21 Product Design Tools to Use in 2023
Innovation can’t happen by accident. The right tools for product design can help you streamline the entire product design process, making it easier to create high-quality products and services that your customers will love.
While no “one tool” will cover all your design needs, there is powerful product design software that can help you optimize your workflows.
We compiled a list of the best product design tools to help you improve your designs.
Throughout this blog post, we will examine tools that are dedicated to different aspects of the product design process. These steps include:
- Product Discovery
- Product Design & Prototyping
- Usability Testing
- Validation
- Handoff
- No-Code Development
- Communication & Project Management
Now, let’s explore tools for product design in greater detail at each stage of the process.
Tools for product discovery
Product discovery is the first step in the product design process. This early stage involves user experience research and product-related data collection to better understand what problems the future product will have to solve and for whom.
Below we’ve gathered a list of product design tools that help with brainstorming ideas, researching, and collecting user data. Take a look at each one and see how it fits your needs.
Whimsical
Whimsical combines documents and whiteboards in the same online collaboration hub, making it easy for designers to move seamlessly between brainstorming and mapping out design concepts. This saves time and streamlines the overall design process.
Source: Whimsical video on visual project management.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Mind maps. Start with a mind mapping tool to organize ideas and concepts effortlessly.
- Flowcharts. Visualize data with easy and convenient diagrams.
- Wireframes. Create beautiful low-fidelity to high-fidelity wireframes in minutes. Whimsical rich library of configurable elements—buttons, inputs, checkboxes, and more—makes it easy to create sophisticated prototypes, speeding up the design and development process.
- Documentation & collaboration. Simultaneously work on a single document and exchange ideas in real-time.
What is the price?
- Pro plan: $12 per editor/month ($10 per editor if billed annually)
- Organization plan: $20 per editor/month
UserBit
UserBit provides UX researchers and designers with an entire UX design stack. This amazing product designer software allows teams of all sizes to keep all the research data they need within one platform and collaborate on personas, journey maps, user research, card sorting, visual sitemaps, and more in real time.
Image source: UserBit YouTube video on project overview.
How can this tool benefit you?
- UX research. At this stage, it is a valuable tool to prepare and record interviews, generate automatic transcriptions from video and audio recordings, analyze survey data and manage participants and stakeholders.
- Analysis. Manage all your research data and insights within an analytics dashboard.
- Information architecture. Create user personas, conduct card sorting studies and finally, get the architecture of your product right with visual sitemaps.
- Interaction design. Map out your users’ path with user flows and build customer journey maps—all in one place.
What is the price?
- Free plan: one project and limited features
- Pro plan (3 users minimum): $20/user/month
- Enterprise plan: $30/user/month (annual billing only)
Miro
Miro is a web-based collaborative tool that helps teams ideate and manage digital whiteboards. Miro is especially useful for Agile workflows because it has a variety of use cases: strategy, planning, mapping, and diagramming.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Tools integration. Miro integrates with over 100 apps for product management, design, or documentation, like Figma, InVision, or Microsoft Teams. It gives teams a priceless possibility to connect, automate manual processes and make work more efficient.
- Template library. Miro has template categories organized by use cases like customer journey mapping or brainstorming, so you can easily find the perfect template for your current project.
What is the price?
- Team plan: $10/member/month
- Business plan: $20/member/month
- Enterprise plan: custom pricing
Tools for product design & prototyping
When you’re ready to create a prototype, you’ll have the opportunity to review all your ideas, choose the most promising ones, and turn them into testable prototypes. As with any creative process, there will be hiccups along the way.
Using online product design tools to create your prototypes quickly and efficiently, you can avoid bottlenecks in the design process and ensure that every idea is evaluated on its merits before it becomes part of your final product. Typically, product designers for hire choose these tools when creating visual designs and prototypes.
