19 Best UI/UX tools to empower your product design team

What makes a user keep coming back to your product? How do you design a product that looks great and feels just right? These questions are at the heart of user interface (UI) and user experience (UX)—where creativity meets empathy.

The best UI/UX tools offer a structured framework for organizing data, mapping the user journey, and bringing your design concepts to life. But remember, it's not about having every platform in your tech stack—it's about finding the ones which best serve your specific needs and complement your existing workflow.

Whether you're building an intuitive website or working on a must-have invention, we’ve compiled a list of the best UI and UX tools, so you can transition your design process from 'it works' to 'truly exceptional'.

First, let's look at the difference between UI and UX. While they’re often used interchangeably, they both have distinct roles.

Whether you're a seasoned designer or a beginner, here are the most common types of UI and UX design software:

User testing tools are essentially the ‘try before you buy’ mindset applied to the design process. You can test your designs with real users, gain insights into their experiences, and fine-tune your product based on their feedback. The best remote user research and usability testing tools, like Maze, provide features like task analysis, screen recording, A/B testing, surveys, and automated reports to guide your ideas into customer-centric products.

Wireframing tools help you create blueprints of your ideas, arrange content and functionality, and build the basic structure of your design before going into the details. These are low-fidelity, simplified frameworks of your design. Popular wireframing platforms like Balasmiq, Sketch, and UXPin let you sketch out your plans early on, so you can ensure your team and stakeholders are aligned on design objectives, and then conduct user research to test key functionality.

While wireframing tools set the foundation of your design, prototyping tools bring the wireframes to life. Prototypes simulate actual user experience, allowing users to navigate through the interface, interact with elements, and test functionality of the design. User testing software like Maze integrates with popular prototype tools like InVision, Figma, and Adobe XD to gather feedback, test and track usability metrics, and validate design decisions before moving forward with development.

Once wireframing and prototyping tools focused on structure and interaction, visual design tools focus on aesthetic elements—color selection, typography customization, image editing, and layout composition. These platforms often provide extensive libraries of pre-designed assets, templates, and style guides to streamline the design process and maintain consistency. It’s important to note that most prototyping tools also aid in visual designing.

Handoff tools are the bridge between design and product development. They eliminate the need for tedious manual documentation and serve as a centralized hub for design handoff. Popular handoff software like Framer, InVision, and Marvel offer features like design asset extraction, style guide generation, code snippets, annotation, commenting systems, and version control—resulting in accurate and pixel-perfect implementations of the design every time.

We’ll go into detail about the industry’s best design platforms in a moment—but first, here’s a quick overview of the toolse.

Type: User research and continuous discovery tool

Maze is a continuous product discovery platform that empowers product teams to collect and analyze user insights at every stage of the product lifecycle. Maze has solutions for participant recruitment, product research, and reporting. You can run in-depth usability testing—with or without prototypes—and test or validate ideas, concepts, and copy.

The platform supports various user research methods, including usability testing, live website testing, card sorting, tree testing, and prototype testing. Since it's code-free, anyone on your team can quickly create and share a test, regardless of technical expertise. The drag-and-drop functionality and ready-to-use templates help you generate insights in hours, not days.

Maze’s free forever plan gives you access to testing methods like prototype testing, live website testing, in-product prompts, and closed card sorting. If you want access to three seats with advanced features like Clips, open card sorting, and conditional logic for up to 1,800 viewable responses per year—opt for the Professional plan at $75 per month.

Type: Wireframing, prototyping, and handoff tool

Sketch is a vector-based platform with features tailored specifically for designing user interfaces and creating digital assets. It also provides real-time collaboration for easy design feedback, and workflow automation. However, Sketch is only available for macOS—so Linux and Windows users will have to opt for another tool.

The pricing ranges from $9 to $12 per editor for Standard monthly plans, and $99 to $120 per editor for Standard yearly plans.

Type: Prototyping tool

Adobe XD is a UI design software to create product prototypes, mobile apps, and websites. Its features help you create fully-fledged prototypes; including workflows, element creation, animated transitions, and other dynamic elements. If you’ve used the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, you’ll get a hang of this design tool easily. It’s supported on Windows, macOS, and Android devices.

