100 Best Apps for UI Designers
UI designers rarely rely on one application alone. This first group covers core tools for creating interfaces, testing ideas, collaborating with teams, and preparing designs for development.
Figma
Figma provides browser-based collaborative tools for designing interfaces, prototyping interactions, and maintaining shared component libraries. It helps distributed teams avoid conflicting design files through simultaneous editing and centralized design updates.
Sketch
Sketch is a macOS design application for creating interface layouts, vector assets, and reusable symbols. It helps designers organize repeated interface patterns without manually rebuilding common elements across screens.
Penpot
Penpot is an open-source web application for collaborative interface design, prototyping, and SVG-based assets. It helps teams seeking open tooling collaborate on editable design files without relying on proprietary desktop software.
Framer
Framer combines responsive interface design, interactive prototyping, and website publishing in a browser-based workspace. It helps designers turn responsive concepts into shareable live websites without a separate publishing workflow.
Axure RP
Axure RP creates detailed wireframes and prototypes with conditional logic, variables, annotations, and documentation. It helps teams communicate complex application behavior when static mockups cannot explain interactions or states.
ProtoPie
ProtoPie builds high-fidelity interactive prototypes using triggers, responses, device sensors, and conditional logic. It helps designers validate nuanced mobile interactions before engineering invests time in implementation.
Principle
Principle is a macOS application for designing animated interface transitions and interactive prototype flows. It helps designers demonstrate motion details that are difficult to convey through static screen layouts.
Origami Studio
Origami Studio is a prototyping tool that uses visual patches to create interactive interface behaviors. It helps designers explore sophisticated interactions without writing production code for every experiment.
Balsamiq
Balsamiq creates low-fidelity wireframes with sketch-style components for early interface planning and discussion. It helps teams focus feedback on structure and content before visual polish distracts reviewers.
Miro
Miro provides an online collaborative whiteboard for mapping journeys, workshops, diagrams, and design ideas. It helps remote teams gather workshop outputs and planning artifacts in one shared visual space.
FigJam
FigJam is Figma's collaborative whiteboard for brainstorming, diagramming, workshops, and early design exploration. It helps design teams connect ideation activities with their existing interface design workspace.
Whimsical
Whimsical lets teams create flowcharts, wireframes, mind maps, documents, and project diagrams collaboratively. It helps designers quickly map user flows when a full visual design tool feels excessive.
Lucidchart
Lucidchart is a web-based diagramming application for flowcharts, process maps, architecture, and user journeys. It helps teams clarify complicated product flows before designers commit them to interface screens.
Maze
Maze enables teams to run usability tests with prototypes and collect task-based participant feedback. It helps designers identify confusing flows earlier by gathering structured feedback from test participants.
UserTesting
UserTesting supports customer research through recorded participant feedback, moderated sessions, and usability testing. It helps teams hear users explain frustrations instead of relying solely on internal design assumptions.
Lyssna
Lyssna provides user research tools for preference tests, prototype studies, surveys, and participant recruitment. It helps designers compare alternatives and collect feedback before committing resources to a direction.
Zeplin
Zeplin organizes design handoff by presenting screens, specifications, assets, notes, and style information. It helps developers find implementation details without repeatedly asking designers for measurements or exports.
Storybook
Storybook is a development environment for building, testing, and documenting interface components in isolation. It helps designers and developers review reusable components without navigating entire product workflows.
Chromatic
Chromatic hosts Storybook projects and supports visual review workflows for component and interface changes. It helps teams catch unintended visual regressions before component updates reach production interfaces.
zeroheight
zeroheight creates design system documentation that brings together guidelines, components, and usage examples. It helps organizations reduce inconsistent interface decisions by making standards easier to find.
Stark
Stark provides accessibility tools for checking contrast, simulating vision conditions, and reviewing design files. It helps designers spot accessibility issues before handoff, when fixes are typically simpler.
Adobe Color
Adobe Color creates, explores, and saves color themes using color-wheel rules and accessibility-oriented tools. It helps designers develop coherent palettes when choosing compatible colors manually becomes time-consuming.
Coolors
Coolors generates and organizes color palettes for digital design projects and visual exploration. It helps designers move past blank-page color decisions by quickly offering adjustable palette starting points.
Iconify
Iconify provides searchable icons from many open-source collections, plus tools for using them in projects. It helps designers locate consistent icon options without searching individual icon libraries separately.
