Item: Balsamiq
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Balsamiq

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Balsamiq is used by me, the Web Dev, in the IT department of our institution. I use it to design mockups of our external and internal websites during the review and approval process, after which I develop the sites. Balsamiq mockups has saved me a huge amount of time and effort.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The buttons and objects are intuitive.
Flexible, easy, and quick. Low learning curve compared to much pricier mockup software.
Highly customizable. Ability to design with a high level of granularity, which is key when dealing with older, less-techy stakeholders.

Cons

While I understand the comic sans font, I do wish I could use a more professional font because I usually have to explain to stakeholders that they should ignore the font.
Stronger right-click context menu functionality would make editing box colors and fonts simpler.
Pre-defined responsize-sized templates would be awesome. Just pick a starting screen res and 5 breakpoint templates are displayed...

Return on Investment

Price tag vs. time it's saved on building full sites; Balsamiq is basically free.
Of the 6 months it took for me to single-handedly build our website, 2 were spent building mockup after mockup. Had I had to learn a more complicated piece of software to build those mockups, the project would have taken at least 2 months longer.
Balsamiq is a one-time fee rather than the dreaded subscription. It's paid for itself multiple times.

Alternatives Considered

Axure

Axure is basically a direct copy of Balsamiq for 4x the price.
Moqups is painful to use and it's a monthly subscription.
Although I have not used Adobe Comp, the learning curve is so high, it cannot even come close to the ease of Balsamiq. And Illustrator and Photoshop for mockups is a joke if you are a designer AND a developer. I don't have time for all that nonsense!

Other Software Used

Drupal, XenServer, Adobe Photoshop

Likelihood to Recommend

It's particularly well-suited for small-scale projects, but I don't think it would be any less appropriate for large scale projects. I work in a hybrid museum/library/gallery with many stakeholders of varying expertise and Balsamiq has made it easy for me to provide examples to all of them with little fuss.

Comments

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Virgin Pereira
commented 8 years ago
Hi there, Thanks a lot for sharing your review! Great to hear that Mockups is helping you with designing your websites. :) We'd love to help with the few pain points that you mentioned: - You can change the font used at any time from the Project Info Panel: https://docs.balsamiq.com/desktop/projectinfo/ - About the right-click options: we'd love to hear more about that, could you reach out to support@balsamiq.com with more details? Only if you have some time of course. :) We are trying to make it useful and simple enough at the same time, so getting input is always a great help. - While we don't have default templates within the tool (I'm adding your vote for this feature), you may want to have a look at Mockups to Go elements. Please find all the details here: https://support.balsamiq.com/resources/mockupstogo/ Hope this helps! Feel free to reach out via support@balsamiq.com if you need anything else. -Virgin from Balsamiq

Balsamiq FTW!