Time to call off the search! We’ve compiled the ultimate list of UI/UX tools that every UX designer needs to create exceptional user experiences in 2024.
UX designers today are spoilt for choice with the plethora of UI/UX tools and cutting-edge solutions out there. We get it— it’s not easy to go through the pile and pick the tools that specifically fit your team’s requirements.
So we’ve meticulously researched and put together a list of 12 tools that have been game-changers in the industry, for each step of the UX design process. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, here’s everything about the tools you need, including key features, pros and cons, pricing, and user reviews.
In this article, we shall explore the most popular and user-friendly tools for each of these use cases in the UI/UX design process— user testing, user research, wireframing, prototyping, visual design, and handoff to developers.
User Research Tools
Step 1 of any UX design journey: find out what your users actually care about! User research tools help you gather user feedback, perform usability tests, and conduct user research.
Here are the top UX research tool essentials, for everything from surveys to usability testing and qualitative data analysis.
1. Looppanel
Best for: Research repository and qualitative data analysis
Looppanel is a research analysis & repository product that records your user interviews and generates transcripts and AI-powered notes in minutes.
It automates all the tedious, manual parts of the research process, and organizes all your data in one place— a definite must-have for any UX team!
A UX research repository is a place to store research data, notes, and insights. It helps immensely in also making research accessible to the right people at the right time. There are many research repository tools available based on your budget and requirements— Condens, EnjoyHQ, and Dovetail are a few examples.
If you have no prior experience with repositories, check out our definitive guide.
Unlike other repository tools, Looppanel doesn’t rely on tagging taxonomies. It has been built based on how researchers actually do research—using a discussion guide, notes, and categorical tags.
Main Features
- High-quality transcripts: Looppanel provides transcripts with 90% accuracy in multiple languages, including English, Hindi, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch.
- AI note-taker: The AI note-taker acts like your research assistant, taking real-time notes during interviews.
- Time-stamped notes: You can take time-stamped notes of key moments live on your call
- Automatic analysis: This feature organizes data by user interview questions or tags, and creates affinity maps automatically. It also does automated sentiment analysis, to make skimming for insights 5x faster.
- Google-like search: This allows you to do semantic search throughout the repository and find data snippets, quotes, and insights easily.
- Integrations: You can share video clips from user interviews on various platforms like Jira, Notion, and Confluence. Looppanel also offers plug-and-play integration with Zoom, MS Teams, Google Meet, and Google Calendar too.
Limitations
- Looppanel does not solve recruiting today (but we have it on our minds for the future!), so you’ll need to recruit participants through some other means like User Interviews or your own panel.
- It only supports audio and video recordings as data input at the moment (e.g., you can’t upload a CSV to the product)
Pricing
Looppanel has pricing plans to meet all budgets. If you're starting out with a small team, you can get going for as little as $30 / month. The Pro plan (for teams of 2-5 researchers) will cost $350 per month ($3500 yearly) for 25 transcription hours monthly.For larger teams, the Looppanel Business plan offers 120 transcription hours/month, SSO, and priority support for $1000 per month. Looppanel also offers custom Enterprise solutions with custom pricing, on request.
2. SurveyMonkey
Best for: Surveys and collecting data online
SurveyMonkey is a UX research tool for researchers to conduct surveys through emails, web links, and embedded forms on their websites or via social media. You can conduct your surveys in multiple languages and easily collect the data in one view.
SurveyMonkey is easy to get started with, and comes ready with templates you can use to set up your study.
Main Features
- Survey Templates: It offers a variety of survey templates that you can use as a starting point for your own surveys.
- SPSS Integration: SurveyMonkey can be integrated with SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) for advanced statistical analysis.
- Filter and Cross-tabbing: This allows you to filter your survey data and perform cross-tabulation analysis.
- Easy to Export Data: You can easily export your survey results to Excel and PDF formats.
- User panels: SurveyMonkey’s new service, SurveyMonkey Audience now offers survey panels with over 175 million participants worldwide, although it’s designed more for market research.
Limitations
- The free version is best for conducting surveys on a small scale, but the cost of paid plans can go up quickly.
- Design and customization options are extremely limited on the free and basic plans.
