14 Best UX Design Software Tools in 2024
- October 27, 2022
Research shows that the number of UX professionals in the workforce is expected to grow 100 times from 2017 to 2050.
This is driven by factors like widespread digitization, high levels of competition within industries, and an overall shift in what users expect from the products and services they use. A few examples of brands that have succeeded through excellent UX design and product experience are product-led growth companies like Slack, Airbnb, and Apple.
UX design is essential for your product because it guides your audience to interact with your product or service appropriately to solve a specific problem and remain engaged. The UX design process involves working with various tools that help product designers and managers understand their audience and draw them in through compelling visuals and content.
In this blog, we explore the types of tools you’ll encounter in the UX process and some popular ones in the market today.
What are the best UX design software tools in 2024?
- Whatfix
- HotJar
- Dovetail
- Figma
- Invision
- Google Analytics
- Mixpanel
- Lucidchart
- OmniGraffle
- Balsamiq
- Marvel
- Pendo
- Omniconvert
- UserGuiding
What Are UX Tools?
Product designers use UX tools to plan, analyze, and design how users should interact with products, websites, and mobile applications. These product management tools help designers conduct the end-to-end UX process, which according to the Stanford School of Design, falls into five phases:
- Product definition
- Research
- Analysis
- Design
- Testing
11 Types of UX Tools
A survey of over 3000 designers in 2021 found that a designer’s toolkit typically includes software for digital whiteboarding, prototyping, user testing, research repositories, handoff, and more.
Product teams and designers interact with multiple tools throughout the five phases of the UX process. Here are different categories of common UX tools you’ll use along the way:
- User Interview & Research Tools: Helps you better understand your target audience’s common behaviors, motivations, and pain points to create an impactful and relevant user experience.
- User Feedback & Survey Tools: Allows you to gather data and product feedback from your target audience and users so you can measure the effectiveness of your designs.
- User Behavioral Analytic Tools: Gives you granular visibility into how users interact with your site, product, or app so that you can optimize on-screen content for more conversions.
- Flowchart Tools: Used by designers and product teams to illustrate behavioral flows users should take when navigating your site, product, or app.
- Prototyping & Wireframing Tools: Wireframe solutions help teams map out a digital interface’s foundational layout — think of it as a blueprint you can quickly sketch. Prototyping tools allow you to turn wireframes into more advanced mock-ups of your end product, equipped with detailed content, animations, colors, and more.
- Digital Adoption Platforms: Empowers end users directly with the information and resources they need to familiarize themselves with a digital interface without lengthy training programs and courses. This includes creating product tours, onboarding task lists, interactive walkthroughs, and more.
- A/B Testing Tools: Allows product teams to compare and contrast how two different design elements or layouts can impact a target audience’s behavior.
- Product Analytic Tools: Used to identify opportunities and bottlenecks by analyzing how users flow in and out of your product, website, or app, and how they spend their time using a particular interface or page.
- Heatmap Software: Gives designers and product managers a visual overview of how users interact with specific parts of a website page and if they’re reaching important content or calls to action.
- Session Recording Software: Records the browsing sessions of website visitors to help product teams understand the real-time behavior of their target audience.
14 Best UX Design Tools in 2024
Here are fifteen of the most popular UX design tools across the categories mentioned above, including a list of their core features and pricing.
1. Whatfix
- G2 Review Rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
- Price: Reach out for a custom quote
Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that helps product teams improve user adoption with in-app guidance, on-demand support, and product analytics. Teams use Whatfix’s no-code platform to tailor the user experience for different user segments with omnichannel content, such as product tours, task lists, reminders, surveys, and more.
Product managers use the platform’s built-in analytics to track and measure how users engage with different product features. Report on your deployed content flows, make iterations as you go, and publish them quickly with Whatfix’s easy-to-use content creation and curation tools.
Whatfix core UX features include:
- User action analytics
- No-code flow builders
- Multi-channel content creation
- Content aggregating across connected applications
- Testing features
- Third-party integrations
2. Hotjar
- G2 Review Rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars
- Price: Start for free
Hotjar lets product managers and designers use heatmaps to test and measure how users engage with a product. The tool shows teams where users click and scroll on a site, saving these interactions as recordings that you can view at any time to understand better what users are seeing. It lets you see how potential customers are interacting with your on-page content and form fields so you can focus on retaining and converting visitors.
