18 UX/UI Design tools for better product design and UX

Designing a product that not only looks good but also works well is crucial for providing an excellent user experience. But in order to do just that, you need a variety of UX/UI design software.

In this guide, we’ve curated a list of the best UX/UI design tools, organized by their core purpose, to help product teams move ideas from concept to launch with clarity, speed, and real user insight. From brainstorming and wireframing to testing and team collaboration, these tools are a must for your UX design and development process.

We cover 18 top tools for UX designers, but here are the top five for you to consider from the get-go:

These five tools cover the UX design process from ideation to execution, ensuring your UX design team can build products that look great and work seamlessly. Now, let’s take a look at some more UX design tools.

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

If you’re at the “What exactly are we designing?” stage, these platforms help you collect inspiration, map user needs, and structure early thinking without slowing the team down.

Mobbin is a reference library for UX and Product teams who want fast access to UI patterns, end-to-end flows, and user–centered design decisions from top mobile and web apps. It’s a reliable way to benchmark competitors, study interaction patterns, and align your team on practical, production-proven UI standards and design principles.

Dribbble is a community platform where designers share visual concepts, UI shots, animations, and branding work. It’s widely used for early-stage UX design inspirations because it showcases cutting-edge visuals, microinteractions, and polished creative explorations. Product and UI designers rely on Dribbble to explore emerging aesthetics, mood directions, motion ideas, and aspirational concepts before moving into structured prototyping or validation.

VisualSitemaps is a cloud-based crawler that turns any website, public or password-protected, into a high-resolution, editable visual sitemap. It’s widely used for redesign planning, UX and SEO audits, competitive scans, and monitoring visual changes over time through scheduled AI-powered crawls. With collaboration tools, drag-and-drop editing, and exports for Figma, PDF, CSV, and more, it fits neatly into Design, Product, and Content workflows.

Wireframing and prototyping tools bring structure and visual clarity to the UX design process, from low-fidelity wireframes to fully interactive mockups.

Here’s a quick look at the best tools in this category:

Figma is a browser-based interface design and prototyping platform built for real-time, team-wide collaboration, whether your team is remote or in the same room. What sets it apart is its seamless workflow across design, prototype and developer-handoff phases, backed by native apps for macOS and Windows and a truly web-first experience.

You can use Figma to create moodboards, wireframes, product roadmaps, and mockups for websites or mobile apps. Figma also now offers built-in AI capabilities: features such as First Draft, Rename Layers, Replace Content, and the prompt-to-app tool Figma Make let designers rapidly generate layouts, streamline repetitive tasks, and even turn ideas into functional prototypes

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.

Sketch is a vector-based UI design tool built exclusively for macOS, making it one of the most popular choices among Apple-based designers and developers. Designers can create wireframes, mockups, icons, and complete design systems using reusable symbols and shared styles.

Its real strength lies in its extensibility; thousands of community-built plugins and integrations with tools like Zeplin and InVision make it easy to prototype, test, and hand off designs to developers. However, since Sketch is limited to macOS; Linux and Windows users will have to opt for another tool.

Adobe XD integrates with the wider Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem, making it a good choice for teams already working with tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. It offers intuitive design workflows (like Repeat Grid for quickly creating lists and galleries) and supports interactive prototypes with transitions, voice-enabled commands, and mobile/desktop previews.

Adobe XD is no longer sold as a standalone app; it’s available exclusively through the Creative Cloud All Apps plan.

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.

Initially designed for UI and interaction designers, Framer is now a no-code website builder that retains its roots in motion design and high-fidelity prototyping. Using a drag-and-drop canvas with smart components, Framer lets you design pixel-perfect layouts, create animations, and publish responsive websites.

It supports Figma imports, built-in CMS collections, analytics, and SEO settings, making it ideal for design-driven teams who want full creative control without relying on developers. However, it has a steeper learning curve than beginner-friendly tools like Marvel.

User testing tools enable you to 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.

Here are the top three tools in this category:

Maze is a complete user research platform empowers teams to build the right products faster, by making user insights available at the speed of product development. UX teams use Maze to conduct user research and testing to ensure that UX designs are intuitive and efficient—not just nice to look at.

