5 Best Web Design Software Shortlist
Here are the top 5 web design tools I’d like to highlight out of the 15 I cover in this article:
Our one-on-one guidance will help you find the perfect fit.
There are endless ways to make a website look amazing, and all of them require equally amazing web design tools. Having built a crazy number of websites over the years, I'll be the first to admit that even a mediocre web design project is a huge job. And if you want to create the kind of UX that stops users in their tracks? Oof, you're gonna need some serious design firepower.
So that's exactly what I had in mind while reviewing these popular web design software tools. My mission is to wireframe, prototype, and usability test my way through the industry's leading tools to bring you the ultimate list of web design software that can handle that big, creative brain of yours. Let's jump in!
What Is Web Design Software?
Web design software is a digital tool that helps designers and developers create, edit, and manipulate the visual elements and layout of websites. It encompasses a range of functionalities to support the design and development of websites, ensuring a user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing online experience.
Key features included in web design software are drag-and-drop functionality, design element libraries, responsive design capabilities, and the ability to export designs for development. These features empower designers to translate their creative ideas into functional and visually appealing web designs, meeting the needs and expectations of online users.
Best Web Design Software Comparison Chart
Here is a table you can use to compare the tools we just covered in the overviews.
Tool | Best For | Trial Info | Price | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Best for customizable templates | Free plan available | From $16/month (billed annually) | Website | |
2 | Best web design software with robust cross-functional collaboration features | Free plan available | From $15/user/month (billed annually) | Website | |
3 | Best drag-and-drop website builder | Free plan available | From $14.99/month (billed annually) | Website | |
4 | Best web design software for rapid prototyping | 7-day free trial + free plan available | From $16/user/month (billed annually) | Website | |
5 | Best for web and mobile application prototyping | Free trial available | From $9/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
Overviews Of The 5 Best Web Design Software
The web design software space is flooded with tons of options. How do you make the right choice? Don’t fret; here’s an evaluation of the best web design software, including a summary of their key features, screenshots, and information on trials and pricing.
Wix is a versatile web design software that enables you to create and manage your own website without needing any coding skills. With its drag-and-drop editor and a vast selection of customizable templates, you can design a site that reflects your personal or business brand.
Why I picked Wix: Wix has an extensive template library, offering over 800 designer-made options tailored to various industries and styles. This variety allows you to find a design that suits your needs, providing a solid foundation for your website. Additionally, Wix's built-in SEO tools help improve your site's visibility on search engines, making it easier for potential visitors to find you online.
Another notable feature is Wix's App Market, which offers a wide range of applications to enhance your website's functionality. From adding contact forms and live chat to integrating social media feeds, these apps allow you to customize your site to meet your specific requirements.
Wix Standout Features and Integrations
Features include mobile optimization, ensuring your website looks great on any device and advanced design capabilities that let you animate text and images to create a dynamic user experience. Additionally, Wix provides secure hosting, giving you peace of mind that your site is safe and reliable.
Integrations include Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Catalog, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Omnisend, Meta Pixel, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Stripe, PayPal, and QuickBooks.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- A wide selection of apps and widgets
- User-friendly drag-and-drop editor
- Built-in SEO tools
Cons:
- Storage limits on lower-tier plans
- Can't switch templates without creating a whole new site
Figma
Best web design software with robust cross-functional collaboration features
Figma is a leader in the web design software space. The platform is cloud-based and promises seamless collaboration. Its “multiplayer” version-controlled design interface is a delight for designers and developers worldwide.
Why I picked Figma: Figma remains unfazed when it comes to effective web design collaboration. Figma’s “multiplayer” enables you to comment and annotate on designs in real time. You can also branch off to iterate on design options and later merge updates using dynamic overlays. The platform comes with other attributes, such as the OpenType feature that enables you to customize your designs with variable fonts.
Additionally, Figma keeps track of the contributors accountable for a project's workflow. On “project pages”, for instance, you can view every project; on “team and organization pages”, you can view every contributor. To view the most recent files that each person has worked on, you simply have to click on their respective user profiles. The software also lets you share files with a live link or embed the link in other tools.
Figma Standout Features and Integrations
Features include the ability to convert static files to interactive web elements. You can connect UI design elements, animate objects, specify interactions, and use GIFs to express motion designs, video elements, and animations. Figma’s library contains reusable components with quick search and drag-and-drop features.