Pricing
SurveyMonkey offers a free plan with extremely limited features and responses, including only 10 questions per survey. Under Individual plans, the Standard monthly plan is priced at $99/month, and offers unlimited surveys and questions with a limit of 1,000 responses per month. It includes paid features like skip logic, custom reports, and exports. The Advantage Annual Plan costs $39/month with unlimited surveys and questions and a limit of 15,000 responses per year. The Premier plan costs $119/month (billed annually), with 40,000 responses per year and more brand customization options.Similarly, under Team plans, the Team Advantage and Team Premier plans cost $25 and $75 a month per user respectively, and allows your team to share and run a survey across multiple user accounts.SurveyMonkey also offers custom Enterprise plans for teams on request.
3. Useberry
Best for: Unmoderated research
Useberry is an unmoderated research platform that allows you to run tests across a variety of methods.
In unmoderated testing, you don’t have to actually intervene during the research sessions. The platforms provide instructions to users, record their actions, and should ideally be able to ask them predetermined follow-up questions.
Main Features
- Wide range of testing methods: It offers a lot of options among testing methods, including Usability testing, Card Sorting, Tree Testing, 5 Second Tests, First Click tests, Preference Tests etc
- Tool integrations: Userberry allows integrations with Protopie, Adobe XD, Sketch, Marvel, and InVision (other than a Figma integration, of course). This allows you to test more complex, realistic prototypes with your users, aside from basic Figma prototypes.
- Automatic reporting: Heatmaps and basic reporting (completion rates) are automatically calculated for you.
- Participant recruitment: One less thing on your plate! You can access a verified mix of consumers, professionals, and hard-to-reach audiences from 34 countries worldwide.
Limitations
- If you’re looking for a specific persona of users, sometimes it’s hard to find them on UseBerry. For example, we tried to recruit User Researchers and although they had a category “researchers” the results seemed to indicate that the category was murky.
- Participant filtering criteria are preset and you can’t add screener questions
Pricing
The Free Plan includes 10 responses per month, 1 seat, and 1 project. The Basic Plan costs $33 per user per month and includes 100 responses per month, 3 projects, and 3 versions per project. The Pro Plan costs $67 per user per month and offers unlimited responses, projects, and versions. The Team Plan costs $84 per month and includes 3 seats with additional seats available for $20 each.
4. User Interviews
Best for: Recruiting participants
User Interviews is a UX research tool that connects user researchers and participants.
You can filter out potential participants based on different parameters like age, location, industry, etc., to find the right participants for your studies. In exchange, participants are compensated fairly, incentivizing them to contribute to the research.
User interviews also serve those who want to manage a panel of their own participants for research studies. Let’s say you run a lot of research with existing customers of your product—you can use User Interviews’ Research Hub to store the data of these people and simplify the painful scheduling activities (emailing users, reminders, etc.)
Main Features
- Pre-existing panels: Their “Recruit” product provides you with a pre-existing panel of potential participants. You can then filter and recruit participants from the panel.
- Automated screening, scheduling, and incentive distribution: This means you get to skip all that painful back and forth setting up a time, following up to confirm the call, and making sure your incentives are paid out (phew!)
- Calendar integrations: You can schedule the meeting through Google or Outlook 365 calendars.
- Easy replacement for cancellations: It is quite easy to contact a large number of potential participants and if any participant drops out before the session, the software connects the next participants on the list you approved.
Limitations
- The screener needs to be more adaptable, with rating scale questions and arrays.
- The screening capabilities lack the sophistication of non-DIY options e.g. "must say 3 of the 6 options." You have to do that manually.
Pricing
The Free plan for individual researchers allows a maximum of 100 contacts, automated emails and scheduling, research tool integrations, and the use of 1:1 and bulk messaging tools.For small teams, you get custom branding, customer success support, custom page templates, and many more at $ 250/month for up to 1,000 contacts, or $ 500/month for up to 5,000 contacts.For large research teams, you additionally get unlimited custom email themes at $1,250/month for up to 5,000 contacts, and $1,417/month for up to 10,000 contacts.The custom Enterprise plan also offers security review, large-scale custom onboarding sessions and other features like API for custom data integrations, etc.
Check out the complete pricing plan here.
