11 Best Prototyping Tools For UI/UX Designers

Prototyping tools are integral part of an UI/UX designer’s work. That is why it is very essential for you as a designer to have the right kind of prototyping tool to help you create great, high fidelity designs.

The market is full of all-in-one tools that not only let’s you prototype but also let’s you create wireframes, do full-fledged UI design and also let’s you collaborate with your team members. It’s important to find a tool that matches all these needs, is fast to use and saves you time.

So to help you out with your search, I have curated a list of some of the best prototyping tools in the market to help you comprehensively determine which tool best suits your needs.

Best Prototyping Tools For UI/UX Designers

#1 Adobe XD

Adobe XD is the leader in everything it has to offer. With XD, you can do wireframing, designing and prototyping of websites as well as mobile applications.

Collaboration is real easy and it integrates with its family apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, and you can also choose from more than 200 integrations to help you to get more out of your Adobe Experience Cloud investment. It’s fully integrated with Adobe’s Creative Cloud which which means you get a full fledged suit of design tools for your prototyping needs.

Also it’s super easy to hand-off the designs to your developer for code conversion with sharable design URLs.

It offers apps for all major operating systems like OS X, Windows, Android, and IOS. Adobe XD is everything that a designer needs to build high-end prototypes. It cost starts at FREE pricing with limited functionalities to around $23 a month per user if you want more features. You can check their full pricing here.

#2 Sketch

The Sketch app is well-known for its rich features and user-friendly interface. Design-focused features like Grids and Layouts, Resizing Constraints, Variable, and OpenType Fonts make it easier for you to work at your best.

Features like Reusable Components, Smart Layout, and Shared Libraries help you to scale your projects. Also Sketch has made the process of getting feedback and testing ideas painless, by offering features like Cloud Sharing, and Developer Handoffs. You can now share designs directly with your developers to convert them to code.

It also supports hundreds of plugins such as Plants, Overflow, and Chart to name a few. I’ve covered a bunch of them on this post.

Sketch comes with a 30-day free trial and you can then upgrade to a $99 lifetime license, which is perfect if you are a solo designer. If you have a team of contributors, you can go with their monthly plan of $9 per month per user.

#3 Figma

Figma is another popular option for you to explore. It lets teams create, test, and ship better designs from scratch to end. It’s a great tool where multiple designers can work together to make designs in a fully collaborative manner. With Figma, you can prototype while you design, and vice versa.

Figma comes with a lot of handy features to help you build a prototype. Some of the features are Intuitive build, Interactions, Mobile-optimized, Animated GIFs, Dynamic overlays, and much more.

Figma Integrations include Maze, Slack, Dropbox, Dribble, Jira, and more. It’s free for up to 3 projects and then $12 per editor/month for professionals.

#4 InVision

InVision provides you with everything you need for digital product design, all in one place, with tools for ideation, prototyping, and design management. You can streamline your workflow by using various integrations such as Slack, Dropbox, Jira, Basecamp, Trello, Microsoft Teams etc.

With InVision Cloud, you can draw, wireframe, and present your team’s best ideas on a shared digital whiteboard. You can also create powerful screen designs with fast vector-based drawing and flexible layer, add transitions, and micro-interactions to turn static screens into working prototypes, through InVision Studio.

With InVision DSM, you can create and maintain a shared visual language for design and development, push and pull library changes with Studio and Sketch plugin. It free to use for individuals and small teams, and starts at $9.95 a month for professionals.

#5 Framer

Framer is one of the best and simple to use prototyping tools to create interactive designs for designers, engineers, product managers, and teams.

It’s relatively new and has come into existence just few years ago, and already have a full-blown interactive design, prototyping, and collaboration set of tools trusted by teams at Dropbox, Twitter, Pinterest, and others.

Designers can start from scratch in Framer or import from their Sketch or Figma designs. The output is near-native prototypes that can be tested on real users with real-world constraints, so design decisions can be stress-tested from the start and no development resources are needed.

