Top 18 Mobile App Design Tools

Mobile app design is a crucial phase during development and a mobile app's UI can make or break the application. Delivering a great user experience should be your number one priority as a mobile app developer as it has a powerful and direct impact on your user engagement, conversion rates, and consequently revenues.

In our experience, what separates the best mobile app design tools from the rest is their ability to empower our entire team to collaborate seamlessly, rapidly turning a simple idea into a life-like, interactive prototype that feels just like the final product. Below we list the top mobile app design tools that are essential to your mobile app development process to take your app to the next level.

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Adobe XD offers a powerful way to design, prototype, and share user interfaces and experiences, backed by the robust Adobe ecosystem. It allows designers to easily switch from Design to Prototype mode, dragging wires between artboards to turn wireframes into interactive prototypes. While it remains a capable tool, new feature development has ceased. It is best suited for teams already deeply integrated with the Adobe Creative Cloud suite who do not require cutting-edge features.

• Developer: Adobe Systems
• Founded: 2016
• Platform: Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android
• Integrations: Jira, Slack, Zeplin, Avocode, and more
• Pricing: No longer sold as a standalone app. Available only as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud "All Apps" subscription.

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Axure is a popular wireframing and rapid prototyping tool with a drag-and-drop interface. It is used by more than 25,000 organizations around the world including 87 of the Fortune 100 companies.

It allows you to create custom controls by combining existing widgets and assigning actions in response to events or touch gestures like pinch and swipe. It also allows multiple people to work on the same project at the same time, making it easier for teams to collaborate.

• Founded: 2003
• Platform: Windows, macOS
• Users: Apple, Amazon, IBM, eBay, Microsoft, and more
• Integrations: Slack and Hipchat
• Pricing: Plans start at $25 per user per month

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Balsamiq is a rapid wireframing tool that reproduces the experience of sketching on a whiteboard. Having the ability to make wireframes fast, you'll be able to generate more ideas so you can discover the best solutions.

Since Balsamiq requires little investment in time and effort, you'll revise your designs more often and refine them sooner. That leaves more time for discussion and writing code, making it a perfect tool for lean, agile teams.

• Developer: Balsamiq Studios, LLC
• Founded: 2008
• Platforms: Windows, macOS
• Users: Apple, Cisco, Adobe, Skype, and more
• Integrations: Jira, Confluence, and Google Drive
• Pricing: Plans start at $9 per month

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Canva is primarily used in the initial stages of mobile app design for rapid ideation and creating low-fidelity concepts. Its main advantage is its ease of use, which allows team members without a formal design background—such as product managers, marketers, or developers—to quickly create visual mockups.

With a large library of templates and pre-built UI elements, users can assemble mobile app screens to visualize an idea, map out a basic user flow, or create a proof-of-concept for a presentation. While it does not replace dedicated UI design software for producing pixel-perfect, high-fidelity assets, it serves a practical role in brainstorming and early-stage visualization where speed is the priority.

• Key Feature: Ease of use for rapid, low-fidelity wireframing
• ‍Platform: Web, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android
• ‍Users: Millions worldwide, from individuals to Fortune 500 companies‍
• Integrations: Slack, Google Drive, Dropbox, and more‍
• Pricing: Free. Paid plans (Pro and Teams) unlock premium assets and features.

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Figma is a collaborative, web-based interface design tool widely used for modern mobile app design. It enables teams to design user interfaces (UI) for iOS and Android apps, create extensive component libraries, and build interactive mobile prototypes in real-time. Key functionalities supporting the mobile design process include Dev Mode, a dedicated space for developers to inspect mobile designs, and Variables for managing design tokens. Its advanced prototyping, which includes conditional logic, allows designers to create realistic user flows that simulate the final app experience.

• ‍Founded: 2012‍
• Platform: Web‍
• Users: Microsoft, Uber, Slack, Braintree and more‍
• Integrations: Jira, Trello, Slack, Zeplin, and more‍
• ‍Pricing: Offers a free Starter plan. The Professional plan costs approximately $15 per full-seat user/month when billed annually, while the Organization plan is around $45 per user/month.

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Fluid UI lets you create visually stunning prototypes in minutes. You can create interactive mobile app prototypes with taps, swipes, clicks and more gestures using their simple linking system.

It also provides over 2,000 built-in components from Material Design, iOS, Windows, and Wireframe libraries, allowing you to integrate prototypes faster with integrated review and feedback.

