What is Framer and what are its top alternatives?
Framer is a powerful prototyping tool that allows designers to create interactive prototypes for web and mobile applications. It offers features such as customizable animations, rich interactions, and the ability to test designs directly on devices. However, Framer can be complex for beginners and may have a steeper learning curve compared to other tools.
- Sketch: Sketch is a popular design tool with a focus on user interface and user experience design. It offers a wide range of plugins and integrations, making it easy to customize and extend functionality. Pros: Easy to use, great for UI design. Cons: Limited prototyping capabilities.
- Adobe XD: Adobe XD is a design and prototyping tool that allows designers to create interactive prototypes for web and mobile applications. Pros: Seamless integration with other Adobe products, easy to use. Cons: Limited animation options.
- InVision Studio: InVision Studio is a prototyping tool that allows designers to create interactive prototypes and animations. Pros: Integrated design system, collaboration features. Cons: Steep learning curve.
- Figma: Figma is a collaborative design tool that allows multiple users to work on a project simultaneously. Pros: Real-time collaboration, easy to use. Cons: Limited prototyping functionality.
- Marvel: Marvel is a prototyping tool that allows designers to create interactive prototypes without code. Pros: Easy to use, good for rapid prototyping. Cons: Limited customization options.
- Axure RP: Axure RP is a prototyping tool that allows designers to create complex interactive prototypes with dynamic content. Pros: Powerful prototyping capabilities, robust interactions. Cons: Steep learning curve.
- Origami Studio: Origami Studio is a prototyping tool created by Facebook that focuses on mobile app design. Pros: Seamless integration with other Facebook tools, great for mobile prototyping. Cons: Limited web design capabilities.
- Proto.io: Proto.io is a prototyping tool that allows designers to create high-fidelity prototypes for web and mobile applications. Pros: Easy to use, good for testing on different devices. Cons: Limited design customization.
- Flinto: Flinto is a prototyping tool that focuses on creating micro-interactions and animations for mobile apps. Pros: Easy to use, great for creating animations. Cons: Limited web design capabilities.
- Principle: Principle is a prototyping tool that allows designers to create interactive prototypes with animations and transitions. Pros: Easy to use, good for creating animations. Cons: Limited design customization.
Top Alternatives to Framer
- Sketch
Easily create complex shapes with our state-of-the-art vector boolean operations and take advantage of our extensive layer styles. ...
- Figma
Figma is the first interface design tool with real-time collaboration. It keeps everyone on the same page. Focus on the work instead of fighting your tools. ...
- InVision
InVision lets you create stunningly realistic interactive wireframes and prototypes without compromising your creative vision. ...
- Adobe XD
A vector-based tool developed and published by Adobe Inc for designing and prototyping user experience for web and mobile apps. ...
- Origami
Origami is a free toolkit for Quartz Composer—created by the Facebook Design team—that makes interactive design prototyping easy and doesn’t require programming. ...
- ProtoPie
It is the easiest tool used to turn your UI/UX design ideas into highly interactive prototypes for mobile, desktop, web, all the way to IoT. ProtoPie runs on macOS & Windows and the player app is on iOS and Android. ...
- Principle
It makes it easy to design animated and interactive user interfaces. Whether you're designing the flow of a multi-screen app, or new interactions and animations, it helps you create designs that look and feel amazing. ...
- Webflow
Webflow is a responsive design tool that lets you design, build, and publish websites in an intuitive interface. Clean code included! ...
Framer alternatives & related posts
- Lightweight alternative to Photoshop23
- Mirror designs on mobile devices11
- Reusable elements/components9
- Vector7
- Plugins for everything5
- Real-time design preview on iOS devices2
- Constant updates1
- Thought for UI design1
- Not for Windows4
- Horrible for slide presentations3
related Sketch posts
How we ended up choosing Confluence as our internal web / wiki / documentation platform at Katana.
It happened because we chose Bitbucket over GitHub . We had Katana's first hackaton to assemble and test product engineering platform. It turned out that at that time you could have Bitbucket's private repositories and a team of five people for free - Done!
This decision led us to using Bitbucket pipelines for CI, Jira for Kanban, and finally, Confluence. We also use Microsoft Office 365 and started with using OneNote, but SharePoint is still a nightmare product to use to collaborate, so OneNote had to go.
Now, when thinking of the key value of Confluence to Katana then it is Product Requirements Management. We use Page Properties macros, integrations (with Slack , InVision, Sketch etc.) to manage Product Roadmap, flash out Epic and User Stories.
We ended up with using Confluence because it is the best fit for our current engineering ecosystem.