Figma
If you think Figma is just another product designer tool, think again. As an all-in-one tool that offers endless design features, and the ability to track changes and share your work in real-time with stakeholders and clients, it’s truly a game-changer for teams, large or small.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Unique set of tools and features. Figma has tools you won’t find in other programs of its kind, like a pen tool that allows you to change the width of lines on the fly and ‘OpenType’ features to help make your design ideas come to life.
- Seamless prototyping. Create animated, interactive prototypes in a snap—no coding required. Send a link to your team so everyone can work together more efficiently.
- Plugins and widgets. Automate tasks and customize your workflow with plugins created by the Figma community.
- Simplified developer handoff. Developers can review the code in your design files directly within Figma without any additional effort. Simply select the frame or object, and the code appears right before their eyes.
- Organize your files. Figma enables teams to manage their files in a way that helps them collaborate. With Figma, your team can create multiple pages per file and easily navigate between pages.
Figma has developed an online whiteboarding tool called FigJam, which is free for anyone to use. FigJam is one of the best online product design tools to help with product design and prototyping.
Image source: YouTube video on brainstorming in FigJam
How can this tool benefit you?
- Ideation and brainstorming. Sketch your ideas and get feedback with sticky notes, dot voting, stamps, or emotes— all in real time.
- Diagrams. Map your processes and systems with intuitive, easy-to-use shapes and arrows.
What is the price?
- Figma Professional: $15/user/month
- Figma Organization: $45/user/month (yearly billing only)
Sketch
Sketch is a very intuitive and flexible software to design products with a highly active community of designers and developers. It’s the perfect balance between an intuitive interface and powerful tools that let teams design and collaborate from the start of the project until its completion.
However, keep in mind that Sketch is currently only compatible with macOS and has no plans of launching for Windows or iOS anytime soon.
How can this tool benefit you?
- All-in-one toolkit. Sketch helps you through every stage of your product design process, from brainstorming and collaboration to the final touches on your product design.
- Prototype testing. Turn your designs into prototypes and test them out on your browser, Mac app, or device.
- Collaboration in real-time. Work with your team, share feedback and hand off tasks in one place.
- Accessible for everyone. Anyone can use Sketch. Its features are so intuitive that even non-designers can start using it in minutes. This means designers can test ready-to-launch designs with users or stakeholders more efficiently than ever.
What is the price?
- Standard plan for individuals and teams: $9 per editor, monthly or $99 per editor, yearly
- Business plan for organizations: custom pricing (25 editors minimum)
Adobe XD
Adobe XD is the all-in-one UX and UI software to design products and prototype websites, web apps, mobile apps, and hardware. Fast, powerful, and everything you need for the entire product design process: from low-fidelity wireframes to hi-fi interactive prototypes.
As a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, it combines the strengths of many tools into a single integrated experience.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Vector-based editor tool with unlimited artboards and smart guides that help you to align different objects and elements in your designs.
- Components and states. Components make it easy to implement changes across entire designs or documents, so you don’t have to duplicate and make those changes manually.
- Rich set of animation features. Animate your content with motion and micro-animations, or play videos and Lottie files.
- 3D Transforms. Make your designs come to life with the illusion of depth and perspective.
What is the price?
- Single Adobe XD app plan: $11,99/month
- All apps plan (20+ Creative Cloud apps, including XD, Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects): $35,99/month
InVision
InVision empowers you to collaborate at every stage of the product design process so that your team is constantly working together in one place and never duplicating effort. It contains all the tools and assets you need to create, wireframe, prototype, and animate stunning visuals.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Ready-to-connect integrations. All of your favorite tools—Figma, Google Docs, Microsoft Teams, Kanban boards, and more—can be embedded into your digital whiteboard.
- Adaptive layout for responsive design. You can adjust your designs to fit any screen size without having to redo the work.
- Rapid prototyping. Allows easy implementation of fluid interactions, mobile device mirroring, and instant playback.
- Built-in animation. Smart-swipe transitions, timeline editing, and auto-layer linking are now at your disposal.
- Components. Component libraries with global syncing and real-time updates help you ensure design consistency.
