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 …
Starting at $4 per month per user
View PricingOverview
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…
Recent Reviews
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
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
- About
- 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).
Comparisons
Compare with
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!
- 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.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-21 of 21)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.
November 29, 2022
Rapidly iterate and collaborate remotely
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.
November 29, 2022
Plenty of room to grow
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
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 04, 2022
Freehand versus Miro
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.
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
October 27, 2022
Welcome to the collaboration party!
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.
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 19, 2022
Love FreeHand for sharing and organizing creative ideas.
We use InVision to develop vision boards when concepting a brand and campaign design, look, and voice. We'll also use it later to showcase assets for campaigns across digital, print, and media. We can have hundreds of assets for one campaign, and InVision allows us to see all of these assets together and how they interact. Personally, I use it for storyboarding, plotting, and vision board for my writing.
- Allows us to view visual assets for a campaign as a whole.
- Collaborate across teams to build vision boards.
- User-friendly—everyone can contribute and add notes easily.
- While I like that I can zoom in and out easily, I find that it creates inconsistencies in the size of text and images when I add them. I wish there was more consistency that way.
June 01, 2022
Good ideas, need more education
I used InVision Freehand as a whiteboard to Sketch out my idea during meetings or to show my design solutions to the team. Usually, these are in the ideation phase. The business problems are:
- Simplify the shipping experience for small and medium-size businesses
- Allow internal users to quickly resolve issues
- Make the shipping or billing information easier to understand for the users
- Use as Sketch to demonstrate ideas
- Use as whiteboard during online meetings
- Use as low-fi wireframe
- I think InVision Freehand is quite powerful, but people are not aware of some new features of InVision Freehand
My organization utilizes InVision Freehand to work collaboratively on projects. It is the perfect tool for brainstorming and collecting the ideas of many people in my organization. The tool has been used many times in particular to analyze executive orders that may impact our organization and our clients. Using the tool allows us to focus in on many specific areas of these orders, while also being able to see the full picture.
- The tool is very intuitive to use
- It can be shared across an organization with ease
- It has many useful functions that allow for differentiation between topics
- Some templates would be helpful!
- Different fonts/font colors
- Would be nice to link in with something like Microsoft teams
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.
InVision Freehand is a collaborative tool for getting ideas out in a visual way. Whether we're brainstorming campaign flows, wire-framing web pages, or just laying out a rough layout for a piece we are going to design, we almost always go to InVision Freehand first. It's just a simple tool that allows conversations and ideas to flow without getting caught up in the technicalities of building something visual at the moment.
- Brainstorming
- Wireframing
- Quick Design Layouts
- Text Formatting is Limited (i.e. wonky font resize)
- Comment Functionality (instead of post-its)
- External Images can be a pain
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
Effective collaboration tool for a new era
My teams use Invision Freehand to work together on product innovations. In an era when we're all joining meeting from different places, it's great that we can work together visually in a Freehand collaboration space. Speaking on conference calls where only one person can control the screen at any one time is simply not adequate. We use the various Freehand tools to set up a series of brainstorming activities to discuss consumer needs, formulate hypotheses, and align on potential solutions. Honestly, I think it's superior to meeting in-person with hundreds of sticky notes on a whiteboard. It's so easy to add notes, read each other's writing, and copy/paste content from the web to support your ideas. And the Freehand board gets to live intact for the duration of the project and beyond – versus a physical board that has to be disassembled if you share meeting space with others.
- Varied tools and capabilities to add content
- Intuitive interface
- Preserve the entirety of your project's evolution
- Gives more people the chance to participate in a project
- Pasting images can sometimes be clunky
- Users accidentally move content too easily
April 18, 2022
Great extension to the InVision suite of products
We use InVision Freehand when we are in our design discovery phase. We use it to organize inspiration - like screenshots from other companies/designs we like. We also use it to map out user flows and even some quick prototyping when we are in a meeting to explain an idea.
- Provides a lot of flexibility
- Allows you to see others working at the same time as you
- Integrates well with the rest of the Invision suite
- When I try moving flows where I have arrows between objects, the arrows stay in the same place
- Prototyping could be more advanced
- Ability to change font size verses just resizing the object
April 17, 2022
InVision Freehand is another invaluable tool from InVision that allows us to keep all our design tools in one place
We use InVision Freehand for brainstorming sessions, design sprints, wireframing, workflows, org charts, and team-building activities. The flexibility of the program and ease of use makes it an easy tool for our UX team to master as well as teach Product team members how to use it.