Integrations include more than 30 tools, such as Asana, Bubble, Confluence, Dropbox, Flinto, GitLab, Lingo, Microsoft Teams, Mixpanel, ProtoPie, Storybook, UxTweak, and more. Additionally, you can use its API and webhooks to create custom integrations.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Generous free plan
- Auto-layout enables auto-resizing and reduces stretch-to-fill iterations
- Lots of widgets to help run collaborative workspaces
Cons:
- Little laggy on Windows compared to Mac
- Occasional delays in load times
Canva enables you to create visually appealing websites in minutes. It is the perfect platform for beginners with little to no experience. Canva features an easy-to-use drag-and-drop website editor and a vast database of design templates, royalty-free images, and graphics. As a result, your web design process becomes quick, simple, and extremely cost-effective (since you can publish for free!)
You may use Canva online or by downloading the app for your Mac, PC, Chromebook, iOS, or Android device.
Why I picked Canva: Canva offers thousands of free templates and over 250,000 free photos, icons, illustrations, graphics, social media elements, videos, animations, and more that you can easily drag and drop into your website. The platform has other features, such as Styles, to help you find the perfect color and font combinations for image editing. Additionally, Canva features Magic Write, an AI writer & text generator powered by OpenAI.
Additionally, Canva ships a color palette generator to create custom color palettes. Canva also allows you to add brand elements to your sites. Subsequently, Canva stores your logo, brand colors, and fonts in its Brand Kit (available to only Pro users).
Canva Standout Features and Integrations
Features include its Website Insights. It lets you track traffic and engagement right from Canva without integrating your site with any third-party analytics. Canva also provides robust collaborative functionality, using which you can invite unlimited team members to your class space.
Some other features include easy exporting and importing tools, free custom domains, automated saving, password protection, and a one-click background remover feature.
Integrations include 150+ third-party applications, such as Brandfolder, Dropbox, Edgar, Flickr, HubSpot, Later, Mojo AI, Moovely, OneDrive, Pinterest, Slack, Shopify Sync, and others. Additionally, you can use its API and webhooks to create custom integrations.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Robust real-time collaboration capabilities for teams
- Easy drag-and-drop editor with clean UI
- A vast library of templates and graphics
Cons:
- Output formats such as .psd (Photoshop’s default) are missing
- Many images are watermarked in the free version
Marvel is a web design software that enables design teams to generate design specs. It is the perfect tool for users seeking to rapidly create wireframes and prototypes without code and give their design thoughts some structure.
Why I picked Marvel: Marvel offers a centralized platform that unifies all aspects of the web design process from wireframing to prototyping, user testing, and finally, handing it off to your developers. It offers robust collaborative features for designing on the go. Users can access Marvel’s vast library with millions of digital assets, stock photos, and icons to draw inspiration.
Moreover, Marvel helps you overcome the complexities of explaining site hierarchy and user journeys in your design mockups to stakeholders; instead, you can display them through interactive online prototypes that require no code. This makes it super easy to build customized web designs that are interpretable for everyone.
Marvel Standout Features and Integrations
Features that stand out include its integrated user testing and research feature, Ballpark. It enables Marvel users to capture high-quality feedback on questions, marketing copy, designs, and prototypes (Sketch and Figma) using tasks and video.
Additionally, the platform’s Handoff tool optimizes the design-to-development process in seconds. With just one click, you can produce CSS, Swift, and Android XML code for your prototypes. Moreover, Marvel enables you to give your team and stakeholders complete visibility and control across all projects, via folders, comments and annotations.
Integrations include 10+ third-party applications, such as Dropbox Paper, Jira, Microsoft, Niice, Sketch, Smartmockups, YouTube, Zeroheight, and others. Marvel also integrates with four tools developed by its proprietary platform, Marvel LABS, including BotBot, Dashboard, Keynote, and Userflows.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Team libraries for digital assets and UI kits help maintain design consistency
- Shareable project links for easy access to prototypes
- Clean and simple user interface with auto layout web elements
Cons:
- Does not support group creation within prototypes
- Limited animation features and no offline version
Justinmind is an all-in-one web design platform that generates interactive mockups for online and mobile applications. It also enables interactive graphics, user testing, exchange of feedback in teams, and managing design requirements intuitively. Justinmind is user-friendly for beginners and helps you prototype mobile-first apps for iOS and Android users.
Why I picked Justinmind: Justinmind is ideal for quickly creating first-version mockups, prototypes, and wireframes. The software has pre-installed UI kits that help build flowcharts and wireframe user interfaces for both iOS and Android applications. It also allows you to download extra UI kits that support designing apps for other devices, including the Apple Watch and Google Glass.
Justinmind Standout Features and Integrations
Features include its built-in user-testing heat maps that allow you to understand which sections of your website garner the most impressions and clicks. This is especially helpful for e-commerce sites. Additionally, Justinmind has robust capabilities for creating, managing, and supporting an e-commerce digital storefront.
Justinmind’s iOS and Android emulators are also a great addition to your web design process since they emulate the exact functionalities of your application for user testing, even if you don’t use a mobile device.