- Web-based application18
- Intuitive interface and perfect collaboration10
- Free software8
- Works on both Mac and Windows7
- Highly Collaborative7
- Great plugins, easy to extend6
- Works on multiple OS's5
- Imports Sketch files5
- Large community, tutorials, documentation5
- Hands done the best design tool for collaboration!5
- Prototyping, design files and comments all in one place4
- Interactive, event-based prototypes4
- No more syncing between Sketch and InVision3
- Limited Export options6
related Figma posts
I needed to choose a full stack of tools for cross platform mobile application design & development. After much research and trying different tools, these are what I came up with that work for me today:
For the client coding I chose Framework7 because of its performance, easy learning curve, and very well designed, beautiful UI widgets. I think it's perfect for solo development or small teams. I didn't like React Native. It felt heavy to me and rigid. Framework7 allows the use of #CSS3, which I think is the best technology to come out of the #WWW movement. No other tech has been able to allow designers and developers to develop such flexible, high performance, customisable user interface elements that are highly responsive and hardware accelerated before. Now #CSS3 includes variables and flexboxes it is truly a powerful language and there is no longer a need for preprocessors such as #SCSS / #Sass / #less. React Native contains a very limited interpretation of #CSS3 which I found very frustrating after using #CSS3 for some years already and knowing its powerful features. The other very nice feature of Framework7 is that you can even build for the browser if you want your app to be available for desktop web browsers. The latest release also includes the ability to build for #Electron so you can have MacOS, Windows and Linux desktop apps. This is not possible with React Native yet.
Framework7 runs on top of Apache Cordova. Cordova and webviews have been slated as being slow in the past. Having a game developer background I found the tweeks to make it run as smooth as silk. One of those tweeks is to use WKWebView. Another important one was using srcset on images.
I use #Template7 for the for the templating system which is a no-nonsense mobile-centric #HandleBars style extensible templating system. It's easy to write custom helpers for, is fast and has a small footprint. I'm not forced into a new paradigm or learning some new syntax. It operates with standard JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS 3. It's written by the developer of Framework7 and so dovetails with it as expected.
I configured TypeScript to work with the latest version of Framework7. I consider TypeScript to be one of the best creations to come out of Microsoft in some time. They must have an amazing team working on it. It's very powerful and flexible. It helps you catch a lot of bugs and also provides code completion in supporting IDEs. So for my IDE I use Visual Studio Code which is a blazingly fast and silky smooth editor that integrates seamlessly with TypeScript for the ultimate type checking setup (both products are produced by Microsoft).
I use Webpack and Babel to compile the JavaScript. TypeScript can compile to JavaScript directly but Babel offers a few more options and polyfills so you can use the latest (and even prerelease) JavaScript features today and compile to be backwards compatible with virtually any browser. My favorite recent addition is "optional chaining" which greatly simplifies and increases readability of a number of sections of my code dealing with getting and setting data in nested objects.
I use some Ruby scripts to process images with ImageMagick and pngquant to optimise for size and even auto insert responsive image code into the HTML5. Ruby is the ultimate cross platform scripting language. Even as your scripts become large, Ruby allows you to refactor your code easily and make it Object Oriented if necessary. I find it the quickest and easiest way to maintain certain aspects of my build process.
For the user interface design and prototyping I use Figma. Figma has an almost identical user interface to #Sketch but has the added advantage of being cross platform (MacOS and Windows). Its real-time collaboration features are outstanding and I use them a often as I work mostly on remote projects. Clients can collaborate in real-time and see changes I make as I make them. The clickable prototyping features in Figma are also very well designed and mean I can send clickable prototypes to clients to try user interface updates as they are made and get immediate feedback. I'm currently also evaluating the latest version of #AdobeXD as an alternative to Figma as it has the very cool auto-animate feature. It doesn't have real-time collaboration yet, but I heard it is proposed for 2019.
For the UI icons I use Font Awesome Pro. They have the largest selection and best looking icons you can find on the internet with several variations in styles so you can find most of the icons you want for standard projects.
For the backend I was using the #GraphCool Framework. As I later found out, #GraphQL still has some way to go in order to provide the full power of a mature graph query language so later in my project I ripped out #GraphCool and replaced it with CouchDB and Pouchdb. Primarily so I could provide good offline app support. CouchDB with Pouchdb is very flexible and efficient combination and overcomes some of the restrictions I found in #GraphQL and hence #GraphCool also. The most impressive and important feature of CouchDB is its replication. You can configure it in various ways for backups, fault tolerance, caching or conditional merging of databases. CouchDB and Pouchdb even supports storing, retrieving and serving binary or image data or other mime types. This removes a level of complexity usually present in database implementations where binary or image data is usually referenced through an #HTML5 link. With CouchDB and Pouchdb apps can operate offline and sync later, very efficiently, when the network connection is good.
I use PhoneGap when testing the app. It auto-reloads your app when its code is changed and you can also install it on Android phones to preview your app instantly. iOS is a bit more tricky cause of Apple's policies so it's not available on the App Store, but you can build it and install it yourself to your device.
So that's my latest mobile stack. What tools do you use? Have you tried these ones?
