In my experience

At work, we’re constantly looking at the best software for us to use for wireframing, and quite often prototyping too. We currently use a mixture of OmniGraffle & Axure - both pretty solid pillars of UX design. I like OmniGraffle a lot, and the drawing tools are way beyond Axure, but Axure’s use of masters and widgets is just leagues ahead. That, and the SVN-driven shared project functionality, mean its the only tool suitable for our large projects, and my software of choice at the moment.

But there are a lot of new kids on the block, and some old ones too. Here’s a list of everything we’ve come across on our travels:

The major players

OmniGraffle

Properly vector-based, unline Axure, with plenty of templates and interactive PDF output.

$199 per license, making it good value.

Adobe InDesign

Not specifically for UX diagramming but a growing number of UX users. Less templates and stencils than Omnigraffle, and some quite basic interactivity functions.

$699 per license.

Axure RP 6

Desktop-based with online collaboration. Good community with plenty of widgets and layout grids.

$589 per license, though you can use that on two computers per user.

Microsoft Visio

It wouldn’t be right to leave out Visio. For years it was the default tool for UX professionals - not perfect, but it did the job. But it never changed. New versions came out, with a host of new features, none of which would be useful, and the same old issues were still there - poor page management (no duplication, buggy stencils), shonky looking drop-shadows and transparency, and a lack of decent UX stencils - made worse as people walked away from Visio over to Omni & Axure. Nowadays we only use Visio on legacy projects, via a virtual machine on our macs.

£372 per license for the professional edition

Balsamiq

Sketchy mockup tool, which has progressed from its Comic Sans roots into a massively popular tool for the UX community. Desktop & online pricing options.

Desktop: $79/license

Web-based: $49/month for up to 20 projects and unlimited users

The challengers

Adobe Edge Reflow

First in the race to create a responsive wireframing solution, Reflow let’s you import Photoshop files and set break points to make them responsive, but drawing from scratch is frustrating, and there’s no scope for annotations, so it won’t suit all projects.

Get it while it’s free in beta

Hot Gloo

Advanced web-based wireframing tool with collaboration.

$28/m for 5 projects and unlimited users

Protoshare

Rich web-based prototyping ala Axure, with a strong emphasis on collaboration.

$95/m for 2 editors + 6 reviewers per project, so it works out expensive.

Just In Mind

Desktop-based Axure clone. Includes main OS widgets + grid templates.

$495 per license

Antetype

Good-looking newcomer, looks to have some very strong iOS prototyping features, and supports shared libraries across multiple docs with different ‘look & feel’ which seems to be their take on a stylesheet. Desktop-based, Mac only.

Mid-range pricing at $289 / license.

Just Proto

Real-time collaboration with chat. From £13 a month.

£31/m for the fully-featured package.

Lovely Charts

Focuses on flow charts and diagrams.

Desktop & online options, although Desktop has better features

From 59 euro per license

Mockingbird

Simple wireframe generation with some advanced features

Web-based

$20/m for 10 projects

Mock Flow

Basic web-based wireframing tool

$69/year unlimited projects and users

Wireframe Sketcher

Desktop-based, Balsami-esq, wobbly lined sketch-style mockups

$75 per license

iPlotz

Collaborative, and cross-platform for Flash-based browsers

$295/year for 5 users with unlimited projects

ForeUI

Embarrassingly-named and suitably ‘pink’ online mockup tool. I do wonder where the name came from - whether it was actually a team in-joke? The homepage states, “With ForeUI, your prototype project will be skinnable”!

Desktop: $150/license

Moqups

Yes, another web-based wireframing tool.

$9/m for 10 projects

Interface 2

Just for iOS apps, but fully featured, if you’re an app designer this could be the way forward.

$9.99 for iPad or iPhone

Indigo Studio

A promising new app with quick drawing tools and the option to add storyboards, but no guides or grid, and no printing options, so it’s only really useful for quick prototypes.

On the plus side, it’s FREE!

Also well worth a look

InVision

Not so much for wireframe design, but it does do prototypes, based on images you upload.

UX Stage

Simple iPhone app for mocking up mobile apps.

Ratchet

An HTML-based iPhone prototyping framework.

Wirefy

A boilerplate solution for creating HTML prototypes, seemingly based on Bootstrap. Some coding knowledge required.

Divshot

Great looking web-based application for creating HTML prototypes, again using Bootstrap, but via a dare-I-say-it Dreamweaver-esq interface! See also Jetstrap and LayoutIt.

Pay attention clients - you need to read those notes! Yeah, you know, those things in tiny writing down the side of your wireframes. They mean something, and they can help you get the best out of your new website.

Not only do they help you understand what’s going on (that’s the idea), but we UX people also tend to use them as a place to flag issues up.

Along with detailing complicated functionality, in a typical wireframe deliverable, you’ll come across important notes, like these from a real project:

“…strongly recommended to include these wherever possible.”

“Current POS asset not sufficient, new image needs to be sourced/cropped.”

“Exact content awaiting completion of the content audit.”

Why should you read them? Aren’t these just all things that we, your agency, should have under control?

Well, yes, perhaps. But if you read them you can then say to your project manager or product owner, “Where is that asset?”, “Who’s job is that?”, “Why has no-one thought of this?” etc. That way you’re going to make the most of the all the resources at your disposal. You’ll know where there may be problems, often before we get into the later design and build stages.

And hence you get more for your money!