- Templates. A variety of template options based on categories and roles helps you to focus on the essential tasks.
What is the price?
- Plan for individuals: free
- Pro plan (up to 200 users): $4/user/month billed annually or $4,95 billed monthly
Overflow
Overflow is one of the best product design tools aimed to help you get your ideas out there quickly. It helps visually document your ideas and concepts, draw beautiful user flow diagrams, and create stunning design presentations that tell a story in a snap.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Build interactive user flows. Overflow makes building user flow diagrams effortlessly and swiftly, speeding up the workflow by making it faster to generate diagrams.
- Meaningful design presentations. With Overflow, you can create professional design presentations to engage your audience. To make your presentation seamless, you can use only the screens you want to share, group and organize them efficiently, and add additional content or branding elements.
- Communicate effortlessly. Discussing your work and collaborating with the team becomes much easier when using this software for product design. It allows one to share ideas and get feedback without registering or learning a complicated design program.
What is the price?
- Pro plan: $15/user/month or $12/user/month if billed yearly
- Enterprise plan: custom pricing
Balsamiq
Balsamiq is one of the product design softwares for low-fidelity wireframing that decreases the time and cost of designing by providing quick and flexible prototypes. With Balsamiq’s combination of sketching and collaboration features, you can focus on what matters most: the content and structure of your design.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Interactive prototypes. Create simple prototypes to demonstrate your ideas or test usability.
- Built-in UI components. Hundreds of pre-made and user-generated UI controls and icons allow designers to create dozens of wireframes quickly without wasting time on creating the components themselves.
What is the price?
- 2 projects: $9/month or $90/year
- 20 projects: $49/month or $490/year
- 200 projects: $199/month or $1,990/year
Framer
Framer is a design tool for creating prototypes rather than a post-development tool. It’s great product designer software if you’re already on top of the newest web design innovations and want to create interactive prototypes with a variety of features. Framer’s easy-to-learn interface makes it easy for designers to start prototyping in minutes.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Dozens of professionally designed templates. Framer makes it easy for you to create websites with dozens of customizable templates and ready-to-use elements—then publish them straight away.
- Plugins. Framer’s store offers a variety of plugins that give designers features such as UI kits for integrating social media channels, players for embedding a variety of media, grids, and other valuable components.
What is the price?
- One site with limited features: free
- Basic site: $12/month
- Pro site: $16/month
Framer also charges editors who collaborate on paid sites $14/month per editor.
Usability testing tools
Creating a successful product implies finding out if it’s actually good enough. Remote usability testing with the right tools can help eliminate barriers that prevent users from being successful and happy, so they will continue to use your product. Let’s take a look at product design softwares for usability testing that help create a smooth experience from end to end.
Maze
Maze is fantastic product research and testing tool that allows teams to make quick, data-driven decisions about their product development. Giving prototypes a test run with their built-in pool of research participants couldn’t be easier.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Usability testing. Gather user insights and determine which features are popular and effective so that you can build a more effective prototype.
- Content testing. Maze can help you validate messaging that resonates with your users and product copy that increases sales.
- Idea validation. Use Maze to test your idea and ensure that it’s something worth pursuing.
What is the price?
- Free plan with limited features
- Professional plan: $75/month if billed annually
- Organization plan: custom pricing
Zoom
Zoom is a powerful video communication tool that needs no introduction. Although it’s been used for everyday purposes, it is not commonly recognized that it can be used for testing prototypes with users.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Screen-sharing. Observe the users as they interact with a product, listen to their feedback, and ask questions about how the experience feels to them.
- Zoom Room. This feature is ideal for conducting user testing with many users, as few services can accommodate as many attendees as Zoom Room.
- Easy to use. This creates an environment where users feel comfortable and confident when participating in user testing.
What is the price?
- Basic plan: free for an unlimited amount of 40-minute long meetings, up to 100 attendees.
- Pro plan: $149/year/user, up to 100 attendees
- Business plan: $199/year/user, up to 300 attendees
- Enterprise plan: custom pricing, up to 1000 attendees.