Teams use Hotjar’s conversion funnel analysis to easily view where users drop off and how these trends change over time. With this information, product teams can make precise decisions on improving user experience and interface design. You can also put your insight into action with features to collect user feedback and run segmented user tests.
Hotjar core features include:
- Site heatmaps
- Recordings of user interactions
- User feedback collection
- User surveys and survey templates
- Third-party integrations
3. Dovetail
- G2 Review Rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
- Price: Start for free
Dovetail is a customer research enablement platform that helps UX researchers centralize and analyze customer interactions. Upload call recordings into Dovetail so you can generate transcriptions, highlight important information and create data-backed discoveries with flexible tagging and filtering systems. Product teams find the most value in using Dovetail to strengthen the user interviewing process.
Teams can use Dovetail to build a repository of customer recordings, documents, decks, and notes that can be easily accessed and shared. On top of that, the platform has built-in CRM functionalities that let you store data on research participants and link them to your tracked data. You can also create visually-appealing research reports that bring together findings across different information sources.
Dovetail core features include:
- Video and audio transcription
- Transcription markup features
- Customizable knowledge base for research content
- Research report creation
- Reporting and analytics on research creation and views
4. Figma
- G2 Review Rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars
- Price: Start for free
Figma is a popular cloud-based design tool that helps product teams and designers collaborate on complex design projects in real-time. Work on user experience projects from wherever you are without worrying about uploading and downloading source files. You can use a robust set of design features to create wireframes and prototypes for your product while ensuring changes are saved and reflected on your project immediately for all team members.
Figma is a great fit for teams who want the most efficient collaboration within large teams or across different functions. Use their online whiteboard feature, leave comments or deploy widgets and plugins to accelerate your design delivery.
Figma core features include:
- Real-time collaboration
- Prototyping
- Complete design toolbox with unique Figma tools
- Plugins and widgets
- Online whiteboard
- Design systems
- Third-party integrations
5. InVision
- G2 Review Rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
- Price: Start for free
InVision is a productivity platform that gives product and design teams an end-to-end document creation and collaboration process. Designers and product managers can build and improve user experience designs with hundreds of templates for brainstorming ideas documenting design research, and building wireframes,
The platform’s infinite whiteboard feature, Freehand, allows teams to make quick sketches and notes in one place. From there, you can grab a template to turn your ideas into wireframes that you can hand off to designers and developers. The platform integrates with popular tools like Figma, Sketch, Jira, Adobe XD, and Zoom, so you can quickly embed files from different places or hop right into a meeting during a brainstorming session.
InVision core features include:
- Real-time collaboration
- More than 100 documentation templates
- Infinite online whiteboard space
- Standard drawing tools
- Smart widgets
- Third-party integrations
6. Google Analytics
- G2 Review Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
- Price: Start for free
Google Analytics is a robust web analytics platform that helps companies track, measure, and analyze user behavior on their website. Product teams use Google Analytics to spot patterns and trends in how users engage with product pages and calls to action. The platform is complex and has a decent learning curve, but having a mastery of Google Analytics will help teams identify where users are dropping off your site, how many of them are converting, how long they engage with your content if there are any crashes on your site, and more.
You can apply detailed segmentation to narrow down on areas like user types, channels, or geographic location. Product teams also have the flexibility to customize different types of tracking, assign them to a value for your business, and compare data in dashboards and reports.
Google Analytics core features include:
- Real-time metrics
- User metrics
- Page metrics
- Data filtering and segmentation
- Conversion-tracking
- Reports and dashboards
- Integrations with other Google products
7. Mixpanel
- G2 Review Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
- Price: Start for free
Mixpanel is a product analytics platform that lets product teams collect and analyze user data across the entire product funnel. It’s a tool that lets you build detailed interactive reports with a few clicks. There are many variations of reports you can build with Mixpanel’s data analysis suite, like reports for experiments, user signals, retention, new feature impact, funnels, and flows.
Teams can visualize product usage trends in a clean and modern user interface. You can also explore behavior from different angles through filters and attribute breakdowns. User activities can be sliced down into steps and actions to provide product teams with a detailed look at user groups and paths. Mixpanel also has built-in alerts and notifications that help you identify and act on high-risk trends.
Mixpanel core features include:
- User metrics
- Page metrics
- Account-based metrics
- Data filtering and segmentation
- Report builders
- Notifications and alerts
- Third-party integrations
8. Lucidchart
- G2 Review Rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
- Price: Start for free
Lucidchart is a visual collaboration platform that product teams can use to organize processes and systems into clear diagrams. It gives companies an expansive, easy-to-use set of diagramming shapes and pre-built elements. Teams can also use their drag-and-drop editor to generate mind maps and flows for user experience projects quickly. A few examples of resources built with Lucidchart include product process maps, user flows, scrum planning, and data infrastructure models.
