Balsamiq: Easy Tool for simple Wireframing & Prototyping
August 30, 2017

Balsamiq: Easy Tool for simple Wireframing & Prototyping

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Balsamiq

Our company purchased Balsamiq software after using the free trial. It was mainly bought for wireframing for a new website we were creating for a new software platform. It's mainly used by the marketing department to relay the vision for the new website to the developer team overseas.
  • There is hardly any learning curve for using this software. It's very easy for a beginner to get a hang of it and start using immediately.
  • This is perfect for a very fast layout or a wireframing for a website or app. The whole app wireframe can be done in just a few hours with the click and drag options.
  • The first thing I miss is COLOR! There aren't very many options for really adding some creativity with colors.
  • There could be better layout for all the elements. Sometimes the elements are hard to find.
  • Names of the Elements are sometimes a bit confusing too. Once you search or look through ALL of them, you can usually find what you are looking for, but it can be confusing for new users.
  • I like that we were able to buy the program for one lump sum payment and didn't have to keep paying each month like Photoshop makes you do.
  • Definitely good ROI as we were able to complete some wireframes for a software pretty quickly.
Balsamiq is very simple and easy, select and drag program for wireframing and prototyping for websites and software. It's really meant for beginners and people who put more weight into the workflow rather than design as there aren't very many options for making it personalized or showing off your creativity. However, for a beginner, it's a really amazing and simple way to get the idea across to the whole team. The graphic designers can then work on top of that wireframe to get it personalized.
Balsamiq is built for software engineers and their development teams if they don't want to invest in a graphic designer or a UI/ UX designer from the beginning, as there isn't too much room for creativity. I have used it for simple wireframing and the software teams understand it really well, however those wireframes aren't going to sell any investor to invest in the project as the full vision of the software can't be recognized.
I really love how easy it is for beginners to get started on this without any prior training. However the more you use it, the more you want the fancier, more elaborate options to be there.