Amazing for fast prototyping
April 13, 2018

Amazing for fast prototyping

Alexis Medvedeff | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Balsamiq

We have been using Balsamiq as a prototyping tool at the Product department. Being a small software startup this allowed us to make low fidelity prototyping very fast. It has been great for showing users the basic functionality of new features and iterate rapidly with the feedback. It's also perfect for the development team to understand the basic idea and complement it with some written specifications.
  • It is very easy to create a layout and show an idea. With just a couple of clicks, you can state the main screens of an app of any kind.
  • Simple. Even though you can import assets and make a mockup with real assets, I think the main power of Balsamiq is keeping it in wireframes. This allows you to focus only on layouts, available information, and interactions and then in another stage of the project you take care of the design and look.
  • Good library of components available by default. This makes it straightforward to open it and work right away in your project or idea.
  • The project can get a bit laggy around 70-100 pages (on a MacBook Pro). It didn't happen to me but I've seen it in a presentation of a project and it froze in a moment and had to restart the app.
  • I don't find the design of the components very "pretty". It's totally subjective but still wanted to mention it. I know this is the style they have had since the beginning and it's almost something that identifies Balsamiq, but I think it can be improved.
  • It allows for a rapidly paced company where you need to move fast and iterate based on feedback (and you don't have a big team to do that).
We have used some other alternatives and Balsamiq is the best one for fastest results.
InVision and Justinmind both work very well and have great tools for collaboration and making interactive mockups. With Justinmind, I have done some app mockups that felt almost functional because I even used real assets. But unfortunately, a lot of time and dedication is needed. It can be good if your application isn't too big.
In this case, I mention powerpoint because we have also used it to make some mockups based on assets we already had. Just by cutting, pasting and cropping different images and assets.
Trello, Bitbucket, GitHub, Slack, LastPass, Evernote, Justinmind, Bonita BPM, Dropbox, Woopra, Freshdesk, MailChimp, TeamGantt, Zopim by Zendesk
It is probably the best option for people who need to move fast and don't care about the aesthetics of the mockup.
It is also very good for a presentation as it has a special cursor that points out easily parts of the design.
It is great when you care most about layout and functionality and less about the final look.

It is probably not the best option for a high definition mock, even though you can do it.
I would not suggest this for a sales/marketing/PR presentation as it is not as good looking.