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Freehand by InVision

Freehand by InVision

Overview

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

InVision Freehand has proven to be a valuable tool for various use cases, as reported by users, reviewers, and customers. Its low learning …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

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Pricing

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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
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Product Details

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 Competitors

Freehand by InVision Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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.

Miro, Mural, and Figma are common alternatives for Freehand by InVision.

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(134)

Community Insights

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!

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.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 102)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
James Donohoe | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use InVision to review mockups that are provided by our UX Team. Developers use the mockups to develop solutions to resolve business pain points that need to be resolved.
  • Allows you to scroll through separate designs
  • Allows you to add comments to designs
  • Allows you to organize designs on the left panel
  • The login process could be easier but that may be related to the work setup
InVision works well for designs that have different development components that need to be highlighted.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use InVision Freehand primarily for wireframes for our products to show our developers what we want the product to show. We use it at an elementary level as we do not do extensive things within InVision Freehand. While InVision Freehand is a good product I feel like it could be better suited for users like myself who find it difficult to navigate when trying to find specific tools to use (for example: blurring customer information out, or highlighting an area of focus.) I find that InVision Freehand lacks certain tools that other products use. It's almost like InVision Freehand was designed with a minimalistic approach, and while I appreciate that in theory, this is something that needs more details.
  • Easy to upload a screenshot
  • Easy to use whiteboard
  • Sticky Notes
  • Most important- Collaboration
  • The tool bar needs to be improved.
  • Minimalistic is nice, but I think it needs to be expanded.
  • I wish you could tag co-workers somehow.
InVision Freehand works really well for collaboration which is why our company started using it as we sometimes have multiple Business Analysts working on one wireframe at a time. It works well for wireframes and what we want the product to have.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Invision to manage and creative direct designers within my organization. I primarily use it to view their rough drafts and provide feedback within the app.
  • Allows for easy commenting and feedback
  • Alignment and organization
  • Text styling
  • Shape creating
  • Grid use and organization of design
  • Layer organization
I love InVision Freehand for it's easy-to-use interface. It does the job well for me to provide feedback to artists. It could, however, have a better use of grid and structure so each document can be easily organized visually.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
InVision Freehand is used in our organisation for doing a brainstorm sessions within the internal teams so we can quickly communicate with each other. It also helps the design team in generating the wireframes or discussing our flows with the product managers and it has been very helpful to us because it is a tool that anybody can use without any knowledge to use.
  • Wireframes
  • Brainstorming about the product flow
  • 1 place for us to see everything
  • Notes (sticky) are distracting
  • It seems that you can not select a board from any position to drag it, you have to click on the left corner only
  • It does not detect the shapes created by marker
In the brainstorming sessions when many people dive into a call, we earlier used to lose context because the conversation would divert, so in such cases it works excellently. Also, when we revisit to any project after a while to see what we did and why and when, InVision Freehand helps in giving the context and the boards too.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Our team uses Invision Freehand for planning out individual products - with user flows, journey maps, screen flows, brainstorming, and planning. These are created by designers and often shared with non-design team members. The boards are also used for research affinity mapping and reflection. Finally, we also use them for team social meetings for our book club, jeopardy, and other team games or activities.
Bumhan YU | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Share the working design development in progress with stakeholders for discussion. Have an easy-to-use, cloud-based, real-time brainstorming and collaboration platform. Have a centralized place for collecting and archiving a variety of documents and assets. Collect product requirements and specs before starting a project Deliver annotated design specs and interactions to the engineers Have a regularly updated live document and a retro board
  • Realtime collaboration and brainstorming
  • Bringing in external resources like a Figma or Sketch, and keeping them in sync
  • Collecting comments/feedback in a thread directly and visually in context
  • Integration with Figma is rather minimal. Key features like inspecting design specs and embedding prototypes are completely missing.
  • Browsing between spaces and viewing files across them can be done differently. In the absence of proper breadcrumb and/or global navigation, it takes work to navigate and is often disorienting.
  • I'd like to see the "Space Overview" editing mode evolving a bit. Perhaps along the line of other tools like Notion or Coda. I understand it's not a core feature of InVision Freehand, but would be a nice bonus.
Good: Gathering feedback and continuing discussion on design artifacts. Providing design annotations and specs along with design deliverables. Collaborate in realtime and brainstorm freehand Putting together quick wireframes or other sketches Less appropriate: Collecting a variety of types of data content, documents, and files (probably better suited for Google Apps, Notion, Dropbox) Directly accessing design specs from Figma and its prototypes (probably better done natively in Figma, or via other spec tools like Zeplin)
Art Stiefel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Without a doubt, InVision Freehand sets the table for excellent live workshopping that plays an important role in business today. This becomes even more of a necessity as a tool in today's remote - non-in-person business environment. This approach to getting work done today is no longer a nice-to-have, it's an absolute must! The access to working across remote team member groups and using InVision Freehand helps us feel secure in setting up meetings. We know that we will have a much more positive working session with the collaborative workspace that InVision Freehand gives us. We haven't found any instances that Freehand wouldn't be a positive component to a productive workshop, brainstorming or even just capturing thoughts from meeting discussions. Freehand is a pretty flexible platform for us to work in. What it comes down to for us is that with Freehand we don't have to think at all about the platform we're using. We just use it intuitively and instinctively. As it should be.
Nicolette (Nic) Nieves | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
I've been using InVision Freehand for close to 4 years. I've used it when designing for responsive sites and native apps and it has helped, especially with the large variety of complex enterprise projects I've worked on. So far, it has been great for collaborating and sharing with the team during brainstorming, user flow diagram, and wireframing sessions in the early planning stages. In the research stage, it has also helped with creating and sharing affinity maps, feedback grids, and being able to color code when multiple team members are working together to document possible solutions has also been great! Overall, I definitely appreciate how much they've stood out on top of making improvements to simplify the whiteboarding and even automate some parts of the process. One feature I appreciate most is the ability to use templates so more time-consuming parts (like commonly used icons) are readily available. I didn't give a full 10 because, for me, the scrolling is something I have to get used to each time I use it since it's opposite from how I regularly scroll. It would also be great to have more color and opacity options, but it's definitely not a deal-breaker.
November 30, 2022

