15 Budget-Friendly Design Tools for Startups

22 March 2022 10 min Read
budget friendly design tools for startups

These days, there are many excellent web design tools available to assist you with mockups, frameworks, testing, and other tasks. You’ll also find a wealth of resources on the many factors that go into successful web design, such as virtual reality, animation, color, and typography.

Someone has probably built a tool for whatever problem you’re attempting to solve in your web design workflow, whether it’s a standalone utility or a feature within a larger program. The even better news is that so many of these fantastic tools are available for free, though this does make deciding which ones to use significantly more difficult.

Don’t waste your time learning, and put your training wheels away. Instead, use these 10 tools for entrepreneurs and marketers to get into the design process.

InVision Studio:

InVision Studio aspires to be the only user interface tool you’ll ever need. It includes tools for rapid prototyping, responsive and collaborative design, and working with design systems, among other things, to help you develop attractive, interactive interfaces.

There’s a lot of overlap in capabilities if you’re currently utilizing InVision with tools like Sketch. The studio’s strength is in prototyping, which is especially important if your design contains animation. Rapid prototyping will enable you to develop intricate and innovative transitions, allowing you to attain the desired amount of animation. Decide how you want your UI to appear at the start of the transition, and then create the final product. InVision Studio handles the remainder.

You may also make your own animations and transitions using a variety of movements and interactions, such as swiping, clicking, and hovering.

Related: How To Create Perfect Website Design?

Adobe XD:

Under the Adobe Creative Cloud package, Adobe XD provides the greatest environment for digital projects. If you’re a long-time Adobe user who’s new to XD, the interface might not seem very ‘Adobe’ at first. It does, however, compare favorably to other prominent tools. It’s a big leap if you’ve been using Photoshop for a long time, but it’s well worth it for UI design.

This vector design and the wireframing tool keep improving, with features like auto-animation support guaranteeing that it can stay up with the newest UX trends. Drawing tools, tools for defining non-static interactions, mobile and desktop previews, and sharing facilities for offering feedback on designs are all included in XD. It lets you start a project with a device-specific artboard size, and you can even import famous UI kits like Google’s Material Design.

Importantly, Adobe XD is fully integrated with the rest of the Creative Cloud, allowing you to import and work with files from Photoshop or Illustrator. If you’ve used previous Adobe programs, the UI will seem comfortable and familiar, so there won’t be much of a learning curve.

Visme

Visme’s presentation maker is an excellent choice for a company that wants to scale its corporate communications and presentations. With access to hundreds of professionally designed slide templates and over a million distinct design elements, you can create spectacular slide designs.

Stock photographs, stock movies, vector icons, animated illustrations, 3D graphics, and more are available. Insert your company’s brand colors and fonts to generate branded visual material effortlessly.

Pablo

Buffer’s little assistant for socially active startups (which, if you’re clever, includes yours) is a free web application that lets you distribute visual quotes across all of your social networks in one fell swoop. You can use it in conjunction with the popular social sharing application Buffer.

Pablo streamlines the design process by supplying quotations and images; all you have to do now is mix and match to fulfill your needs. Suppose you want to wield even more power and are prepared to “give” a few seconds. In that case, Pablo allows you to customize the backdrop image for the quotation you want to share with your followers and admirers, alter the contrast, and even add a blur effect for added effect.

Marvel

Marvel is another web design tool that’s fantastic for quickly sketching out concepts, fine-tuning an interface to your liking, and creating prototypes. Marvel has a cool approach to creating pages that lets you simulate your design with a prototype.

For incorporating your ideas into your project workflow, some fantastic integrations are available. It’s worth noting that there’s an integrated user testing option, which is currently uncommon in the web design tool landscape. There’s no need to download anything because it’s all done online.

Figma

Figma is an interface design tool that enables real-time collaboration amongst numerous designers. When several stakeholders in a project want to shape the outcome, this is a great way to go. It’s available in the browser and on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and there are free and premium versions available depending on your needs. 

“Figma has a similar USP to Sketch, with the exception of being cross-platform,” says Benjamin Reed, a front-end designer. “When I used it to generate a couple of icons, I found the workflow to be really seamless.” It was straightforward to learn and has the extra benefit of being collaborative: sharing graphics with others within the program. A Web Designing Company in Chandigarh understands how to use this tool to its full potential.

UXPin

The next web design tool on our list is UXPin. This web-based prototyping tool is available for Mac, Windows, and the web. UXPin comes closer to the code and allows you to work with interactive states, logic, and code components. In contrast, most other design tools allow you to mimic interactions by linking different items on your artboard.

To assist you, there are built-in element libraries for iOS, Material Design, and Bootstrap, as well as hundreds of free icon sets. UXPin also offers accessibility capabilities that help you keep your designs compliant with WCAG standards, which we appreciate.

You can make your prototype for free on UXPin and then upgrade to a premium monthly subscription if you like it (team memberships are available). UXPin also offers a good Sketch connection, so it’s worth adding to your workflow if you like Sketch but find its prototyping capabilities limited.

