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…
Great feature set that can be used with multiple teams
Good for Small Projects and Collaboration, but the Tool Bar is a Bit Lacking
InVision Freehand Review for Design Managers
Good tool for team collaborations!
Research needs more colors for sticky notes.
Scratching many itches—some areas better than others
InVision Freehand is the Best Way to Collaborate
My Favorite White Board Tool in a Fully Remote Environment!
Great tool for designers!
Rapidly iterate and collaborate remotely
Plenty of room to grow
Freehand makes a PMs life easier!
InVision Freehand does it all
InVision Freehand Review
InVision Freehand makes collaborating with UX a lot easier for us!
Awards
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Pricing
Freehand Free
$0
Freehand Pro
$4
Freehand Enterprise
Custom Quote
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
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 Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(134)Community Insights
- 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
- 7.8Likelihood to Renew9 ratings
- 8.7Availability3 ratings
- 8.3Performance3 ratings
- 7.7Usability16 ratings
- 9.3Support Rating6 ratings
- 7.9Implementation Rating7 ratings
- 8Configurability2 ratings
- 7.3Product Scalability3 ratings
- 8.2Ease of integration2 ratings
- 9.1Vendor pre-sale1 rating
- 9.1Vendor post-sale1 rating
- 9.1Professional Services1 rating
- 9.1Contract Terms and Pricing Model1 rating
Reviews
(1-25 of 61)- 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.
Research needs more colors for sticky notes.
- 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.
Scratching many itches—some areas better than others
- 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.
InVision Freehand is the Best Way to Collaborate
- 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.
My Favorite White Board Tool in a Fully Remote Environment!
- 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.
Rapidly iterate and collaborate remotely
- 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.
Plenty of room to grow
- 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
Not as well suited for larger multi-day design sprints
Freehand makes a PMs life easier!
- 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 does it all
- 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.
InVision Freehand Review
- 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.
InVision Freehand makes collaborating with UX a lot easier for us!
- Commenting
- Easy Navigation
- Quick to Load
- Easy Sharing
- Make it easier to share out links without complicated permission settings
Connectivity, Collaboration and New Design Paradigms
- 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.
Like a magic whiteboard that nobody can accidentally erase
- 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
A good option for large teams
- Organization
- Live View
- Loading time
- to make the images look better
- be able to upload gifs with fewer restrictions
Helps remote work tremendously
- Collaboration
- Prototyping
- Sharing files
- Not free
- Not great for working with variants
- Wish it could integrate with Illustrator easier
Freehand versus Miro
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
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.
It's the virtual whiteboard that works better than the real life in-person whiteboard!
- 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
I have been a Freehand user for a while
- 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
A Collaboration Tool for the New Way of Working
- 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
Easy to use, Ideate quickly, and get client buy-in.
- Decision trees and conditional logic mapping.
- User Experience and sequence of screens.
- Wireframe and other templates that are quick to drag and drop in.
- Sharing freehand with client as a link.
- Easy to draw layouts and connect the interactions as an experience map.
- Easily create notes and document interactions, rules, and requirements that are being met.
- A method for stamping or assigning statues and approvals.
- Adding a way to have a bit more than a comment so that a client or PM could drop in a detailed product requirement to keep in mind while drawing.
- Being able to quickly build out tables for a design.
- and interactive click through a concept like the UX plugin Overflow (overflow.io).
- Use the same sharing functionality as the rest of Invision. Freehand doesn't have the same sharing method, and that's really annoying.
InVision FreeHand works well for quick and easy Design Feedback!
- Collaboration with design clients.
- One space for all feedback.
- Detailed connections with design programs like XD.
- Learning curve is a little much.
- Explanation and videos of tools could be improved.
- More templated examples.
- 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.
Favorite FreeHand
- Visual Construction
- Layout specs
- Comments more accessible
Not too keen on Freehand
- 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.
Not a Stand Out, but a Perfectly Solid Solution
- 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.