5. Maze
Best for: unmoderated research and testing
Maze allows you to run unmoderated research on your new product or prototype. It supports tests like unmoderated usability tests, website testing, prototype testing, tree testing, surveys, and card sorting.
Main Features
- Automated reports: Maze automatically creates a shareable report from your unmoderated tests which is super handy to share directly with your team, without spending a ton of time creating it.
- Participant panels: They have a panel of participants as well, so you can skip the pain of recruiting
- Easy integrations: Maze integrates with major prototyping tools like Figma, AdobeXD, and Invision—so you can bring your prototypes into Maze with ease.
- Easy replacement for cancellations: It is quite easy to contact a large number of potential participants and if any participant drops out before the session, the software connects the next participants on the list you approved.
Limitations
- Heatmap features don’t work perfectly.
- Maze limits the number of prototype links you can test in a project to 1, which limits our ability to test alternatives against each other easily.
- Their participant panel isn’t great, so you may get “professional testers” who are just trying to finish the task in order to get compensation.
Pricing
Under the Free plan for Maze, you get 300 responses per year for studies, with 1 active project at a time and up to 10 blocks (blocks kind of like questions or segments in a survey).
The Professional plan costs $75 per month, and allows for 1,800 responses per year, 10 active projects and unlimited blocks, and access to pro templates.
You can also get the custom Organization plan, which additionally offers unlimited responses, unlimited active projects and blocks, and custom templates.
Check out Looppanel's complete list of must-have UX research tools here.
Wireframing, Prototyping, and Design Tools
By building wireframes, designers define the information hierarchy of their design, making it easier to plan the layout according to how users are expected to process the information. Once wireframes are finalized, designers create prototypes— a working model of a website or app that can be tested and iterated upon.
Here are the best wireframing, prototyping, and visual design tools for UX designers, with key features, pricing, and limitations.
6. Figma
Best for: Wireframes, prototyping, collaborative design
Are you even a real UX designer if you don’t know of Figma?
Figma is a cloud-based design platform great for sharing and collaborating among team members. It has become an indispensable part of UX design for creating everything from wireframes to prototypes, roadmaps and product mockups.
Figma’s brainstorming and whiteboard tool Figjam is also a great asset for designers to collaborate, collectively plan, and think through processes.
Main Features
- Real-Time Collaboration: Figma’s collaborative features enable multiple designers to work on the same project in real time, without downloading files or working locally. You can also leave comments and have conversations, to discuss and iterate on designs.
- Extensive Component Library: Figma comes with a pretty extensive component library, which is invaluable in building detailed, interactive wireframes.
- Built-in Vector Editor: The built-in vector editor allows you to create and edit shapes quickly, making it ever-so-easy to create basic wireframe designs.
- Intuitive interface: The user-friendly, intuitive interface has millions of fans. You just need to see it to believe it.
Limitations
- The free plan limits the number of projects and files you can share for collaboration.
- The data isn’t searchable. This is a huge disadvantage especially if you use Figjam boards for analysis. You'll have recordings in a drive, transcripts (maybe) in another tool, notes in docs, FigJam for analysis, and PPTs for presentations! Finding any historical data will start getting difficult very quickly.
- Larger files with many pages or complex vectors have been known to sometimes cause performance issues.
Pricing
The Figma Starter Plan is free and includes 3 Figma and 3 FigJam files, unlimited personal files, unlimited collaborators, plugins, templates, and a mobile app.
The Figma Professional Plan costs $12 per editor/month (billed annually) or $15 month-to-month and includes unlimited Figma files, version history, shared and private projects, team libraries, and advanced prototyping.
The Figma Organization Plan costs $45 per editor/month (billed annually) and includes everything in the Professional Plan, plus org-wide libraries, design system analytics, branching and merging, centralized file management, unified admin and billing, and private plugins.
The Enterprise Plan costs $75 per editor/month (billed annually) and includes everything in the Organization Plan, plus dedicated workspaces, advanced design systems, and more features.
7. Uizard
Best for: prototyping and mockups
Uizard is a powerful AI-powered prototyping tool that makes UI design accessible to everyone, from non-designers to experienced professionals. With Uizard, you can quickly transform your ideas into functional prototypes, saving you time and effort in the early stages of the design process.