Maze offers a comprehensive suite of user research and testing tools for getting user and product insights, as well as AI capabilities to streamline and optimize the research and design process. It also provides participant recruitment and management solutions for finding and organizing research participants, and automated reporting for uncovering insights fast. It’s the all-in-one solution for testing UX designs both pre- and post-launch to ensure they’re exactly what your users want and need.

Maze offers pricing options for organizations and Product teams of all sizes:

Lyssna is built for fast, unmoderated testing. It’s good for quick checks like first-click tests, five-second tests, preference tests, card sorting, and tree testing. It helps teams validate information architecture and early design choices with simple studies, surveys, and Figma-based prototype tests, plus AI summaries to speed up analysis.

Dscout is a mobile-first qualitative research platform built to capture real-world user behavior through video diaries, live interviews, and longitudinal studies. It allows teams to observe users in natural environments, gather rich contextual insights on designs, and run quick concept tests.

Dscout does not publish pricing on its website, and most sources describe it as an enterprise-level tool with custom annual contracts. Vendr’s buyer data shows a median contract value of around $51,000 annually, while Crazy Egg cites average costs “just over $60,000.” Reddit threads in r/UXResearch mention quotes between $80,000–$100,000, emphasizing that it’s a premium platform best suited for large organizations.

Design collaboration and whiteboard platforms give teams a shared space to think, sketch, debate, and refine ideas, together and in real time. These tools support everything from early-stage brainstorming and journey mapping to later-stage alignment, workshops, and feedback review sessions.

Here are the top tools in this category:

Miro is a leading visual collaboration platform that supports brainstorming, workshops, product design, and teamwork at scale. In November 2023, Miro acquired Freehand from InVision, bringing in Freehand’s whiteboard technology and talent to strengthen its own workspace offering. Miro offers an ‘infinite canvas’ where remote and hybrid teams can ideate, map out flows, run interactive workshops, and integrate with tools like Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams.

Notion is an all-in-one workspace that combines notes, docs, databases, and task management into a single, flexible platform. For design and product teams, it serves as a powerful collaboration hub. Its AI features help summarize meeting notes, generate design briefs, and connect ideas across projects, while integrations with Figma, Slack, and Miro make it easy to embed visual work directly into team documents.

FigJam is Figma’s collaborative whiteboard tool built for brainstorming, planning, and design thinking. It extends Figma’s ecosystem by allowing teams to map user journeys, sketch wireframes, and run workshops all in the same space where they design and prototype. With features like sticky notes, stamps, live cursors, and interactive widgets, FigJam makes real-time collaboration engaging and visual.

FigJam is included as part of the Figma ecosystem, which means you’d need to buy Figma seats:

Filestage is a review and approval platform that streamlines how creative teams gather, manage, and finalize feedback on visual assets, videos, and documents. It’s designed to simplify collaboration between design teams, clients, and external stakeholders without endless email threads or version confusion. Reviewers can leave time-stamped comments directly on files, approve or request changes with one click, and see everyone’s feedback in one organized view.

Lucidspark is a cloud-based virtual whiteboard designed to help teams brainstorm, plan, and collaborate visually in real time. Created by the makers of Lucidchart, it connects seamlessly with diagramming and design tools, making it especially powerful for design system visualization, UX mapping, and creative workshops. Teams can sketch ideas, organize sticky notes, and structure complex workflows on an infinite canvas all while capturing input through votes, comments, and chat.

Lucidspark is only available as part of the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite bundle, not as a standalone product.

UXPin Merge is a part of the broader UXPin platform that lets design and engineering teams operate from the same components in code. You import React, Vue, Angular, or Web Component libraries from Git, npm, or Storybook and use those exact components in high-fidelity prototypes.

The UX and product design tools we’ve explored cover the entire lifecycle: early-stage inspiration, UI creation, design validation, and UX team collaboration.

If your goal is to test whether those designs work, Maze is the missing piece. While tools like Figma, Sketch, Miro, or FigJam help you create and refine concepts, Maze brings the essential layer of user validation. With both moderated and unmoderated research methods, a participant panel of over 3 million testers, and automated reporting capabilities, Maze is the ideal research tool for teams looking to grow their research efforts.

Try the free forever plan today to find out how Maze can help you uncover game-changing user insights that help make data-driven decisions across your organization.