It’s free for up to 2 editors and 3 projects, then you have two premium plans starting $12 a month.

#6 Marvel

Marvel offers a wide range of features including wireframing, designing, prototyping, handoff, user testing and collaboration. You can instantly generate design specifications and connect integrations that power up your workflow.

Marvel provides integrations with Sketch, Trella, Jira, Slack,, G Suite, Maze, etc. You can make designs interactive with dynamic transitions, interactivity, and gestures to bring your prototypes to life.

User testing feature allows you to take feedback from your target audience, customers, and stakeholders before you send the designs for development. Marvel’s collaborative features let team members add notes, and share ideas in real-time.

It’s free for upto one project for individuals and $84/month for teams.

#7 Axure RP

Axure RP is the most powerful way to plan, prototype, and handoff to developers, all using one app. Axure RP lets you quickly make rich, functional prototypes so you can make informed choices with the help of dynamic content, conditional logic, and adaptive views.

It allows you to import Sketch, Figma, Adobe XD and other design files and allows high-quality prototyping so you can amaze your stakeholders and customers. You can bridge the gap with the development team by utilizing their documentation, Automated Redlines, and Code Export.

Axure RP is trusted by companies like Amazon, BBC, Verizon, Microsoft, Target, and other. It costs $29/month for individuals and team plan costs around $49/month.

#8 Origami Studio

Origami Studio is a product from Facebook. It is built and used by designers at Facebook for prototyping and designing modern design interfaces for mobile apps.

With Origami Live you can view the mockups live on mobile phones in real-time. You can use your device’s camera, microphone, accelerator, and haptics in your prototype, even send and open prototypes directly on your other devices. It’s an excellent tool for creating mobile app prototypes.

It allows you to easily create prototypes with layers, save time with pre-built Material and iOS components, quickly explore and iterate visually with patches, and see changes immediately in the Viewer as you make them.

This prototyping tool is best for freelancers and individuals starting out as designers. It’s a free service.

#9 Webflow

Webflow helps you build business websites without coding. Webflow’s interactions and animations tools bring all the power of CSS and JavaScript into a completely visual tool, empowering designers to build complex, rich websites and animations.

You can create scroll-based parallax animations, build micro-interactions, create hover animations, and more. With it’s CMS, you can define your own content structure and design with real data.

If you quickly want to prototype a website or even make an end product irrespective of your skills, Webflow is the right choice for you. It’s free to try and the most basic plan starts at $12/mon.

#10 Balsamiq

Since 2008, Balsamiq‘s mission has been to help rid the world of bad user interfaces, and Balsamiq prototyping tool is the best way to do that. UX professionals from across the globe use it to create wireframes as it’s a very focused, low-fidelity tool for wire-framing.

It is easy to collaborate and get feedback on your wireframes with this tool. They claim their wireframes are the gold standard in low-cost wire framing tools. The main focus of this tool is on the ideation phase, which provides you with a clean tool that helps you get in the flow and stay focused on structure rather than colors and icons.

Companies like Apple, eBay, Cisco, Skype, and Tesla use Balsamiq for creating wireframes and usability test. It costs anywhere between $9 per month to $199 per month depending on the number of projects.

#11 JustInMind

JustInMind is a great prototyping tool that lets you create wireframes for websites and web apps that adapt to multiple screen resolutions for desktop and mobile, the UI elements in your screen will also adapt automatically.

You can create your own UI kits, personalize them with your own style and interactions. You get seamless collaboration with features like User Management, Reviewers and Developers, On-Premise Collaboration, and LDAP Integration.

JustInMind’s usability testing tool integrations include Peek, Loop, CrazyEgg, UserZoom, and Validately. It cost $19/month for professionals and $39/month per user for enterprises.

There you go!

These are some of the best prototyping tools used by professionals around the world. Prototyping has never been this easy and these tools have made it much more easier and efficient for even people who are just starting out in the UX/UI world.

As most of them offer a free trial, try each of them yourself to get a taste of what each of them have to offer and choose the tool that you feel the most apt for your work. Goodluck!