Great tool for designers!

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Freehand to brainstorm during group meetings, plan out workflows that will improve our internal processes, conduct design reviews, and map out ideas. Currently, our teams are remote so Freehand is a great way to have everyone contribute despite location differences.
  • Multiple app integrations
  • Ability to upload and inspect design mocks
  • Useful collaborative tools: ability to follow others, presentation mode, stickies, comments, reactions.
  • Wireframing
  • When updates are made to an artboard and you re-upload it to Freehand, it spawns a new artboard instead of updating the existing one. This is tedious because you have to delete the outdated one.
  • You cannot see connection links between artboards unlike InVision specs
  • Needs ability to upload videos (mp4)
Well suited scenarios: Brainstorming Mapping out workflows Presentations Sharing ideas Icebreaker activities Less appropriate scenarios: Design handoff Managing documents w/ large amounts of text
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My team uses InVision Freehand during ideation sessions to help quickly visualize ideas and concepts and begin to understand how we can translate these into a real user experience, so we can then gather feedback to understand if we should move forward with more detailed design and prototyping or if we need to further refine the proposed solution or problem statement. It enables us to iterate and move quickly in a fast-changing market.
  • Allows wireframes to be created quickly.
  • Facilitates collaboration on ongoing projects.
  • Also aids in meeting collaboration in being able to access the same whiteboard and take hybrid meetings to the next level.
  • Maybe history or version control?
  • Integration with project management workflows.
Works well in small to medium-sized groups with a targeted purpose but wouldn't want to use it with a large group or a general meeting.
November 29, 2022

Plenty of room to grow

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I lead design thinking workshops for product discovery. This includes problem statements, empathy mapping, and assumption mapping competitive demos. We focus mostly on using it as a collaboration tool to make sure teams are solving the right problems before moving into design and content building. It is a part of my weekly life.
  • Collaboration space for many users
  • being a place of reference for artifacts
  • easily shareable
  • Additional tool capabilities to gain parity with other whiteboard tool
  • editing text is a huge pain. Just use a size of text instead of resizing the box
  • More colors of text and post-its are needed
Well suited for simple brainstorming activities.

