TrustRadius Insights for Balsamiq are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
Balsamiq has proven to be a valuable tool for various departments and teams within organizations. Users have found that Balsamiq is particularly useful for creating wireframes and low fidelity prototypes in the early stages of the design process. This helps teams and clients focus on user flows and on-page content, allowing for quick iterations based on user feedback. Balsamiq has also been utilized by product management departments as an alternative to more complex design software like Photoshop or Illustrator, enabling the quick mocking up of layouts and workflows. Additionally, Balsamiq has been used by software development teams to visualize new feature enhancements and refine requirements based on customer feedback. Multiple departments across organizations have found value in Balsamiq's ability to set up mockups quickly, refine requirements, and gain approval for project planning. The software has also helped standardize the design process and improve communication between marketing and design channels. Overall, users appreciate Balsamiq for its ability to create low fidelity wireframes early in the design process, allowing for a focus on layout before getting distracted by colors and other design elements.
I use Balsamiq to create mockups to support my user stories in the development of functionality for a web app. It allows me to quickly assemble a visual which explains to developers and designers the vision I have for something new that we will build. It is widely used by product managers/product owners in my organization.
Pros
Quick creation of mockups help start the conversation about a new piece of functionality
Their library of icons is extensive enough to produce most screens without having to create anything from scratch yourself
The ability to insert screenshots into your Assets library and start there with a mockup is a nice feature
Cons
Using an Assets library is difficult across projects if you don't set up each one to reference a single instance of the library. Set up is important to allow for visibility across projects
If you have a locked-down pc due to organization limits (no admin rights), you might have difficulty with the Adobe Air upgrades that are frequently needed - having to keep getting an admin to help with each upgrade is a pain
Likelihood to Recommend
Balsamiq is great for the non-designer crowd who is interested in creating quick mockups to start a discussion. It is dead-easy to pull something together that can be used for user-testing/validation.
It is not going to be used for a truly designed screen - its intention is not for a final design to hand over to a developer. True UI design does not happen in Balsamiq.
VU
Verified User
Program Manager in Product Management (1001-5000 employees)
As a Product Manager, I use Balsamiq to create Low low-fidelity mockups of the UI Screens to visually orient the Cross-Functional Teams of the Proposed Solutions. The solution in terms of new features is created post due diligence of the Business Problem Statements and is shared with the cross-functional team to get their agreement on clarity in problem statement and scope. Balsamiq helps in this process to make the cross-functional teams aware of the UI solution & scope way before the actual high-fidelity wireframes are created.
Pros
Ease of Use: The application is very intuitive and needs no to minimum hands on before actually using it.
Support for different screens: As the application provides pre-built templates for different devices (web, Tablets & Phones) it saves a lot of time in re-mocking the same UI for different devices from scratch.
Good Amount of Wireframing Aid: The application supports an exhaustive list of UI Controls, Icons, Images & Templates which helps in saving time while creating wireframes.
Ease of File Managements: Its easy to manage the created Projects.
Cons
Black & White UI: the application UI is very boring in terms of color. The entire application is in mostly Black & White which can cause eye fatigue after some time.
Lack of colors also leads to lack of muscle memory and hence making the app less intuitive.
Conversion from Low to High Fidelity wires: if there was a feature which converted Low Fidelity to High Fidelity wires it would have been great.
Likelihood to Recommend
Balsamiq is well suited to just mock up something in a quick time before actually developing the detailed wireframes.
Balsamiq is not useful when you want to get the detailed wires to be passed on to the engineers to get them developed.
So if you just want to work on the 1st part, then this is a good tool but if it's your job to make the journey from 1st Part to the 2nd then this tool is not the answer.
I use Balsamiq for a range of applications. Firstly, I use it for ideation and creating mock ups to flesh out ideas. Secondly, I use it to create wireframes for quick communication with clients. Lastly I use it for verification and collaboration with clients. I find that it is much more effective for requirements elicitation to have something visual drawn up and Balsamic is fast and easy.
Pros
Produce mockups quickly for discussion
Producing wireframes
Great lofi look and feel gives a unified style
Outputs in a variety of formats which makes it easy to share
Cons
If there was an option for a grid view of the UI library that would be great
Likelihood to Recommend
Balsamiq is a great tool for quickly getting ideas into visual form. At first it seems like there are not that many UI assets, but this constraint actually adds to the speed. There are less things for you to fuss over, you can focus on getting your ideas down. This is a tool for lofi rough drawings not a tool for building beautiful prototypes for developers to code to. It is fantastic for ideation because you mostly just drag and drop components onto the canvas and move things around. It's great in a live workshop setting for that reason.