Proto.io

Proto.io is a fantastic tool for creating lifelike prototypes that start with rudimentary concepts and conclude with fully realized designs. In addition, the tool offers a variety of options for your projects, including detailed and bespoke vector animations.

You can begin by sketching up the first concepts hand-drawn, then moving on to wireframes and a high-fidelity prototype. If you wish to design using other tools, the Sketch and Photoshop plugins can help, but Proto.io handles the entire design process well. Other capabilities, such as user testing, will aid in the validation of your designs. It is an all-in-one solution that many well-known brands have already used.

There are a number of excellent demos to try out, and you can quickly see how an end-to-end solution could easily replace several existing technologies. Proto.io also includes asset managers, development guidelines, and the option to record your prototype, making it one of the more comprehensive prototyping platforms available.

MockFlow

MockFlow is a set of tools for wireframing and planning websites. WireframePro can help you lay out your first design and then iterate until it’s perfect – it even has a UI revision tracker. It includes thousands of pre-built components and layouts that you can customize to fit your needs, as well as a preview mode for showing your work to colleagues and clients.

After you’ve completed your wireframes, the rest of the suite can assist you with other parts of website planning, such as information architecture, creating a style guide (which can be generated automatically), and completing a sign-off procedure.

Adobe Comp

Adobe Comp is an excellent iPad web design app that helps you create wireframes, prototypes, and layout designs for your web pages. If you want to call it that. You can rapidly create placeholders by drawing intuitive shapes to represent photographs, text, and more, and it offers basic templates for a range of mobile and web layouts, as well as a print if that’s your thing. Comp turns scribbled lines, circles, and rectangles into straight lines, circles, and rectangles.

Despite a long-standing request that has been under evaluation for what seems like an eternity, Adobe has not seen fit to integrate direct export to XD — crazy! – despite a long-standing request that has been under review for what seems like an eternity. However, exporting to Photoshop (along with Illustrator and InDesign) is built-in, and once you’ve tweaked your mockup in the omnipresent image editor, you can export to XD from there. Comp completely earns its inclusion in this list because of its go-anywhere capabilities, ease-of-use, and outstanding UI, despite this annoying extra step in the Adobe devotee wireframer’s user path.

Instapage

With over 250,000 users worldwide, the Instapage platform is the most popular landing page builder. It’s an excellent spot to start your website’s pages.

For contest information pages and signup forms, Instapage has a lot of possibilities. You may then modify it with your brand logo, message, and any images or fonts that will make the image stand out once you’ve chosen one. You can A/B test your pages and make changes based on the results. According to Instapage (and others), keeping track of conversions for each variation will boost your stats significantly.

WhatTheFont!

You can copy a designer’s eye by obtaining fonts from websites if you are a novice with no design abilities. That’s where WhatTheFont can be found. It is a free program that lets you upload an image. The font that will be used within is then generated.

Your image should be no more than 50 characters long. Make sure they’re as far apart as feasible. There are also some suggestions for selecting the best image to use in the software. After you’ve determined the font’s name, look it up on FontSquirrel, Google Fonts, or 1001 Fonts.

Easel.ly

Content marketing is ostensibly replacing traditional advertisements (banners, etc.) as a means of promoting your goods. It’s not as simple as producing blog entries to engage users in this age of widespread ADD and short attention spans. Only visual content has a chance of breaking through the clutter.

Easel.ly, a DIY infographics resource, has a plethora of objects, templates, and images. Visual.ly matches you with a graphic designer who can generate various visual products. You can select from them based on your requirements, time limits, and preferences. Drag-and-drop practically any type of content from Easel.ly’s large library (including photos, charts, icons, and more) or upload your own.

Canva and Canva Pro

This online tool is ideal for businesses having difficulty turning a profit. It can make everything from social network posts and covers to event invitations (like the launch event) complete with a cool graphic, a link to the savable calendar, and other handy tools.

You may either drag and drop your images into their templates or purchase most of their graphic resources for $1.

Canva Pro has the same capabilities as Canva, but it goes one step further by allowing you to design a brand kit with uniform colors and fonts. Templates can also be customised, and photo folders can be shared.

BeFunky

BeFunky is an online editor that goes beyond Pixlr. It combines the functionality of a collage maker, photo editor, and designer into a single site that serves as a one-stop-shop for all of your startup needs.

The gigantic web app’s various branches each have their user interface. It has a real-time viewer in the center and a plethora of resources (icons and fonts, etc.) on the left-hand side of the panel. BeFunky is an excellent tool for getting your photo noticed.

Summing Up

As you can see, there are many reasonably priced tools available to startups. You might not be able to buy the full-featured packages for all of these products, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start with the basic plans and see which ones you prefer. Then, if you find that a certain tool is extremely beneficial to your startup, you can upgrade to a more feature-rich version.

So don’t let a limited budget hold you back from launching your business. Consider which tools would be most useful to you, and then evaluate how much room you have in your budget for them. You’ll probably discover that the return on investment for these products is sufficient to cover their initial cost, allowing you to expand your firm even further. We hope you enjoyed this article. If you did, please let others know!

The Author

I serve as a content writer for Master Infotech, a Web Designing Company in Chandigarh. I enjoy writing about cutting-edge technologies and trends.