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
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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 43)- 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.
Good tool for team collaborations!
- 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
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.
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.
Great tool for designers!
- 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)
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 is a great tool for collaboration
- Notes
- Reactions
- Easy drawing
- Sometimes it's not easy to see who has collaborated on what pieces
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
Welcome to the collaboration party!
- 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.
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.
Love FreeHand for sharing and organizing creative ideas.
- 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.
Great free option to collaborate with others!
- 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.
InVision Freehand is great for easy and fast collaboration, but falls short on more complex projects.
- 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.
- 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
Easy to use for brainstorming and diagramming
- Fast diagramming tools
- Easy to use sticky notes or create new text-only notes
- Good aesthetic
- More prototyping capabilities
- 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.
Great tool for collaboration
- it's great for the team to collaborate
- it's easy to share with the team members
- Copy and paste resources are easy and handy
- We got the account from the company. But for some reasons a couple of our team members can't access it after 3 days of the trials.
- Are there pre-designed templates for users to get a quick start?
- when there are quite a few images, the load time is a bit long
Effective collaboration tool for a new era
- 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
The Vision for InVision is there
- collaboration
- user interface
- nothing unique about it
- can be confusing for new users
- those unfamiliar with invision are hesitant to try it for some reason
- 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.
Great tool for realtime collaboration
- Templates for affinity mapping
- Wireframing tools for drag and drop
- Quick realtime collaboration
- having a better designing ability so that we don't have to switch between tools
- More workshop templates
- Inspiration or plugin capability
It does the job
- 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