SF Symbols
SF Symbols provides Apple's configurable system icon library for interfaces across Apple platforms. It helps Apple-platform designers use familiar icons that align with system conventions and accessibility settings.
Canva
Canva provides browser-based templates, design tools, and collaboration features for creating visual assets. It helps designers quickly produce supporting graphics when custom visual production time is limited.
Lunacy
Lunacy is a vector design application for creating interfaces, graphics, and design assets. It gives teams a dedicated interface design workspace without relying on a browser-based design tool.
UXPin
UXPin creates interactive prototypes and supports design systems with reusable component libraries. It helps designers test realistic interface behavior when static screens cannot convey interactions.
MockFlow
MockFlow offers wireframing, site mapping, and interface planning tools for digital product teams. It helps teams organize early interface ideas before committing effort to detailed visual design.
Justinmind
Justinmind lets designers build interactive web and mobile prototypes with simulated interface behaviors. It helps stakeholders evaluate user flows without requiring engineers to build a functioning product.
Marvel
Marvel is a design and prototyping platform for linking screens into shareable interactive experiences. It helps designers collect feedback on navigable prototypes instead of presenting disconnected static screens.
Uizard
Uizard uses AI-assisted tools to create wireframes, mockups, and multi-screen interface designs. It helps founders turn rough product concepts into presentable screens without extensive design expertise.
Visily
Visily is an AI-assisted collaborative workspace for creating wireframes and UI design mockups. It helps non-designers communicate interface ideas using editable layouts rather than written requirements alone.
Moqups
Moqups provides browser-based tools for wireframes, diagrams, mockups, and collaborative visual planning. It helps distributed teams keep interface planning and related diagrams in one shared workspace.
Fluid UI
Fluid UI enables designers to create mobile app wireframes and clickable prototypes online. It helps designers demonstrate mobile navigation patterns before investing in polished screens or development.
Quant-UX
Quant-UX is an open-source prototyping tool that supports interactive prototypes and usability testing. It helps teams connect prototype creation with user feedback instead of managing separate research tools.
Pencil Project
Pencil Project is an open-source desktop tool for creating diagrams, wireframes, and interface mockups. It helps designers draft low-fidelity layouts when they need a lightweight offline wireframing option.
Wireframe.cc
Wireframe.cc is a minimalist web application for sketching low-fidelity interface wireframes. It helps teams focus discussions on structure and content before visual styling becomes distracting.
Overflow
Overflow turns design screens into animated user-flow diagrams for presentations and documentation. It helps designers explain complex journeys clearly when linked prototype screens are difficult to follow.
Rive
Rive is a design tool for creating interactive vector animations and state-machine-driven graphics. It helps product teams deliver responsive animated interface elements without manually exporting multiple animation files.
LottieFiles
LottieFiles provides tools for creating, previewing, testing, and sharing Lottie animation files. It helps designers hand off lightweight motion assets when animated interface details need consistent implementation.
Spline
Spline is a collaborative 3D design tool for creating interactive scenes and web-ready objects. It helps designers explore 3D interface visuals without mastering a traditional complex 3D workflow.
Blender
Blender is an open-source 3D creation suite for modeling, rendering, animation, and compositing. It helps designers create custom three-dimensional assets when stock imagery does not fit the product.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor for creating icons, illustrations, logos, and scalable artwork. It helps UI designers maintain crisp reusable visual assets across different screen sizes and resolutions.
Affinity Designer
Affinity Designer is a vector and raster graphics application for illustrations, icons, and layouts. It helps designers switch between vector shapes and pixel editing within a single creative document.
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is an image-editing application for compositing, retouching, painting, and preparing visual assets. It helps designers refine photographs and raster assets before placing them into interface compositions.
The Noun Project
The Noun Project offers a searchable library of icons and photographs from contributing creators. It helps designers find recognizable visual symbols quickly when building interface concepts and presentations.
Flaticon
Flaticon provides downloadable icon collections in multiple visual styles and common file formats. It helps designers source matching icon sets without drawing every standard interface symbol from scratch.
Font Awesome
Font Awesome provides icon libraries and implementation tools for websites, applications, and design systems. It helps teams use familiar interface icons consistently across product designs and implemented interfaces.
