainstorms like brackets, speech bubbles, and other symbols.
- I find dropping in a text box that I want to make a bulleted or text list is clunky. The applied bullet seems oddly placed, the text box is sized poorly for the text, and the placement of the text box containers adjacent to the reader is displayed. It always seems to take a lot of manipulation.
- The eraser is accessible from the marker/drawing action, and that could be more top-level. Its placement with the marker option as the colors is available once you've selected the eraser is confusing as there is no color selection relevant to erasing.