- Base kit for wireframes
- Integration with other applications
- Ease of use for non designers
- I'd like to see easier ways to leave comments between team members
- I'd like to see faster load times, we've been having issues loading when multiple people and large prototypes are built
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.
April 08, 2022
Consider the purpose served
We used this as our Scrum board, an important part of our Agile process, to track our tasks and ensure we're on track to deliver.
- Allows simultaneous modifications.
- Does not require "reloads" to see changes.
- Cannot create template from which a new document can be copied from. New documents require manual copy/paste from an "example" document.
- The colors for stickies in documents are very limited. And resizing of stickies impacts the font size - should be able to just resize the sticky without changing the font size.
- Cannot tag people on a sticky, which would be helpful to create a quick task list from the tags
- Cannot add a status indicator onto a sticky. Even if you use a reaction (which there isn't a green checkmark or anything) it does "stick" to the sticky note so you have to move it.
- No ability to search for items on the page.
- Difficult to shift Items, like if you need extra space in a row. It would be create to be able to insert a table that allows resizing.
April 07, 2022
Easy real time collaboration without all the hassle
We use InVision Freehand as a real-time whiteboard collaboration tool. With the introduction of working asynchronously and remotely, we found that we were missing a big gap in the collaboration space that we used to have. Freehand helped us bridge that gap to make sure we could have a space to "add to the pool of meaning" as we call it, and make sure that we're all looking and aiming at the same target. We also use it to document the current best thinking and also align with stakeholders, both cross-functionally and with executive audiences.
- Collaboration
- Whiteboarding
- Low fidelity wireframing
- Screenshot documentation
- Competitive analysis
- Better onboarding
- Limited text implementation
- Weird zooming behavior (1000% vs 10%).
April 06, 2022
Freehand is mostly OK
We use InVision Freehand to quickly display conceptual, iterative design work like we would see our artboards in Sketch. We also use it for getting feedback on large sets of icons. It helps us gain a birds-eye view of many artboards at one time, allowing us to see if icons look good as a set, and also allowing us to show engineers and product managers how the flows of our concept work go without requiring them to click through a prototype. It also lets us compare versions side-by-side as we design.
- Easy use and editing of text and stickers
- Nice drawing tools for quickly imagining new icons or feature work concepts
- It's easy and clear to see who created everything in Freehand
- Commenting is not as easy or as visible as just adding text to the canvas, and showing a number rather than who added the comment means we have to click to see who left it, which is frustrating. The number labels on comments are confusing and every time I see them I have to remind myself that it has nothing to do with how many comments are in that individual thread. I understand it helps people differentiate between comments on an ambiguous canvas, but I think it adds more confusion than it solves.
- It's really impossible to achieve any sort of consistency with resizing or placement, although the alignment tools did help placement considerably.
- I wish I could set a default font size for my user rather than typing based on how zoomed in I am
- I can't easily give engineers or product managers a link to view this without them needing a basic login.
- It's not possible to easily switch between a prototype and a freehand with the same screens.
I use InVision Freehand to run online workshop sessions with internal team members and clients. This is an excellent real-time collaboration tool that replaces what we used to do in-person with paper post-its. We use it as a brainstorming tool that lets everyone create cards and then prioritizes/organizes ideas later. We also use it as a way of capturing meeting notes. As you take notes, you can easily move around cards to organize thoughts and create a simple diagram while someone shares their ideas. Best of all, you can save all your Freehand sessions, whereas I can't easily keep all physical post-its in person.
- Present view - locking the view for everyone to see the same part of the screen
- Simple art board - I don't have to create separate pages within a Freehand page
- Saving as a template - it is so simple to create a page and save it as a template
- Reaction stickers - this is very important when voting on and prioritizing ideas with multiple people
- More functionality in the text options - I want to highlight text in different colors or change the text color for only a few words in a sentence, but this is hard to do
- More font family options
- Limited color options - I like having a limited selection of colors but would like to set those colors myself