• Founded: 2010
• Platform: Windows, Linux, macOS, Web
• Users: Xerox, Oracle, Samsung, Siemens, and more
• Pricing: Free. Plans start at $8.25 per month.

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Framer is a web-based design platform for building interactive websites and high-fidelity prototypes. Mobile app designers use it to create realistic, interactive prototypes, particularly for mobile web experiences or Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Because the prototypes are built with web technologies, they can closely mimic the feel of a live application in a mobile browser. Teams also use Framer to build marketing sites and landing pages for their mobile apps. The platform includes AI-powered features, robust vector editing, and a built-in CMS.

• ‍Founded: 2014‍
• Platform: macOS‍
• Users: Dropbox, Pinterest, Twitter, Disney, and more.‍
• Integrations: Fiber‍
• Pricing: Offers a free plan for basic projects. Paid plans for personal sites start at approximately $15 per month, with Pro and Business plans ranging from $30 to over $200 per month depending on features and traffic limits.

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Justinmind allows you to design mobile app wireframes and prototypes without a single line of code. Its easy-to-use tool comes with UI kits for web, iOS, and Android, plus all the interactions you need to go from concept to a high-fidelity prototype, just a step before the first version of a mobile app.

It also provides features for annotating widgets and defining interactions such as linking, animations, conditional linking, calculations, simulating tab controls, show/hide elements and database simulation with real data.

• Founded: 2007
• Platform: Windows, macOS
• Users: Digitas Health, Tieto, Ink Cloud Group, and more
• Integrations: Sketch, Adobe, Jira, and more
• Pricing: Paid plans start at $9 per user per month

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Marvel is an all-in-one mobile app design platform. It's created with everyone in mind, not just mobile app designers, and as a result, it provides a simple and intuitive mobile app design tool that enables everyone to quickly create top-notch assets and mockups.

It's great during the early stages of the design process when you’re trying to form your concept into something tangible and translate it to your team, clients, or stakeholders as it allows you to turn your idea into a wireframe within minutes from a desktop or even a phone or tablet.

• Founded: 2013
• Platform: Web
• Users: Buzzfeed, IBM, Stripe, Deliveroo, and more
• Integrations: Jira, Dropbox, Slack, Sketch, and more
• Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $12 per month.

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Formerly a powerful mobile app design and whiteboarding tool, FreeHand by InVision allowed teams to quickly turn ideas into screen designs with intuitive vector-based drawing and flexible layers. It was known for its ability to help teams navigate the entire design process in one place, keeping everyone engaged and aware of updates. While the original InVision platform has sunset, FreeHand's app design features are now integrated into Miro's online collaboration platform.

• ‍Founded: 2011‍
• Platform: macOS‍
• Users: Airbnb, Amazon, HBO, Lyft, and more‍
• Integrations: Jira, Trello, Slack, and more‍
• Pricing: Discontinued. Users interested in similar functionality should explore Miro.

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Another popular mobile app prototyping tool is Mockplus, which is used by nearly 600,000 project managers, developers, and designers worldwide. With simple drag-and-drop, you can build interactive prototypes effortlessly. A set of pre-designed components is also available, enabling you to fully create interactions faster and easier.

Mockplus comes with more than 3,000 icons and nearly 200 components. You can just drag these components into the canvas to prototype your app ideas within a few minutes. It also enables you to preview prototypes on native devices instantly just by scanning a generated QR code, allowing for faster testing.

• Developer: Jongde Software
• Founded: 2014
• Platform: Windows, macOS, Android
• Users: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Huawei, and more
• Integrations: Sketch
• Pricing: Free. Plans start at $99.9 per year for individuals and $24.9 per month for teams

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OmniGraffle is a diagramming and graphic design application used to create mobile app wireframes. It features several design tools including canvases, templates, stencils, vector drawing, and grid guides, along with a drag-and-drop interface and a notes function to annotate and create specification documentation for prototypes and mockups.

OmniGraffle can be great for indie developers but it lacks interactivity capabilities and is not easily used for team collaboration due to its limitations as a desktop and tablet application.

• Developer: The Omni Group
• Founded: 2001
• Platform: macOS, iOS
• Pricing: Licenses start at $149.99 or $12.49/month

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Developed by Facebook, Origami Studio is a free design tool that allows mobile app designers to rapidly build and share interactive interfaces. Origami was primarily created and is still used to design and build Facebook's products and mobile apps including Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram.