Integrations include 10+ third-party applications, such as Adobe XD, Adobe Illustrator, Atlassian Jira, Azure DevOps, Clicktale, Crazy Egg, Figma, Hotjar, Photoshop, Sketch, UserTesting, Validately, and more. Additionally, you can use its API to create custom integrations.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Can mock up two or three different UI/UX iterations at once
- Great customer support
- Rapid prototyping
Cons:
- Design sharing and displaying system responses are difficult
- Lacks adequate documentation and tutorials
Other Web Design Software Options
Here are a few more web design software tools that did not make the cut but are still worth considering:
- Webflow
For creating responsive web designs in a real-time visual builder
- Google Web Designer
For creating animated graphic designs
- Adobe Dreamweaver
For technical front-end developers
- Designmodo
Web design software with free hosting
- Zeplin
Web design platform for smooth design hand-offs
- Bootstrap
For developing responsive mobile-first projects
- Framer
Website builder with a freeform canvas
- Duda
For white-labeled website building
- Vectr
Graphic design software for editing vectors
- Squarespace
For creating no-code and lightweight websites
Selection Criteria For Web Design Software
In case you are wondering how I created this list, I would like you to explore my process. I first assessed a wide range of website design software for their user reviews. Subsequently, I set aside some essential functionalities I would consider as a “must-have” for my recommendations:
Core Functionality
Here’s a list of essentials that every web design software has to offer to clinch a spot on my shortlist:
- Wide range of customization to strike a unique brand identity.
- Basic design workflows like prototyping, wireframing, user testing, and iterative building.
- Offers a code editor for adding custom CSS code
Key Features
In addition to the core functionalities mentioned above, here are some key attributes of the selected product design tools in my list:
- Collaborative functionalities: The tools I chose either provide direct collaboration on their platform or grant stakeholders shared access to web designs.
- Vast library of templates and other web elements: The tools I selected for my list all have a massive collection of pre-designed templates and pre-built design components, like graphics, vectors, images, and videos.
- Customer service: The tools I chose provide robust, responsive, and helpful customer support (preferably 24/7) to clarify your concerns.
Usability
Web design tools with an intuitive and user-friendly UI rank high in my books. Additionally, the tools I have included are quite simple to learn and will help you get started with web design instantly. The tools also offer detailed resources, documentation, and instructive tutorials.
Software Integrations
The web design software I have included in my list all integrate with a wide range of plugins and third-party applications. The latter provides several capabilities for collaboration, communication, analytics, design, project management, and more. These integrations can help you streamline your workflows, keep your stakeholders up-to-date about design developments, decrease time-to-market, and enable you to optimize the website post-production.
Pricing
Given the variety of design elements and features that the web design tools on my list offer, their pricing packages are incredibly reasonable. I firmly believe that pricing should be flexible, clear, and cost-effective. For you to try out the software before buying a paid plan for it, I have also highlighted which tools provide free plans or trials. Some tools haven’t mentioned their pricing, so you must contact their sales teams for a quote.
Web Design Software FAQs
Find answers to common questions other people ask about this topic.
Do I need coding for web design?
Coding is no longer a prerequisite for web design. Many contemporary web design tools provide visual drag-and-drop interfaces and vast collections of pre-built components. As a result, you can embrace the power of no-code development and quickly roll out websites.
However, knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code languages can offer more flexibility and customization possibilities for more intricate web designs.
How can I create my own website?
You can create your own website in two ways—either choose a website builder or write code on your own.
If you wish to design, develop, and launch a site quickly, website builder platforms such as Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress are your allies. These platforms streamline the whole process using drag-and-drop tools and pre-designed templates.
However, you can use programs like Adobe Dreamweaver and master HTML, CSS, and JavaScript if you want your site to have greater customization and original designs.
Choosing between speed and total creative freedom can be overwhelming. In such cases, consider your business objectives, available resources, and the intricacy of your desired website.
How do I design for an ecommerce website?
To develop an e-commerce site, you must focus on a user-centric design strategy. You can do so by simplifying navigation, maintaining a clean layout, and enabling quick product searches.
Many would encounter your stores on their mobile phones. As a result, you must prioritize mobile responsiveness for your ecommerce website. You can foster brand trust through high-quality, relevant pictures, detailed product descriptions, and positive customer testimonials. Reducing friction brings down cart abandonment and streamlines your overall user experience.
Analyzing user behavior using analytics over time can further help you improve conversions, modify the design, and optimize your website to its best potential. Poor web design can make your brand a pariah in your niche industry. Check out these product detail page design best practices for nailing your next website.
What’s Next?
A good website design is the foundation of a strong online presence in the modern digital era. The right web design software for your business should empower you to prototype, wireframe, and design a website that your target audience finds visually appealing and easily navigable.
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