Validation tools
The way that designers validate their product designs can be varied. It’s not just about making sure that it looks good but also about whether it works well and is the right fit for your customers.
Using early versions of the design and testing it with potential customers is an excellent way to get valuable feedback that can be applied before developing it. These product design tools can help understand whether the design serves its purpose.
Hotjar
Hotjar is a tracking tool that helps product teams observe and measure users’ behavior. The insights produced by Hotjar go beyond standard metrics to help businesses empathize with their users and make data-driven on how to evolve the way they engage them.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Heatmaps. Discover what your website visitors are drawn to, and let that guide how you prioritize content.
- Session recordings. Watch users as they navigate your product to see what is causing frustration and confusion.
- Surveys. To get a broader perspective of customer needs, conduct longer-form surveys online.
- Feedback widgets. Gather feedback on your product from users who are actually experiencing it.
What is the price?
- Free plan with minimum features
- Plus plan: €39/month
- Business plan: €99/month
- Scale plan: custom pricing
Marvel
Marvel is an easy-to-use software for product design that allows you to test your product and make sure it’s ready for market. You can engage customers in a new way and get feedback that will help shape your future products.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Prototyping. Designers can upload mockups, create prototypes and test them out with their comprehensive software before they make expensive mistakes or end up having to redesign the entire thing again months down the road.
- User testing. Quickly collect and share relevant feedback and insights on your designs before you develop them.
- Developer handoff. With a few clicks, you can automatically turn your designs into code and specs that are ready to be handed off to developers.
What is the price?
- Pro plan: €12/month
- Team plan: €36/month
- Enterprise plan: custom pricing
Handoff tools
Design handoff is a challenging process, which means it’s easy to miss the mark and get misunderstood. But with the right tools, the design handoff process can be smooth and simple.
While some product designer tools like Figma, InVision, and Adobe XD offer the ability to share designs, there are other tools that are specifically created for sharing designs.
Zeplin
Zeplin is a cloud-based software that lets you organize and share your designs with developers. It provides an organized workspace to create specs, assets, and code snippets for a smooth developer handoff. Zeplin will automatically generate specs and guidelines based on your designs once you upload them.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Reduces time and effort. Frontend developers can easily convert your designs by generating platform-related code snippets.
- Easy to navigate. Zeplin lets you organize your artboards into folders, tag the artboards themselves, and search via artboard name or tag. It makes finding the designs you’re looking for a snap.
- Great for collaboration. Zeplin’s commenting feature allows you to add annotations to your designs, and teams use it to keep track of updates they need to make.
What is the price?
- Free plan for 1 project
- Team plan: $8/user/month for 12 projects
- Organization plan: $16/user/month for unlimited projects
- Enterprise plan: custom pricing
Avocode
Avocode is a tool that helps you to make a handoff from Sketch, Adobe XD, and Photoshop to HTML, CSS, and more. Avocode offers users a set of unique features that set it apart from similar software.
How can this tool benefit you?
- More design formats. Avocode has resolved designers’ frustration with limited formats in their design apps by supporting more file formats.
- Cross-platform. Avocode software is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows operating systems.
- Timesaving. Share your designs quickly with Avocode PS Plugin.
What is the price?
- Solo plan: $15/month for 1 user only
- Team plan: $22/month per each user
No-code development tools
With no-code development platforms, designers can create beautiful software by themselves without ever touching a line of code. Let us find you the right no-code software for product design to meet your needs.
Webflow
Webflow is the platform for creating websites without coding. Through intuitive tools and a canvas-based approach, professional web designers can handle all the technical details. With its popularity growing rapidly, Webflow now offers CMS solutions and another helpful tech for eCommerce.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Build landing pages effortlessly. Give your clients access to customizable landing page templates so they can build landing pages on their own.
- Faster iterations. You’ll no longer need to wait weeks for initial designs, and implementing your clients’ changes will be a breeze.