Google Fonts
Google Fonts is a catalog of open-source typefaces with web embedding and download options. It helps designers evaluate accessible type choices without searching across scattered font foundries.
Mural
Mural provides collaborative digital whiteboards for workshops, journey maps, affinity clustering, and early design exploration. It helps distributed teams replace scattered workshop notes with a shared, editable facilitation space.
Dovetail
Dovetail organizes research data, transcripts, notes, tags, and findings in a collaborative repository. It helps designers synthesize qualitative evidence without losing important patterns across interviews and studies.
Optimal Workshop
Optimal Workshop offers usability research tools for card sorting, tree testing, surveys, and first-click studies. It helps teams validate information architecture before investing heavily in navigation and content structures.
Lookback
Lookback records moderated and unmoderated user research sessions, including participant screens, cameras, and reactions. It helps designers observe real user behavior when in-person testing is impractical or unavailable.
Hotjar
Hotjar provides heatmaps, session recordings, feedback widgets, and surveys for understanding website behavior. It helps teams identify confusing interface areas by showing where visitors click, scroll, and hesitate.
FullStory
FullStory captures digital experience data through session replay, interaction analysis, and issue investigation tools. It helps designers diagnose reported usability problems by reviewing the steps users actually took.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity provides session recordings and heatmaps to help analyze how visitors use websites. It helps small teams spot dead clicks, excessive scrolling, and other signs of interface friction.
axe DevTools
axe DevTools checks web pages for accessibility issues through browser-based automated testing and guidance. It helps designers and developers catch common accessibility failures before they reach production.
Accessibility Insights for Web
Accessibility Insights for Web offers automated checks and guided assessments for evaluating web accessibility. It helps teams follow structured testing steps when accessibility requirements feel difficult to interpret.
WAVE
WAVE evaluates web pages and visually highlights accessibility errors, alerts, structural elements, and contrast issues. It helps designers quickly locate accessibility concerns directly within a page's rendered layout.
Tokens Studio
Tokens Studio manages design tokens, allowing teams to define, organize, and synchronize visual variables. It reduces inconsistencies caused by manually updating colors, spacing, and typography values in multiple places.
Specify
Specify centralizes design tokens and helps distribute them across design and development workflows. It helps teams avoid mismatched interface values when design decisions must move into implementation.
Supernova
Supernova helps teams document design systems and connect design data with developer-facing resources. It helps designers keep system guidance discoverable when components, tokens, and rules grow complex.
Frontify
Frontify is a brand management platform for organizing guidelines, assets, templates, and design systems. It helps teams maintain consistent brand usage when many contributors need approved visual resources.
Knapsack
Knapsack supports design system documentation and connects component guidance with development workflows. It helps product teams reduce ambiguity around which components are approved and how they behave.
Webflow
Webflow lets designers build responsive websites visually, with controls for layouts, interactions, and content. It helps designers test and publish polished web experiences without relying entirely on hand-coded prototypes.
CodePen
CodePen is an online editor for writing, previewing, and sharing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript experiments. It helps designers communicate interaction ideas with live browser examples rather than static screenshots.
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code is a code editor with extensions, debugging, source control, and integrated terminals. It helps UI designers inspect and adjust interface code when closer developer collaboration is needed.
GitHub
GitHub hosts code repositories and provides collaboration tools for reviews, issues, pull requests, and documentation. It helps designers follow implementation changes and contribute feedback within the team's established development workflow.
Linear
Linear is an issue-tracking platform for planning, prioritizing, and monitoring product and engineering work. It helps design teams keep interface tasks visible alongside the technical work required for delivery.
Jira
Jira tracks work through issues, boards, workflows, backlogs, and reports for product development teams. It helps designers coordinate dependencies and status updates when interface work spans several contributors.
Notion
Notion combines documents, databases, wikis, and project planning tools in a shared workspace. It helps designers consolidate briefs, research summaries, meeting notes, and design decisions in one place.
Trello
Trello organizes tasks on visual boards using cards, lists, assignments, due dates, and attachments. It helps small design teams see workflow bottlenecks without managing a complicated project-management system.
Asana
Asana helps teams plan projects, assign tasks, track deadlines, and coordinate work across projects. It helps designers manage review cycles and handoffs when multiple stakeholders need clear ownership.
Material Theme Builder
Material Theme Builder creates Material Design color schemes and theme settings from selected source colors. It helps designers establish coordinated interface colors without manually calculating every semantic color role.