Balsamiq is used in my organisation to assist in the development of systems. Usually in the early stages of development, we will use Balsamiq to mock up screen designs / prototype the UI / UX of the system. We also use it to mock up changes as part of a change request or new screens when the system is in the maintenance phase. It is an excellent product that makes it very easy to quickly produce high quality mock ups and prototypes. It is used in the development team of the IT services department.
Pros
Easy to use
Produces good quality mock ups and prototypes
Mock ups are obviously only just mock ups (this is important as if users see mock-ups in HTML, for example, they tend to think the system is ready to use or not far off)
Has a good selection of standard shapes that mock real world fields / controls
Allows not for profit organisations use it for free
Cons
Somewhat expensive for full commercial licences
Likelihood to Recommend
Balsamiq is very well suited for mocking up / prototyping UIs for systems or apps. The really good thing about it is that the wireframes it produces do not look like real screens but all the same do look nice, neat and tidy. This allows you to express and design how your interface will looks and even work, but it also expresses that these are just wireframes. I have had problems throughout my career when I have mocked up UIs with HTML, often users and stakeholders think that the system is ready to be used or not far off, they can't seem to grasp that there is nothing behind it. Balsamiq helps here because the wireframes are in a hand drawn style, so they can't be confused with a near-ready or working system.
Multiple people at my company use this for software design mockups. We've used it to gain approval for the pages in a customer's portal, including how customers would be funneled and traverse them (depending upon their goals), and how processes would work through APIs we are developing. For this type of design, we previously used Visio.
Pros
Toolbar at the top makes sure everything is at your fingertips.
Options available are generous and suited to laying out processes.
Viewing wireframes easy to see process down the left side of the screen.
Adding notes easy for collaboration.
Cons
Some of the objects aren't very easy to edit.
Adding items to a list not intuitive.
Resizing columns isn't easy or sometimes possible.
Likelihood to Recommend
Anytime you have a process to map out to show others we think it works well. It is easy for multiple people to get in, review, and add their thoughts. The look and feel is nice and even the marked-up version with notes looks presentable enough to show management to get approval/buy-in. We still use Visio for things like swim lanes.
Currently, we use Balsamic to quickly create wireframes that “feel” like wireframes. In other words, we use Balsamic to create designs that communicate the idea of a design to stakeholders without presenting a design that looks “finished.” The benefit to this is that our stakeholders don’t get too tied to what a potential finished design may look like, so they can contribute big-picture feedback that helps us create a high-fidelity wireframes that answer their needs. When we offer stakeholders more polished designs earlier in the design process, we find that they get too wrapped up in the details and end up offering feedback that is less relevant to solving the design need.
Pros
Low-fidelity wireframing—Balsamiq offers tools to create lo-fi wireframes without the messiness and confusion that often comes along with other types of lo-fi wireframing (e.g. hand-drawn wireframes). This helps us avoid the need to heavily “translate” our designs to the people we’re showing them to.
Easy-to-use interface—We have never had to spend time training anyone on how to use Balsamiq. Drag, drop, arrange—that’s it! This is helpful in getting non-designers and less experienced designers to communicate their ideas of what the finished design should sort-of look like without asking them to spend a lot of time learning a new tool.
Ability to convert a design to a PDF—This is definitely a plus! Whereas other design tools require stakeholders to log into a design tool account or view designs on a web page, Balsamiq makes it really easy to just download a design as a PDF and hand/email it to a stakeholder. Lots of our stakeholders don’t want to deal with visiting a website or logging into something. However, they’re typically happy to receive a PDF and not have to ask questions such as, “How do I access that?” and “What’s the password again?"
Cons
The sketch-like style can be off-putting to some stakeholders, and it’s not initially very clear that there is the option to turn this “off.” While I do think there is benefit to the default style, knowing from the start that this flexibility existed would have helped us be able to use this tool more often in the past and in different situations.
There are very limited collaborative functionalities. When it’s early in the design process, it’s often really helpful to have a number of people in the design to offer in-app feedback so the designer doesn’t have the burden of collecting feedback from many disparate sources in order to incorporate the feedback.
There are limited UI elements. As design evolves, there are more and more UI elements to consider, and many to stop using. Our Balsamiq wireframes would be a lot more effective in communicating design ideas to stakeholders if there was a wider range of UI elements to choose from.
