Top 12 UI/UX Design Tools In 2021

October 21, 2021

Viiniit Aroraa

Sr. Lead UI/UX @ Radiansys

The need for accuracy and precision-led web designing emerged as a crucial requirement post pandemic as more businesses adopted the digital-first model. A very crucial part of web designing is UI and UX creation that must match pace with the shifting web design trends. New approaches and practices of UI/UX are constantly upping and evolving, helping tech leaders become appealingly visible. UI and UX mostly go hand-in-hand towards creating functionality-rich websites delivering great content and satisfactory experiences to the customers.

There is a humongous variety of UI/UX designing software helping the creation of detailed websites that establish business goals perfectly and drive great user experiences. These tools can help both an individual or a UI/UX design company to build the perfect website. You can choose between complete designing tools, specialized tools for prototyping, and tools with great design UI libraries and frameworks.

To rid you of the confusion, we present this article as a preliminary read on the best UI/UX design tools currently available in the market. The below-mentioned tools have been picked after a comprehensive study of their overall utility, features, user-friendliness, and more. Keep reading to know more.

Top 12 UI/UX design tools

Here are the 12 wonderful UI/UX design software that we found to be the best choice for creating the most stunning websites.

1. Figma

The most versatile, enabling, and easeful UI/UX design tool available in the market is Figma. Along with designing, it also allows prototype creation. The best part is that it allows the freedom of coding. There is so much to do with Figma- create website elements, reuse them for creating different pages, public assets and their libraries for later use, etc. Prototype creation enables live assessment of the element’s interactions, overlays creation, and check live GIFs. Figma also enables team collaborations and effective project management through design sharing, code generation, version history check, and feedback share. The live preview app creation feature for Android and iOS is the best of all.

2. Adobe XD

For the designers who stay a step ahead, Adobe XD is the best UI/UX design tool. It's an upgrade for the web designers proficient with using Adobe Photoshop as it gives them the power of vector-based designing features. Noticeably, Adobe XD is easy to learn too and produces amazing low/high fidelity designs and prototypes. This software has got a set of wonderful designing tools along with a design asset library that stores upgradable design customizations. Adobe XD also allows great collaborations as it works perfectly in sync with other tools like Illustrator, Sketch, and Photoshop. You can carry out easy import of designs and instances on XD.

3. Sketch

Popularized as the best drag-and-drop web editor, Sketch is the desirable UI design tool for non-coders and new designers due to its intuitiveness and easy learning curve with moderately advanced features. This designing-cum-prototyping tool enables pixel-perfect website creation with its feature of super zoom for effective component alignment. Sketch allows versatility at its best. The collaborative component library facilitates the creation of universal components and their regular updating. It also has an app library that stores different functionalities like plugins, apps, assistants, etc. for optimized project management. Sketch is the right choice for creating high-fidelity mockups easily and creatively.

4. InVision Studio

The most powerful prototyping tool you will find in the UI/UX design tools market is InVision Studio. It is also a complete UI designing tool in itself with advanced features for animation creation. The tool helps web designers with rapid prototyping, design systems, and collaborative and responsive web designing. The rapid prototyping feature of InVision facilitates superlatively ingenious and composite graphic transitions. You only need to design the start and end transitions through numerous interactions and gestures followed by exporting the prototypes at the end. Everything else is taken care of by Studio. Design collaboration is also eased by the InVision Freehand feature that allows creative discussions on an in-built online whiteboard.

5. UX Pin

This is an exclusive UI/UX design tool with exclusive features for creating mockups and prototypes. You can create the most detailed user experiences with UX Pin with every tool required right on this platform. There are numerous customizable element templates or you can import elements to create high-fidelity prototypes. What makes UX Pin different from the rest is its ability to deal closer with the design code. While most prototyping tools only allow minimal interactions imitation, UX Pin goes a step ahead by letting designers deal with code components, logic, and interactive states. Other great advantages of UX Pin include Sketch integration and smooth accessibility check with the WCAG standards.

6. Marvel

Suitable for both beginners and learned web designers, Marvel is a simple yet productive UI design tool. It boasts a navigable and user-friendly interface laced with significant UI designing features including lo-fi/hi-fi wireframe creation, prototyping, and user testing (much rare feature among UI/UX design tools). You can follow a very streamlined process to design web pages and simulate them for detailed refinement. The Handoff feature of Marvel must get a mention as it provides CSS styles and HTML codes to developers for website building too. This tool also permits many great integrations that allow smoother project workflow management through easy design sharing. Marvel is fully accessible online which means, no downloads!