Adobe XD is available as part of the Creative Cloud subscription, and starts at $9.99 per month for up to 100 GB of cloud storage. If you want access to all the Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, and Acrobat Pro, the plan starts at $54.99 per month.

Type: Prototyping and visual design tool

Figma is a design and prototyping platform for exploring different UIs. Its browser-based functionality and collaborative features allow multiple users to make changes to a design simultaneously, without downloading files locally. You can use Figma to create moodboards, wireframes, product roadmaps, and mockups for websites or mobile apps. Plus, FigJam, a brainstorming and whiteboard tool by Figma, gives your team a playground to collaborate and map out design processes.

The free plan is available for up to three projects, with paid plans starting at $12 per editor/month.

Type: Wireframing, prototyping and handoff tool

InVision is versatile design software that lets you create low-fidelity prototypes with basic animations at an early stage. You can go from outlining the user journey to collaborating on early design, to wireframes and prototypes, and finally to its design handoff features. Since it’s a cloud-based tool, InVision works across all operating systems and devices.

InVision is free for up to 10 users and three documents. The Pro plan gives you access to unlimited documents and up to 15 users starting at $9.95 per user/month.

Type: Prototyping and wireframing tool

Marvel is an all-in-one design tool for quickly generating prototypes and designing simple and effective user interfaces. While this platform isn’t as sophisticated as other tools on this list, it’s a top choice for new designers and developers looking for a platform that can get them up and running quickly. Since Marvel is browser-based, it works across all devices, including Windows, Linux, Android, and Apple products. However some users do complain that the mobile app doesn’t offer as many options, and plugins make the app slow.

The Free plan is available for a single user and project. The Pro plan comes in at $10 per month with unlimited projects. If you need more seats, opt for the Team plan at $30 per month for up to three users.

Type: Prototyping and visual design tool

Framer (formerly Framer X) is a great tool for creating high-fidelity prototypes. It’s known for having somewhat of a high learning curve, as you’ll need a basic understanding of CSS and HTML code for interactions and animations. However, prototypes made with Framer are about as close to a final product as a prototype can get. The level of detail and interactivity in these prototypes enables designers and stakeholders to get a realistic sense of how the final product will function and behave.

Framer is free for up to three projects, and the Pro plan starts at $25 per site/month (charged annually) with access to analytics, CMS collections, and 100k visitors per month.

Type: Prototyping and wireframing tool

Axure RP is a rapid prototyping tool with a focus on building realistic, functional prototypes through mouse, touch, and keyboard event triggers. It’s a great platform for designing customer journeys, wireframes, and other UX documentation. You can use Axure Cloud in your browser or download the app for Mac, PC, iOS, and Android devices.

Axure RP offers a 30-day free trial, after which you can opt for the Pro plan with unlimited prototypes at $25 per month per user. Alternatively, choose the Team plan at $42 per user/month for cloud hosting.

You’ve seen our top eight, but if you’re looking to expand your search further, consider any of these platforms for your UI/UX kit:

There’s no single UI/UX design tool that perfectly fulfills the needs of all designers, so you’ll need to build a tech stack that’s tailored to your team.

While considering your options, it’s worth asking:

UI/UX design is all about understanding the experience of your users and the make-up of your product. From wireframing initial concepts to prototyping interactive experiences, every step aims to create a design that resonates.

Ultimately, your UI/UX toolkit should be able to fully test a prototype that closely resembles the final product, collecting valuable feedback from your target audience and ensuring a delightful user experience. You can also test the UI/UX of your product after launch—especially if you have the support of a continuous product discovery platform like Maze.

Whether you want to run prototype testing, concept testing, usability testing, or live website testing—with Maze, you can do it all in one place. Plus, you can directly import your designs from apps like Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD. Maze can also help you communicate data and win over stakeholders through digestible automatic reports, making it one of the best tools to support UI/UX design teams to achieve their goals.