Fable
Fable connects design teams with people with disabilities for accessibility testing and product feedback. It addresses the difficulty of recruiting disabled testers by coordinating feedback from lived-experience experts.
Color Oracle
Color Oracle simulates several forms of color vision deficiency directly on desktop screens. It helps designers spot indistinguishable interface colors before users encounter confusing visual states.
Contrast
Contrast evaluates foreground and background color combinations against common accessibility contrast requirements. It prevents time-consuming manual checks when designers need readable text and control colors.
Leonardo
Leonardo generates color palettes while displaying contrast relationships for accessibility-conscious interface color selection. It reduces manual palette adjustments when designers need colors distinguishable across different interface roles.
Khroma
Khroma uses AI to generate color combinations based on colors designers choose. It helps designers move beyond generic palettes when seeking color directions aligned with their preferences.
Adobe Fonts
Adobe Fonts lets users browse, activate, and manage fonts for design and creative projects. It reduces font-installation friction by activating typefaces through a Creative Cloud account.
Fontshare
Fontshare offers downloadable fonts for personal and commercial design use under its licensing terms. It helps teams find usable typefaces without starting every project with an empty font library.
Type Scale
Type Scale generates typographic scales from a base size and ratio for interface layouts. It removes guesswork from heading hierarchy by calculating coordinated sizes from a chosen starting point.
Fontjoy
Fontjoy suggests font pairings by balancing visual similarity and contrast between typefaces. It shortens the search for complementary heading and body fonts during early visual exploration.
WhatFont
WhatFont identifies typefaces used on web pages through a browser extension. It saves designers from inspecting page code when they need to identify a typeface quickly.
Material Symbols
Material Symbols provides variable icons customizable by weight, fill, grade, and optical size. It avoids redrawing common interface symbols when projects need flexible, consistent icon variants.
Heroicons
Heroicons supplies open-source SVG icons in outline, solid, and mini styles. It gives interface teams cohesive basic symbols without mixing visually incompatible icon libraries.
Phosphor Icons
Phosphor Icons offers customizable open-source icons across multiple weights and visual styles. It helps designers match icon emphasis to surrounding typography without sourcing separate icon sets.
Tabler Icons
Tabler Icons provides an open-source SVG icon set with consistent stroke styling. It reduces inconsistencies caused by assembling navigation and action icons from unrelated sources.
Radix UI
Radix UI provides unstyled, accessible React primitives for building custom interface components. It helps teams avoid rebuilding keyboard behavior and ARIA patterns for common controls.
shadcn/ui
shadcn/ui provides copyable React components built with Tailwind CSS and Radix primitives. It gives designers and developers a customizable starting point instead of a locked component package.
MUI
MUI offers React components, templates, and theming tools based on Material Design. It accelerates application interface work when teams need production-ready patterns with documented states.
Chakra UI
Chakra UI supplies accessible React components and styling tools for responsive application interfaces. It reduces repetitive responsive styling work when teams build controls across multiple screen sizes.
Mantine
Mantine provides React components, hooks, and utilities for building web application interfaces. It helps product teams prototype functional interface patterns without implementing every common utility themselves.
Ant Design
Ant Design provides a React component library and design system for enterprise-style interfaces. It speeds dense application design by supplying established patterns for tables, forms, and navigation.
Bootstrap
Bootstrap offers responsive HTML, CSS, and JavaScript components for building web interfaces. It helps small teams create structured responsive layouts without developing foundational styles from scratch.
Tailwind CSS
Tailwind CSS provides utility classes for composing custom interface styling directly in markup. It reduces context switching between stylesheets and components when refining detailed layout decisions.
Carbon Design System
Carbon Design System offers IBM's open-source components, guidance, and design resources. It helps teams maintain familiar interaction patterns when designing complex product interfaces.
Polaris
Polaris provides Shopify's design system, components, and guidelines for Shopify app experiences. It helps Shopify app designers follow platform conventions instead of inventing merchant-facing patterns independently.
GSAP
GSAP is a JavaScript library for sequencing animations and interactions on the web. It gives teams precise timing control when static prototypes cannot adequately explain motion behavior.
The strongest UI workflow combines focused design tools with research, documentation, and accessibility checks. The next entries expand that toolkit with additional specialized options.