- Custom client-facing CMS. You can choose which elements to allow the client to customize, so they won’t be afraid of breaking anything.
What is the price?
- Starter plan: free
- Basic plan: $12/month if billed yearly
- CMS plan: $16/month if billed yearly
- Business plan: $36/month if billed yearly
Bubble
As software for product design, Bubble.io will help you create interactive spaces with a simple drag-and-drop interface. You can add buttons, videos, and more to your space in seconds by simply dragging them from the menu onto your site. It’s one of the best product design softwares for creating websites and web applications.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Full functionality. You can build interactive, multi-user apps with real-time data for both desktop and mobile web browsers.
- Versatility. Build out logic and manage a database with an intuitive, fully customizable platform.
- Enhanced productivity. When you build apps faster, it’s easier for the IT team to fulfill other departments’ requests. This leads to a more streamlined workflow and ensures there’s no lag time in any project.
What is the price?
- Free plan with limited features
- Personal plan: $25/month
- Professional plan: $115/month
- Production plan: $475/month
Communication & project management tools
The success of any design project depends on effective communication. You should consider the unique nature of each project before choosing the communication tools that would best suit it. Here are some tools we believe are essential for successful project development.
Slack
Slack is a great way to keep your team connected in one place. A messaging platform and work collaboration tool, it has quickly become one of the most widely used applications in the workplace.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Slack channels & SlackConnect. Share different pieces of your workspace within different channels and include external parties in your channels for collaborative communications.
- Wide range of integrations. Slack has more than 2000 integrations, including Hubspot, Hotjar, and Google Drive, making it an ideal addition to your team.
- Accessibility. Slack is designed with accessibility in mind, making it possible for users to navigate the app with keyboard shortcuts, adjust the zoom level of the interface, and change contrast levels for easy reading.
What is the price?
- Free plan with limited functionality
- Pro plan: €7,50/active user/month
- Business+ plan: €14,10/active user/month
- Enterprise Grid plan: custom pricing
Notion
Notion can be seen as a central hub of all your information, split into projects. Everything you need to know—from the big picture down to the details—is all in one place, accessible while you’re on your phone or computer.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Project and task management. Instantly share lists, collaborate in real-time, and see your team’s progress on every project.
- Templates. Standout templates from the community help you work smarter and more efficiently.
- Flexibility. With an intuitive user interface and built-in customization options, users can create custom views that meet their needs.
What is the price?
- Personal plan: free for up to 5 guests
- Personal Pro plan: $5 billed monthly
- Team plan: $10 billed monthly
- Enterprise plan: custom pricing
Jira
Helping teams throughout the development cycle, Jira is an agile project management software designed specifically for agile teams. With powerful features to plan, track, and release software, users generate reports that improve team performance.
How can this tool benefit you?
- Agile work management. Jira helps agile teams manage their processes with its agile boards and templates. This allows them to break down large and complex projects into manageable tasks, focus on finishing faster and visualize their workflow.
- Integrations. Jira makes it easy to extend its capabilities with third-party apps and integrations to do things like assign tasks to team members, get project deadlines added to calendars, or send automated email notifications.
- Stay aligned. Plan together better and make the right decisions while staying aligned with the company’s bigger goals.
What is the price?
- Free plan for 10 users
- Standard plan: $75/month
- Premium plan: $145/month
- Enterprise plan: custom pricing
Consider your needs when choosing product design tools
At the end of the day, there’s no “best solution” when it comes to tools for product design.
There are many resources available that can help teams through every stage of the process, and finding the right ones for your team will take a bit of trial and error.
Consider which features best suit your current workflows, who you need to collaborate with, and how you want to view or share information with your team members.
Building a product is no easy task. That’s why we’ve rounded up the best product design tools on the market to help streamline your product design process. If you want to create something new, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel—just use what works and what’s already out there or consider our digital product design services.
If you need professional help building a new product, we can help. Contact us today to discuss your specific product design challenges and how we can help you reach your goals.