Free tools to create web and mobile app designs

App designers are always on the lookout for tools that would help them create stunning mobile app designs. Creating a mobile app that offers excellent user experience as well as value to your customer requires skills, creativity, and the right kind of tools.

It is crucial that you sketch out wireframes and product prototypes on a paper; however, app designing software now makes it easy for designers to share their finished work with clients, investors, developers, etc.

The problem is, there are several tools available for designing mobile apps. In such a situation, which one do you choose?

For your convenience, we bring you some of the best mobile app designing tools that you can use for designing your next mobile app.

Best Tools For Mobile App Designs

Here are a few tools you can try for creating mobile app designs.

BuildFire

If you want to make a working prototype for your app, BuildFire is the perfect app development tool for you!

It is an end-to-end development platform, can be customized in terms of functionality, and you may even publish your app to Google Play Store or IOS Play Store directly from the platform.

On this platform, you can upload your own texts, fonts, colors, and create a fully-functioning app. The best thing about the platform is that you can test your app on it for free and pay for the service only if you want to publish.

Sketch

Sketch is specifically for Macbook and is used as a UI/UX design tool. It is a lot like Adobe Photoshop, but is for app prototyping. Sketch has one of the highest shares in terms of prototyping and wireframing.

It is a lightweight platform, having a size of about only 20 MB. It also does not use too many resources of your system and exports quickly. Once you buy the platform, you would only need to renew the license yearly. Even though there is no animation option available, it is still a good choice for mobile app designs.

Moreover, if you need to edit photos, you would have to use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator in conjunction with this platform.

Origami Studio

Origami is a user interface design tool brought to you by Facebook engineers. The tool has been used to create the Facebook messengers and Instagram, and is now available for the general public for free. Even though it is a complex tool to get around, it has a lot of great functionalities that app designers would find useful.

With Origami, you are able to preview your app’s prototype, copy and paste the layers from Sketch, and get them working in the tool.

This tool also allows you to record your prototype so that you can send your app to your clients or investors.

Another great functionality of this tool is that you can connect the tool to your Android or Apple device and see live changes on it.

Marvel

If you want a tool that lets you design, prototype, and collaborate with your team, then get Marvel as soon as possible!

Moreover, Marvel lets you synchronize your designs from various other tools, such as Photoshop, Sketch, Illustrator, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.

Furthermore, the tool allows you to make animations, which means that you won’t be having a hard time creating animations for your static prototypes with Marvel.

Marvel is very straightforward—you can design on it, prototype, and collaborate with your teammates. If this is something you need, then Marvel is the design tool for you.

OmniGraffle

If you want to prototype strategy maps, screen flows, wireframes, and various diagrams, OmniGraffle will come in handy!

This tool lets you visualize the flow of your app so that you know exactly how it looks like and what more could be done on it.

Another pretty straightforward tool, OmniGraffle helps you in the planning phase of your app.

JustInMind

JustInMind is a great tool for prototyping and designing wireframes. You can also download the tool on your server for collaborating with your team. The tool allows you to add videos, docs, HTML, online widgets, interactive maps, etc. through the widget library.

You can also avail of integrations with Microsoft TFS, JIRA, and Doors with this tool. You will also have a lot of extensions to get benefit from through the tool.

Flinto

If you feel like you’re missing out on a lot of things just because you’re not on Mac, Flinto is here to save the day for you!

When you want to collaborate with your team, and all of them are on Mac, all you have to do is import all your Photoshop and Sketch designs and then join the discussion with your team.

The tool is fast, can mirror Android and iPhone transition animations, and lets you perform prototype previewing as well as sharing installation links.

FramerJS

FramerJS is a flexible mobile app design tool that lets you code or have auto-generated code at the backend. In case you’re a visual designer, the visual editor would be just fine and no need to fiddle with the backend code would be required.

You would have to first take a short training to use the tool, which is provided on the website for free. Once the training is completed, you will be able to create stunning prototypes and powerful wireframes with the tool.

Framer allows you to preview the prototype of your app, lets you import designs from Figma, Sketch, Photoshop, etc. and aids in workflow and collaborating with team mates.

Zeplin

In case you’re looking for a tool that lets you collaborate with your team members, this next tool is it!

Zeplin is a tool for collaboration between developers and designers. It lets you manage more than just workflow and design, and allows you to create stunning masterpieces. With Zeplin, you can upload your visual designs and wireframes from Sketch and Photoshop, and have them all in a project folder in Zeplin.

Wrapping Up

In this article, we enlisted a few great tools for mobile app designs. These tools allow you to create prototypes for your mobile apps and test them for changes. Many of these tools have versatile functionalities and the ability to import files from other applications so that designers can prototype the mobile apps. Moreover, many tools offer collaboration with other team members so that the entire team works together to create a stunning app for your brand.

We hope you found this article helpful and would use one of these tools for your mobile app designing.