Last time we shared there information about our decision about using YouTrack over Jira actually we found much better solution that our team have loved. Linear is a minimalistic issue tracker that integrates well with Sentry, GitHub, Slack and Figma which are our basic tools. I would like to recommend checking out Linear as a potential alternative to "heavy" issue trackers, maybe at enterprises that may not work but when we're a startup that works awesome!
- Collaborative158
- Simple128
- Pretty95
- Quick79
- Works with lots of devices45
- Free33
- Cool for remote team prototyping29
- It revolutionized the way I share work with clients17
- Legendary customer support10
- Dropbox Integration8
- Easy3
- Collaboration3
- Rapid Prototyping2
- LiveShare2
- Annotation1
- They are always improving the product suite1
- Beautiful UI1
- Brings mockups to life1
- Allows for a comprehensive workflow1
related InVision posts
How we ended up choosing Confluence as our internal web / wiki / documentation platform at Katana.
It happened because we chose Bitbucket over GitHub . We had Katana's first hackaton to assemble and test product engineering platform. It turned out that at that time you could have Bitbucket's private repositories and a team of five people for free - Done!
This decision led us to using Bitbucket pipelines for CI, Jira for Kanban, and finally, Confluence. We also use Microsoft Office 365 and started with using OneNote, but SharePoint is still a nightmare product to use to collaborate, so OneNote had to go.
Now, when thinking of the key value of Confluence to Katana then it is Product Requirements Management. We use Page Properties macros, integrations (with Slack , InVision, Sketch etc.) to manage Product Roadmap, flash out Epic and User Stories.
We ended up with using Confluence because it is the best fit for our current engineering ecosystem.
I am working on a project for a client, I need to provide them with ideas and prototypes. They all have Adobe XD, but not InVision - I am the only one who will have that if purchased. I am trying to decide what would be the best tool to hand off the work to a developer who in terms will be working in PySide (Qt related) or Tkinter. Is there any benefits to me or the developer to work in Adobe XD or InVision. I am just trying to use the best tool to get the job done between the two.
Thank you in advance! Nadia
- Free15
- Interactive Prototypes9
- Reusable elements/components8
- Clean Design8
- Vector8
- Imports Sketch files5
- Repeat Grid1
- Import Adobe files1
- No dark theme6
related Adobe XD posts
Our UX designers currently use Adobe XD and we are considering moving to UXPin with Merge. Our UI developers are transitioning to React and perhaps React Native, so I'm intrigued by UXPin/Merge abilities to leverage React components, both for improved design fidelity and easier integration with production components. If you use or have evaluated UXPin and/or Merge, I'm interested to know your observations on UXPin/Merge as a design tool compared to any alternative, as well as to what extent Merge delivers on its promise of seamless integration between designers and front-end developers.
I am working on a project for a client, I need to provide them with ideas and prototypes. They all have Adobe XD, but not InVision - I am the only one who will have that if purchased. I am trying to decide what would be the best tool to hand off the work to a developer who in terms will be working in PySide (Qt related) or Tkinter. Is there any benefits to me or the developer to work in Adobe XD or InVision. I am just trying to use the best tool to get the job done between the two.
Thank you in advance! Nadia
- Free6
- Visualize animations and transitions3
- The Awesomeness2
related Origami posts
- Prototypes are very interactive, realistic and advanced4
- Very easy to learn and use4
- MacOS & Windows3
- IOS & Android3
- Smartwatch2
related ProtoPie posts
I want to create a prototype for a location-based AR. Mobile app. Is Adobe XD a good place to start, then build in ProtoPie - will this allow the AR integration? I am a bit lost. Please help.
related Principle posts
- Interactions and Animations13
- Builds clean code in the background7
- Fast development of html and css layouts/design7
- Free plan6
- Fully Customizable6
- Simple5
- Prototype4
- Built on web standards2
- Next Gen2
- Freemium1
- No Audio Support1
related Webflow posts
We chose Webflow to build up websites faster and to make possible for particular employees to fix some misspellings or add an easy element to the page on their own - it is like Adobe Photoshop. To work with the incoming traffic we use our own product, that I can't pin here. It helps to make nurture visitors from the first session into the signing up and further activation into the product. In addition to @Carrrot we use Google Analytics to traffic source awareness, to monitor customers inside the product FullStory helps is a lot with its fury clicking and abandoned links. Activation and retention are done by our own product through the pop-ups, live chat, and emails that all based on customer behavior.
I would like to build a community-based customer review platform for a niche industry where users can sign up for a forum, as well as post detailed reviews of their experience with a company/product, including a rating system for pre-selected features. Something like niche.com or areavibes.com with curated information/data, ratings, reviews, and comparison functionalities.
Is this possible to build using no-code tools? I have read about the possibility of using Webflow with Memberstack, Airtable, and Elfsight through Zapier / Integromat, which may allow for good design and functionality. Is it possible with Bubble or Bildr?
I have no problems with a bit of a learning curve as long as what I want is possible. Since I have 0 coding experience, I am not sure how to go about it.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!