We are excited to announce the Top Rated Prototyping Tools for 2019! Top Rated awards showcase today’s top-of-the-line products in Prototyping Tools based solely on positive user feedback and satisfaction scores. These awards make the voice of the market the primary decider into the industry’s best products.

Top Rated awards are the most trusted in the industry because they are never influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s size, popularity, or status as a TrustRadius customer.

Here are the winners:

InVision

Invision is a design and prototyping platform. Its layered, vector-based drawing interface lets users create and customize their designs. It includes a timeline view for customizable animations and in-window animation previews. The tool also supports mobile layouts and gestures. Review, commenting, and collaboration tools help teams brainstorm, give feedback, and sign off on finished designs. 

A little over a third (35%) of InVision users on TrustRadius are from midsize companies. Reviewers value InVision’s depth of interaction choices, granular inspection tools, and robust collaboration features.

“It is a great collaboration tool, where our clients, developers and [ux]—designers can mark out thoughts at any point of the project and respond and share their opinions. I love that I can hand off the prototype to developers and they can go into inspect mode and get a [great] level of detail: pixel, percent dimensions, colors, font, sizes etc.”

– Verified User | Employee in Information Technology | Design Company

Sketch

Sketch is a digital design tool with prototyping features. It offers a non-destructive, vector-based editing interface where users can manipulate shapes, vectors, text, and images. Teams can create and share automatically-synced content libraries to keep their designs consistent. Sketch includes prototyping tools to add interactivity to designs. The software includes a cloud repository where users can share their designs and prototypes with team members or clients. An extensive plugin library lets users customize and automate their workflow.

Users from midsize companies make up almost half (49%) of Sketch users on TrustRadius. Reviewers appreciate Sketch’s quick and simple interface, reusable content libraries, and wealth of available plugins.

“There are a ton of plugins that make working with Sketch very, very easy to integrate into our new and existing processes…Because Sketch is so easy to use, our designers have had more time to do more work. Rather than finagling difficult tools in previously used products, our designers feel no hesitation with Sketch, and are producing more often and more creatively.”

– Verified User | Professional in Research & Development | Education Management Company

Congratulations to the winners of the Top Rated Prototyping Tools Award!

What are Prototyping Tools?

Creating a piece of software, a mobile app, or a website is often a complicated process requiring a large amount of time and money. As such, it’s important to review the layout and design of the project early and often to catch problems before they’re implemented. Prototyping tools aim to help development and UX teams with this process. They provide quick, collaborative tools for evaluating designs before committing them to code.

Prototyping tools generally allow users to create an interactive mockup of their product. The prototype can include graphics, animations, and other visual features to represent the intended look and feel of the finished product. Tools in this category often have a drag-and-drop interface for faster prototype building. They may also include sharing and collaboration features, version control systems, and usability testing tools. Although prototyping tools generally offer more graphical fidelity and detail than wireframing tools, prototyping software often includes wireframing features.

Buyers considering prototyping tools should understand the purpose their prototypes will serve. Some tools excel at creating low-fidelity mockups very quickly. These prototypes are most useful for internal collaboration and proof-of-concept testing. Other tools may be aimed at creating high-fidelity prototypes that closely mimic the intended look and feel of the final product. If your team’s goal is to sell a design to clients or perform thorough usability testing, a high-fidelity prototype can be much more useful.

It’s also important to consider the scope of your business needs. Some prototyping tools are intended as business-wide design and collaboration platforms—useful for a large company, but possibly overkill for a small studio.

Top Rated Criteria

Products included in the 2019 Top Rated Prototyping Tools list must have been in the top tier of their category TrustMap as of September 12th, 2019. To qualify for the Prototyping Tools Top Rated Award, products must have at least 10 reviews written within the past year, a TRScore of at least 7.5 out of 10, and must receive at least 1.5% of the traffic in their category.  Every reviewer is verified and every review is vetted before publication. Products are plotted on the TrustMap based on end-user data, including users’ likelihood to recommend scores as well as buyer research patterns. To learn more about TrustMaps and Top Rated methodology, check out this page.