Likelihood to Recommend
Balsamiq is excellent for creating low-fidelity wireframes where the designer is trying to communicate a general, loose idea of how the design should look. Because of this, it should be used early in the design stage, when there are still many decisions to be made about how the final design should look like. However, it is less suitable for situations where one wants to communicate a more final-appearing version of a design. There are limited functionalities (which appear intentional, as the Balsamiq website says that the tool "has 'just enough' prototyping capabilities, but not more”). Because of this, it is likely wise to choose a more high-powered tool, such as Axure, to create a fuller design toward the later stages of the design process.
Verified User
Professional in Research & Development (51-200 employees)
We use Balsamiq to create quick mockups for website design. This process tends to cover rough drafts, copy, layout, image needs, and other high-level ideas. It's much faster than using a more technical product and the fact that it's "low res" by design helps collaborators focus on high-level feedback and not get caught up in minutia.
Pros
Creating layouts and mockups to get a rough feel for how something looks.
Quickly getting your ideas on paper.
Preventing you from overthinking design details and keeping you focused on the big picture.
Cons
No collaboration ability, would be much stronger if web-based.
Support for images is awkward and a bit clumsy.
No ability to share files via the web.
Likelihood to Recommend
Balsamiq is great if you're a non-designer and want to share ideas with people who will be executing design or front-end development. It's also good for getting feedback from non-designers as well - the fact that you can only create "crude" mockups helps the people you're sharing with give comments on fundamental issues like content and layout and avoid getting bogged down in fine design details.
We create a great deal of affiliate properties, and since the business case comes from marketing, we often need to describe mockups in detail to our in-house design team. Balsamiq helps us standardize the design process and give an even means of communication from marketing to design channels with little risk of misinterpretation or conjecture.
Pros
UX design
Easy to learn, easy to pick up and implement for marketing associates without much design experience.
Integrates well on browsers and thus makes it easy to present.
Cons
Menu interface for adding design elements can be confusing to a newcomer
Text input function can be a bit clunky
Less-than-stellar performance on non-traditional browsers
Likelihood to Recommend
For a business scenario in which marketing is in need of constant design solutions but the structure of the company isn't amenable to sourcing design ideas or there is no process for sourcing UX resources at all.
Useful for marketing companies with a primarily online presence. Useful for nascent designers looking to understand the keystones of using design elements.
Balsamiq is simply a quick way of drawing out your idea and is easy to pick up and put down. When you launch Balsamiq, your previous "Mock-ups" are ready and waiting.
Its great for mapping out a system diagram, but excellent for application/web development. Each item you add to the page has a "Link" function will allow you to link this to another mock-up. This means that you can mock up a website then when you preview it, all of the links work and take you to other pages. The beauty of it is that you do not have to be a web developer to make a great mock-up. We find it very useful to plan our ideas and then hand our mock-ups over for them to develop.
Pros
Balsamiq makes wireframing and prototyping very fast and easy. You have a lot of pre-defined assets such as buttons, icons, titles, text, labels, placeholder items etc. that you can drag and drop, letting you finish an idea for a landing page or app quite quickly.
I use Balsamiq not only for wireframing, but also sketching processes or business models. The visualization is sketchy enough to keep discussions in the idea-phase, instead of wasting time on detailed discussion.
Cons
Although it's not meant for sketching processes, it could be improved a bit for doing this (a bit more support for some more arrows or diagrams).
Sometimes it's possible to get a bit lost in different propositions. It's interesting that it's only propositions, but the offline desktop version works faster for me (lot of coping attributes and screenshots into my sketches).
It's using flash or something like that in their offline version, it keeps asking for updates.
Likelihood to Recommend
Balsamiq is the easiest way to lay out a design without pen and paper. Quick ways to design without having to get into the nitty gritty of UI design. The ability to turn around designs quicker and with ease.
Verified User
Administrative Assistant in Information Technology (11-50 employees)
We use Balsamiq for low fidelity wireframes early in the design process. Because of its intentionally ugly approach (Comic Sans, anyone?), it allows us, and the client, to focus on layout and not get distracted by colors, fonts, or other design elements that come later.
Pros
Speed. Whipping up a wireframe takes very little time.
Ease of Use. The product works intuitively and as expected.
Covers common elements. Many of the common elements you need on a website are already built in, just drag and drop.
Cons
I can't think of any negatives for this product. It does exactly what it's intended to do.
Likelihood to Recommend
Quick, rough wireframes that show layout without getting into the weeds of colors, fonts, or exacting element placement. In the vendor's own words:
Split the problem in small chunks > make a quick wireframe of key screens > tweak wireframe > incorporate feedback > build working screen as quickly as you can > iterate until solid.