Not as well suited for larger multi-day design sprints
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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!
InVision Freehand is really well suited for lo-fi mocks and wireframes. It's so helpful to be able to get an initial rendering of a product to give developers a general idea of the product they are going to build, as well as share the concept with stakeholders. InVision Freehand is not well suited for situations where you need a very detailed mock-up, with fonts, padding, spacing, etc.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I collaborate with team members by creating and sharing product wireframes, research boards, educational material, product and component research findings and recommendations, flow maps, journey maps, etc. InVision Freehand addresses my ability to share my work online collaboratively with team members and receive comments and approvals since I work remotely. I have also been able to share boards for user research studies and focus group studies.
  • 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.
  • Would like for Freehand to bring in Sketch files without having to use Craft as a plug-in. eg. like it does for Figma and XD files.
I love collaborating and creating wireframes, concepts, etc., within InVision Freehand with remote teams. However, I would not use Freehand to prototype or create any hi-fi here.
November 28, 2022

InVision Freehand Review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it to collaborate. A lot of virtual meetings will use InVision Freehand as a way to engage with one another during a presentation. I think it's nice to see everyone's engagement in real-time, so I would consider that a plus. We like to use sticky notes a lot to share ideas and find points of commonality.
  • Collaborate with collegues
  • Interact and engage in real time
  • Offer a visual format for brainstorming discussions
  • Depending on how many people are using InVision Freehand at once, it can feel a little chaotic.
  • I don't like how I start to feel sensory overload watching everyone's mouse moving all around the page.
  • I think this isn't inherently a problem...but since InVision Freehand is still relatively new I think users just need more time to acclimate to all it offers.
We use this tool to collaborate on virtual calls. It's nice to have a visual format for brainstorming sessions. I enjoy having another means of interacting and engaging with colleagues. That being said, at times it can be visually overwhelming if you're collaborating with a bunch of people in real-time since you see each person's mouse movements. It can feel a little overwhelming, in that sense.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use InVision Freehand all the time for easy collaboration between UX and Product. It's been a really effective tool for the easy sharing of designs. Makes our life a lot easier. After my UX counterparts post designs I typically come in and add comments. The ability for them to see and resolve those comments right in the context of the design is powerful!
  • Commenting
  • Easy Navigation
  • Quick to Load
  • Easy Sharing
  • Make it easier to share out links without complicated permission settings
It's perfect for when I want to quickly see what designs UX has come up with and then it allows me to easily provide feedback. They can then respond to that feedback or quickly replace the UX. This sort of back-and-forth makes collaborating really easy. It's not as good at making prototypes that can go on a mobile phone without a lot of hassle.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use InVision Freehand to run affinity workshops for our internal teams. We can group research insights we've distilled and collaborate on solutions together.
  • Notes
  • Reactions
  • Easy drawing
  • Sometimes it's not easy to see who has collaborated on what pieces
If you are trying to do something low fidelity or collaborate with the team on something, it works great. If you need more high-fidelity designs or a more structured collaboration environment, it might not be the best tool for you.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Shrunga Mehta | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use InVison Freehand for different exercises with our team and also other teams within our IT teams. Since this is freestyle we can use it to show how we envision the application or the website is going to look. We use it for brainstorming, Whiteboarding sessions, low-fi prototyping, and wireframing.
  • I personally enjoy the ready to use templates for different UX processes.
  • The new wireframing tool is soo awesome.
  • I enjoy collaboration feature of InVision.
  • May be having a rotation feature for elements would be nice.
  • May be having a user testing feature.
  • Improvements to the code inspector for dev. handoff.
Well Suited: Collaboration is made easy when working with different teams but when coming to prototypes not having enough flexibility is bad.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
As a UI designer, it's great for sharing user flows with many screens, showing multiple options, and notating feedback right on the screens themselves. It's also good for collecting inspiration and ideas in a flexible format. Most of all, it allows my team to work in one file and have a single source of truth.
Irene Morant Estellés | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
InVision freehand is a very good option for companies that have large teams working from different locations, thanks to this tool we can all be connected and keep up to date with any updates in the designs. However, I think InVision freehand sometimes falls short and does not let us upload some heavier designs.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Good for envisioning a design file as a functional website so we invested in InVision and it was the best thing we ever did for our design process. Very easy to share and collaborate within the design team. Our team uses it as mood boards and it's useful if you've got to gather feedback from multiple stakeholders or those stakeholders who might not be technically savvy. Team can easily add their comments any where on the design screen using drag and drop comment feature.
  • Collaboration
  • Prototyping
  • Sharing files
  • Not free
  • Not great for working with variants
  • Wish it could integrate with Illustrator easier
I use Invision to collaborate with remote teams and it has been fantastic as a communication tool! Easy collaboration amongst remote teams, as well as a great presentation resource. I love the comments feature on the design prototypes. This allows for much more efficient feedback loops when you can comment directly on the prototype and keeps conversation streams clear. I have also began using the moodboards on the platform which has been fantastic for project kickoffs. Less appropriate would be for product design because you can't organize 30 flows
November 04, 2022