Main Features
- AI-powered features: Uizard's AI features allow you to generate UI designs from text prompts, convert hand-drawn sketches into wireframes, and transform screenshots into editable designs. This makes it easy to get started with prototyping, even if you don't have any design experience.
- Pre-made design templates and components: Uizard comes with a library of pre-made design templates and UI components, so you can start prototyping right away without having to create everything from scratch. This saves you time and helps you to create consistent and user-friendly designs.
- Collaboration features: Uizard makes it easy to collaborate with others on your prototypes. You can share your prototypes with others for feedback, or even work on prototypes together in real time.
Limitations
- Uizard restricts designers from tweaking and customizing a lot of the elements.
- Users have reported the tool to be slow occasionally.
- The interface takes time getting used to, and the features can be hard to find.
Pricing
Uizard's Free plan is ideal for students and hobbyists, offering up to 2 projects and 10 free templates. The Pro plan starts from $12 per month, and includes unlimited screens and access to all templates. For large organizations, the Business plan starts at $49 per month, offering unlimited projects and priority support. Uizard also offers an Enterprise plan with unlimited users on request.
8. Balsamiq
Best for: wireframing and mockups
One of the speediest wireframing tools out there, Balsamiq is becoming an increasingly popular choice for UX designers. It has a simple drag-and-drop interface, which helps you visualize ideas quickly. Balsamiq wireframes also have a unique hand-drawn style, which keeps the focus on the structure and content of the product rather than visual details.
Main Features
- Interactive Design: You can create a UI blueprint in minutes without writing code on Balsamiq. It also has user-friendly sketch-style controls for rapid brainstorming sessions.
- Easy-to-add UI icons and buttons: Designers have access to a variety of UI controls and icons, which can be added to wireframes quickly by just typing out the initial letters of the button name.
- Drag-and-Drop feature: This feature makes designing quick and easy, even for users without technical knowledge of product design.
Limitations
- Balsamiq does not support prototyping right now, which really limits its ability to share user flow.
- The hand-drawn style of wireframes might not be for everyone’s taste, and can appear unprofessional for some.
- Users have reported difficulty in learning to navigate the platform due to the lack of an onboarding process.
Pricing
Balsamiq’s pricing starts with the 2 Projects plan, priced at $9 per month or $90 annually. For larger teams and organizations, the 20 Projects plan is available at $49 per month or $490 per year. For extensive project needs, the 200 Projects plan, accommodating teams with more than 20 projects, is offered at $199 per month or $1,990 annually. Users get unlimited wireframes and unrestricted user access with all plans.
Whiteboard Tools
UX whiteboard tools are exactly what it sounds like— digital whiteboards for teams to visually organize their thoughts, brainstorm and collaborate in real time. They’re most useful in the early stages of the project for sketching out ideas, building wireframes and user journey mapping.
These whiteboard tools offer a lot of additional features like an infinite canvas, stickers, templates and media embedding, which make using them a lot more fun than using markers on an actual whiteboard!
9. Miro
Best for: wireframes, brainstorming
Miro is a whiteboarding tool that can be used to visually organize and analyze your user interview data, once it has been extracted. You can use Miro to create affinity maps, user stories, and other diagrams to help you identify patterns and trends.
Main Features
- Infinite Canvas: Miro's expansive canvas provides ample space for free-flowing brainstorming and creative ideating.
- Lots and lots of widgets: Miro features a comprehensive array of widgets, ranging from sticky notes and various shapes to arrows and advanced drawing tools.
- Ready-to-Use templates: It has plenty of ready-made templates, including user story maps, wireframes, and sprint planning.
- Collaborative features: Miro allows team members to view each other's cursor movements, share screens, and communicate through built-in video, chat, and comments, all in real time.
- Integrations: Miro seamlessly integrates with over 100 different platforms, such as Slack, Jira, Google Drive, and Sketch, facilitating an efficient workflow.
Pricing
Public boards are free to build and use on Miro. For the rest, billing begins at $8 per month per user for teams.
Check out Miro’s comprehensive pricing plan here.
10. Figjam
Best for: wireframes, brainstorming
FigJam is a whiteboard tool by Figma, and lets you create and organise ideas on a canvas in sticky notes. In addition, you get to leverage a range of templates, widgets and plugins as well as their integrations with Jira, Github, and Asana to streamline your research analysis workflow.