7. Balsamiq

A great UI/UX design company would trust the Balsamiq UI/UX design tool for its high-efficiency quotient. The easy learning curve allows all web designers to get a better grasp of UX/UI designing through a variety of user-friendlpublic assets. Balsamiq allows rapid production of low-fidelity wireframes in the form of multiple drafts that can be easily stored with cleanly segregated details. This tool is great for prototyping too as it facilitates the linking of designs together for a live website preview. The subscription plans of Balsamiq make it great for all designing purposes. You can choose an apt plan for your designing needs that will give you a suitable set of features and design slots.

8. Mural

Mural is essentially an innovation-collaboration tool that has found ready acceptance in the design world. It has gained the title of design thinking tool that is a platform for smart web designers to brainstorm design solutions. Mural includes an online whiteboard on which all sorts of design diagrams including free-hand, flowcharts, lists, etc. can be drawn and managed. The tool even offers a complete template library along with YouTube guides, webinars, etc. for helping project kickstarts. It also allows easy integration with major apps like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Dropbox to further ease project management.

9. Adobe Illustrator

When it comes to precision graphic designing, Adobe Illustrator is the perfect UI/UX design tool to go to. It is a vector-based designing software that comes with numerous exquisite features for quick illustrations creation. The tool promotes web designers to play with their creativity and design vision and either draw freehand or use shapes. Illustrator facilitates plenty of designing tasks including image tracing, text manipulation, logo creation, mock-up designing, and so on. The notable thing about Illustrator is the image quality that remains undisturbed at any display resolution. Web designers adept with using other Adobe designing tools can shift to using Illustrator for refining their designs further.

10. Adobe Photoshop

This is a classic web designing tool that is only getting better with time and serving even some highly advanced tasks. Adobe Photoshop is an ideal platform to design web graphics, create images through various means, and much more professionally. The tool has been widely used by designers and photographers due to its rich feature set that permits both graphic production and effective workflow management. Some of the amazing features of Photoshop include filters, image effects, Brushes, Scripting, Actions, and much more. The features like Revert and Layer Comps greatly help with workflow improvement.

11. Canva

Carrying simplicity at its best, Canva is the top choice of advanced to most amateur users. It is a wonderful UI/UX design tool with user-friendly drag-and-drop functionality. This allows all types of users to carry out a wide range of web and graphic designing tasks. You can find plenty of shapes, icons, fonts, filters, illustrations, vectors, stock images, and much more in the Canva toolset. The huge library of design types and templates has something for everyone, including bloggers, marketers, and businesses of all sizes, etc. You can choose between the free and paid versions of Canva to get the features you want including graphic resizing, transparent PNGs export, etc.

12. SVGator

SVGator stands for SVG animator which is an advanced animation and illustrations designing tool. It is a complete software allowing web designers to create, animate, import, preview, and export illustrations in the SVG format. SVGator uses vectors to create different types of animations including color graphics, stroke-path, skews, morph, and self-drawing. The built-in elements library of SVGator contains a vast variety of animated avatars, business icons, shapes, signs, symbols, etc. that facilitate creative graphics creation and updation. To do more, there are editing tools, a path animation-making tool, and the main dashboard to manage designs created. The best part is that these many features are studded in a drag-and-drop interface that boosts the usability of the tool.

How To Pick the Right UI/UX design tool?

It would be wrong to expect any UI/UX design tool to carry out all web designing tasks. Each of these tools has its strengths and features. The goal is to find out which tool serves the target needs best. Here is a list of the important factors to consider while assessing web design software:

• Assess your project and its specific requirements. Identify the type of website to be built whether it is going to be an e-commerce website, personal website, or anything else.
• Identify your budget limit and list down the tools accordingly. Check out both free and paid web design software.
• Assess the UI/UX design tools based on their features, user-friendliness, pricing plans, customer support, responsiveness, and other factors. The aim is to see if the tool can meet the designing plan of your website and is worth the investment.
• You must also look into the need of using two or more tools for your project if needed. In such a scenario, assess the total cost for the combined toolset being provided and if it's worth it.
• Workflow management and effective collaboration is a crucial need of modern workspace. Thus, check if the selected design tool is facilitating that or not. The tool must provide integration with project management tools and with other designing tools to be even better.

A great UI/UX design tool can help individual website owners, small enterprises, e-commerce builders, and even professional web designers hired by big corporations. Modern web design software tools need to be even more versatile and offer higher utility. We presented to you a list of the 12 best UI/UX design tools that provide the best editing features, web themes, responsive building, and third-party integrations to provide smoother overall UI/UX development. By making a few important observations, you will be able to make a wise choice of the right UI/UX design software and get built the website nailing your online vision.

Thanks for reading!