Freehand versus Miro

Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
At first I was super excited that Invision had created Freehand because I had been using Miro for years at my previous organization and because tool consolidation is always a win-win. The tool is easy to learn and has lots of useful features and templates that can help streamline collaborative sessions and planning. Additionally it's nice that access to the board can be shared internally and externally to help visualize concepts and convey information.
However, while the tool might look EXACTLY like Miro, it lacks in very fine technical details and usage elements, which Miro does much better. The tool itself is hard to navigate no matter the devices or browsers (mouse, track pad, PC, Mac, Chrome, Safari, Edge). Zooming in and out is also pretty lack-luster but is a critical feature of this type of tool, especially when you are creating large documents that need precise navigation. Additionally, the There are fine controls for typing and selecting that are also sub-par to Miro. I would advise the product team to focus more on fine-tuned usability than the overall perception of this tool.
  • Template Offerings so you don't have to re-create the wheel
  • Multiple Users At Once (Collaboration)
  • Process Mapping elements (goodbye Visio)
  • Navigation Controls
  • Precise selection and deselection of features/tools
  • Zoom in/out functionality (it's not smooth or easy to do)
  • Latency with multiple users
Freehand has been well suited for creating process maps and getting stakeholder feedback. It has also been good for brainstorming and "freehand" board creation.
Some of the templates are hard to customize for specific needs so it's sometimes better to build your own from scratch.
There are a lot of navigational issues with larger boards that require zooming in/out and navigating to different sections.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it as a whiteboarding tool when discussing topics that are easier to address visually. Often we do it in real-time with one person driving and others watching, discussing, and giving feedback. Occasionally we'll all be in working at the same time when doing research / UX exercises to organize data from feedback sessions.
  • Enables multiple collaborators to work in the same area
  • Real-time updates while using it collaboratively
  • You can recognize the pointer of others in the InVision Freehand so it engenders conversation while working synchronously
  • It can be hard to find previous files when they aren't named intuitively. Maybe searching copy within docs would help faster discovery
  • The permissions can be frustrating when trying to share files across different teams, the UX team seems to struggle with providing links that are inaccessible
  • I think more could be done in the context menu for easier / relevant shortcuts
It's great when sketching or discussing topics at a high level and wanting to have something to look at or speak to. It's also very helpful when trying to assimilate and categorize feedback from research or focus groups. I like putting tidbits of info into boxes that we can then sort and organize thematically and identify where our biggest opportunities may be. We tried using it a bit as a road mapping/project management tool, and don't feel it was well suited for that.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Invision Freehand for wire framing and low-fidelity brainstorming of ideas, during the beginning stages of a project. I often attend and lead white boarding sessions with my team of fellow product designers. Often times, my team's content designers will attend these white boarding sessions as well. Cross functional collaboration in a remote world is great with a tool like this.
  • Remote collaboration
  • Wireframing
  • Low fidelity brainstorming
  • Whiteboarding sessions
  • The shape tools
  • The text tools
  • The speed in which it takes to load a large free-hand file, which might have a bunch of images or other information in it
I would recommend InVision Freehand, 9 out of 10! The reason for this 9 score, is that I have been using it for quite some time now and found that there are some slight competitive advantages between freehand and its competitors. Freehand's competitors, such as Figma, MIRO, and Mural, all have different features that are slightly different. Each software does a few things better than the others, but there's not one that does everything super well.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The way we use Freehand is constantly evolving as we find more ways for everyone at our company to use it. It started first as a way to make lightning-fast mood boards with a handful of designers. Then we realized that we could open it up to all of our non-designers, too, since there's no need to install anything or learn how to use special design software. So now we have people from all across the agency working in there, too now, filling in technical or strategic insights. And at the end of the day, what we're left with is a big document that completely captures all of our thoughts — not just pictures — and we can then share it as needed.
  • Infinite Canvas: we're never limited to dragging n dropping, and pasting more and more stuff into it.
  • Live collaboration: It's the closest thing we've had to a full team working on a whiteboard since covid.
  • Sketch Integration: It makes updating designs/mockups a lot easier when I can push a button in Craft and not have to manually replace an image in my browser.
  • 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.
Freehand is best suited for: Remote teams Working fast and dirty, Incorporating notes and flows with design mockups Freehand is not great for Complex illustrations (looking at you, sitemaps) High Fidelity comps where the details matter, Scenarios where you need archival data. Things change a lot and can get deleted easily.
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