Main Features
- Whiteboards for visual thinking: Figjam is a great canvas for your team to collaboratively work on. It’s particularly good for visual people—you can see your data on stickies and move them around as needed.
- Stickers and voting features: You get a set of fun features like stamps, stickers, voting, and audio conversations so you can chat with teammates while you’re analyzing. You can even high five each other!
Limitations
- Not directly built for research, FigJam comes with its limitations. For one, your data is in a separate place compared to your recordings & transcripts, making it hard to jump back to moments or double-check a note.
- It can be overwhelming for users, especially in large studies. Imagine you’re faced with 500 sticky notes—it gets daunting pretty fast!
Pricing
Refer to Figma’s pricing plan above.
Website Tools
Website-building tools like Framer and Webflow are primarily used to help designers create user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing websites, often without using coding. They can also be used for creating wireframes, mockups, or interactive prototypes, in addition to fully functional websites.
11. Webflow
Best for: prototypes, mock-ups, no-code websites
Webflow is one of the best website-building tools for designers who prefer low-code or no-code solutions for website creation. It auto-generates HTML, CSS, and JavaScript during the design process, and allows you full control over your website's appearance and structure. The platform also has a lot of templates for beginners to try out.
Main Features
- CMS (Content Management System): The Webflow CMS allows you to structure content types you’ll publish over and over again, like blog posts, product feature pages, testimonials etc.
- Components: This ingenious feature turns repeating design elements (like buttons) into symbols you can add to your page with a click.
- Motion Design: For ambitious designers, Webflow offers the unique opportunity to create sites with 3D CSS.
Limitations
- Webflow’s no-code interface is not very user-friendly, and has a steep learning curve for beginners to get used to.
- The platforms also glitch a lot, and pages can take time to load often.
Pricing
Webflow offers a free plan for hobby and staging websites, which will include the webflow domain name. Plans offering custom domain names start at $14 per month and offer easy 1-click publishing and hosting.
If you’re interested in building an online store, Webflow’s e-commerce plans start at $23 per month. They also offer Workspace plans, which start at $16 monthly, with additional features for teams to collaboratively build.
For businesses with advanced security and support requirements, Webflow provides an Enterprise solution. Check out all of Webflow’s pricing plans here.
12. Framer
Best for: prototypes, no-code websites
Framer has been a recent game-changing website maker, with its designer-centric, no-code approach. The interface is similar to that of a design tool, and it lets you create SEO-optimized, visually appealing websites with complex animation and layouts.
Main Features
- Doesn’t require code: Framer sites are built on a familiar canvas that you don’t need a a background in web development to figure out.
- Interactive Capabilities: Framer stands out for its advanced animation and interactivity features, enabling designers to craft detailed animations and prototypes that closely mimic the end product.
- AI-Enabled Features: Framer’s arsenal of AI features ranges from optimizing website copy and layouts, to AI-powered translation for multilingual support. The AI prompts feature is quite magic; you just need to enter a prompt, and it builds the entire website for you!
- Analytics: In a step ahead of Webflow, Framer offers built-in GDPR-compliant analytics, that relies on GA4.
Limitations
- It’s a relatively new product, so the community support around it is limited.
- The learning curve is not as steep as Webflow’s, but it’s still a lot to figure out. Especially if you have zero prior knowledge of building websites.
Pricing
Framer’s site plans for individual sites and teams both come in four tiers: Free, Mini, Basic, and Pro. For individuals, the Free plan includes the Framer domain and Framer banner.
The paid plans for individual users range from $5 to $30 per month, based on available features like number of visitors, password protection, CMS collections, cookies, and analytics.
Framer also offers Workspace plans for teams. The Free plan supports tiny teams and allows collaboration on free sites. The Basic plan supports up to 5 editors and includes features like cursor chat. The Pro plan costs supports up to 10 editors and includes advanced permissions and comments.
For larger organizations, Framer offers custom Enterprise plans for both site and workspace categories with custom pricing.
Check out Framer’s pricing plans here.
Conclusion
For a UX designer, the right tools can significantly enhance the design process, making it more efficient and effective. Don’t forget, the best tool is the one that fits your workflow and meets your specific needs!
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