Short question:
The last 2 days, I tested various UI / UX / Prototype Tools like Figma, XD, InVision Studion and said UXPin.
I’m currently working with Sketch + Craft. What I realised is, that Sketch, Figma, XD and Studio (I call them top 4 players) have huge communities and media coverage. When you ask about UI/UX Tools, everybody only talks about those 4. Each of those has good and bad points. No clear leader there for me.
Then I tested UXPin for half a day and I have to say I don’t see any disadvantage.
Do I miss something about this tool? Why isn’t it as popular as the other 4?
Longer Version – Why this question:
I’m working with sketch for about 4 years in the company, always together with InVision for the presentation with the stakeholders. What I hugely dislike about Sketch is the Mac-only limitation. At home, I work on Windows, so no home office. My dev-coworker all use Linux and since I’m the only designer, nobody is able to edit designs when I’m no around. So I started to test out other tools for my UX/UI Workflow:
Figma is amazing since it works smoothly just in the browser, its really fast and can everything you really need in your daily business. But the presentation mode and also the dev hand-off isn’t really that great, especially compared to InVision.
Adobe XD has done a lot over the past years and with it’s Windows client, at least someone in the company is able to open it besides me. The prototyping tools are amazing, the presentation layer is superb and the plugins for it are great. Sadly, some basic design-stuff like vertical align text or multiple shadows on one element aren’t possible.
Studio has also amazing prototype tools as well, high-fidelity animations without the need of an actual animation tool and overall I love all the InVision-Tools and it integrates itself perfectly in the company’s lineup. Sadly, it’s slow as hell, especially when the projects get bigger which most of mine get…And then I tested UXPin… And it had everything. I had every tool to also create creative designs, I even could include videos. I’m able to work with variables for advanced prototyping which I only know in Axure. The presentation layer is amazing and for the dev’s I even can add contextual documentation. I’m even able to pull react.js components to design them.
I don’t see any downside besides maybe that there are no artboards. But with such a great tool, I really don’t understand why it hasn’t more coverage. Am I missing something? It really could be, since I only tested it for half a day..
Why on this StackExchange Domain
I saw other question about tools, so that should be fine. And since UXPin can be compared to design tools like Sketch and so, it should be fine here…
Answer
I have used Sketch / Figma / Xd / Invision Studio and I suppose they’re the top 4 because they’ve been around for a while. It looks to me that UXPin is a newer tool and as such it takes time for people to start using and write about it. (Although I’ve quickly googled and found a few reviews already)
I’m mostly using Figma and Xd nowadays so I’m writing from that point of view.
I don’t know a lot of downsides since I barely started testing UXPin, but I’ll add what I can see for now:
- it’s not free. Well, in Figma and Xd you can create unlimited projects from the start, UXPin uses a subscription model and in the free plan you’re limited to 2 projects. I’m already not a fan of it. Even Sketch you can pay once and use it until it’s not up to date anymore (personally I abandoned it in favor of Figma since they’re very similar and Figma is cross-platform, and also free for now)
- all the advanced features are locked in the paid plans. Wanna export your prototype? Sign up for the basic plan. Have the basic plan and want to add Conditional Logic to some elements? Fork up more money, it’s on the next tier.
- The GUI is buggy; I tested the browser version, and sometimes the input fields (for adding a state name for example) would pick up the auto-complete text from Chrome, filling up with a physical address before I could type anything. Other times, trying to select an element for adding an interaction would be very erratic: the object would only turn blue (selected) when I click on its border (which is a small target), while other times it would work normally when I hover the object anywhere. I never had such problems with the browser version of Figma.
- I can create text styles and save colors, but it’s a bit more complicated than in Figma.
- It doesn’t have the “Auto-animate” feature from Xd where it morphs elements between pages sort-of-nicely for presentation (while not perfect it works well within the limitations). Since this is a newer tool, it would be nice to have such feature.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Michael Schmidt , Answer Author : Luciano