It uses a unique system of patches that are plug-and-play components for quickly adding interaction, animation, and behavior to prototypes. You can also add Photoshop, Sketch, and Illustrator content to your project and add interactivity, rich media, and motion.

• Developer: Facebook
• Founded: 2017
• Platform: macOS
• Integrations: Sketch, Photoshop, and Illustrator
• Pricing: Free

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Penpot is an open-source design and prototyping platform for creating mobile app interfaces and other digital products. It provides a web-based, collaborative environment with the vector design tools, component libraries, and interactive prototyping features necessary for a modern UI design workflow.

Because Penpot is built on open standards (SVG), it can help streamline the handoff between designers and developers. Its primary distinction is its flexibility: teams can use the provided cloud service or self-host Penpot on their own servers for complete control over their data and environment. This makes it a practical option for teams seeking to avoid vendor lock-in or those with strict data security requirements.

• ‍Key Feature: Open-source with a self-hosting option‍
• Platform: Web (and any self-hosted environment)‍
• Users: Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and a fast-growing community‍
• Integrations: A growing library of community-built add-ons‍
• Pricing: Free. A paid cloud plan with more features is also available.

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Proto.io is a mobile app prototyping platform which is perfect for beginners as it utilizes a drag-and-drop interface does not require coding. It was originally designed to prototype on mobile devices and has since expanded to allow users to prototype apps for anything with a screen interface including Smart TVs, digital camera interfaces, cars, airplanes, and gaming consoles.

It is also the first mobile prototyping tool to support full feature animations of user interface items within a prototype screen. The included icon gallery contains thousands of SVG icons for use as buttons, lists, and tab bars and it supports web fonts, which allows mobile designers to access all available online fonts.

• Developer: Labs Division of SNQ Digital
• Founded: 2011
• Platform: Web
• Users: PayPal, Disney, ESPN, Amazon, and more
• Integrations: Dropbox, Photoshop, Sketch, and Lookback
• Pricing: Plans start at $24 per month

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ProtoPie is a specialized tool for building high-fidelity, dynamic prototypes of mobile applications. While most design software can create simple click-through prototypes, ProtoPie is used to build interactions that closely mimic the behavior of a finished native app.

Designers can create prototypes that access and respond to device hardware such as the camera, microphone, gyroscope, and keyboard. The software also supports complex multi-touch gestures and conditional logic, allowing for the creation of realistic user flows. The typical workflow involves importing static designs from Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD and then adding the advanced interactions in ProtoPie. It is most useful for detailed user testing or for stakeholder demonstrations that require a highly realistic app experience.

• ‍Key Feature: Advanced prototyping with device sensor integration‍
• Platform: macOS, Windows; Player app for iOS and Android‍
• Users: Google, Meta, Microsoft, BMW, and thousands of app-focused companies‍
• Integrations: Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD‍
• Pricing: Includes a free plan. Pro plans start at $50 per month.

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Sketch is a vector-based design tool for macOS focused on creating user interfaces for mobile apps and other digital products. It offers a native macOS application for designing mobile screens, establishing design systems with reusable Symbols and Color Variables, and building clickable prototypes to define user flows. While the design application is exclusive to macOS, its collaboration features allow mobile design teams to share their work and gather feedback from stakeholders on any platform via a web browser. Developers can also use the web app to inspect design specifications for free.

• ‍Founded: 2010‍
• Platforms: macOS‍
• Users: Apple, Facebook, Google, Stripe, Nintendo, and more‍
• Integrations: Jira Cloud, Zeplin, Avocode, WeTransfer, and more‍
• Pricing: Offers a Standard subscription starting at around $10 per editor/month (billed annually). A Business plan with advanced features like SSO is available for about $22 per editor/month.

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UXPin is a product design platform for creating highly interactive and functional prototypes of mobile apps. Its strength is the ability to build prototypes with conditional interactions, variables, and expressions, which goes beyond simple screen linking. This allows designers to simulate complex mobile app logic and create a more realistic user experience. A key feature for mobile teams is its "Merge" technology, which allows them to import and sync coded React components from developer repositories, helping to ensure consistency between the design prototype and the final coded application.

• ‍Founded: 2010‍
• Platform: Web‍
• Users: HBO, Paypal, Microsoft, Sony, and more‍
• Integrations: Sketch, Jira, Slack, and more‍
• Pricing: Offers several tiers. Plans start at approximately $6 per editor/month for basic features. More advanced plans with features like conditional logic and variables range from $29 to $119 per editor/month.