Teams can work together in real-time with collaborative cursors and act on feedback immediately via comments and an in-app chat. Product managers and designers can integrate visuals directly into everyday project management and communication apps to make collaboration smooth and instantaneous.
Lucidchart’s core features include:
- Real-time editing collaboration
- Diagramming tools
- Drag and drop editor
- Built-in chat
- Third-party integrations
9. OmniGraffle
- G2 Review Rating: 4.1 out of 5 stars
- Price: Starts at $12.49 a month
OmniGraffle is a diagramming and prototyping tool built for macOS and iOS. Unlike previous visual communication platforms mentioned on this list, OmniGraffle isn’t built for real-time collaboration. Instead, it gives product teams extensive diagram-creation tools that advanced designers love, particularly its large image libraries and options for formatting and styling.
OmniGraffle’s most prominent feature is its ability to lay elements automatically at an as-you-type speed. Use it to simplify your user experience document creation alongside features like shortcuts, stencils, customizable templates, and personal workspaces. Since OmniGraffle is a tool for Apple products, it has added support for the Apple Pencil and Touch Bar.
OmniGraffle core features include:
- Document scaler
- Drag and drop editor
- Design tools and layers
- Automatic document layout
- Stencils and templates
- Workspaces
10. Balsamiq
- G2 Review Rating: 4.2 out of 5 stars
- Price: Starts at $9 a month
Balsamiq is a tool that specializes specifically in low-fidelity wireframing. UX professionals use Balsamiq because its minimal features help teams focus on clean and explicit product content and user interactions. It’s a community favorite often picked up as a first UX tool, making it an excellent platform for small teams and emerging startups.
The tool offers its users a unique resource in the form of a community-contributed collection of UI controls and design libraries ready to use within your projects. From E-Commerce mobile app templates to sign-up flows and social media site mockups, product teams can search across hundreds of diagrams, symbols, and sketches to get started without a learning curve.
Balsamiq core features include:
- Built-in UI components
- User-generated template and icon library
- Drag and drop editor
- Basic prototype generator
- Keyboard shortcuts
11. Marvel
- G2 Review Rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
- Price: Start for free
Marvel is an end-to-end UX tool with product design, wireframing, prototyping, testing, and handoff features. Its users find the most value in its sophisticated no-code prototyping capabilities that beginners can easily pick up. Users can create screen mockups in their design tool or import them from Sketch to add transitions, interactions, hotspots, and layers to their prototyping solutions.
Strengthen your UX design and product research by deploying surveys or capturing screen recordings of how users interact with a prototype or live website. Product teams also enjoy Marvel’s ability to run tests on Figma wireframes and prototypes, complete with tracking and heatmap functionalities.
Marvel core features include:
- Online design platform
- Wireframing
- Prototyping
- User surveys and testing
- Deep native integrations with Sketch and Figma
- Developer handoff tools
12. Pendo
- G2 Review Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
- Price: Start for free
Pendo is a product experience platform that helps product teams improve user experience, engagement, and adoption. It has many features that help product managers research customer behavior and product usage. Teams find the most value from Pendo’s deep analytical capabilities, like comparing churn and expansion rates, capturing user clicks without complex tracking codes, and using built-in tagging systems to capture historical product data easily.
Test your UX design strategies with in-app tools for collecting user feedback. This data is fed into a clean and simple dashboard that you can customize to compare responses from different user segments and attribute them to specific customers. All this makes Pendo a great source of product experience data that can guide UX collaboration across functions.
Pendo core features include:
- Product usage analytics
- NPS surveys and pools
- In-app support content and walkthroughs
- Feature request management
- Third-party integrations
13. Omniconvert
- G2 Review Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
- Price: Starts at $167 a month
Omniconvert’s platform helps product teams optimize website conversions by deploying experiments and tests. Companies in the eCommerce space find the tool very valuable for driving conversions and buyer actions. Teams can use the platform to deploy advanced A/B testing with a large segmentation engine. Omniconvert supports HTML, CSS, and JSS. If you’re familiar with code, you can use Omniconvert’s complete code customizability to make specific modifications or conditions to your test environment.
Product teams enjoy using Omniconvert to personalize large and complex website experiments. The platform’s flexibility makes it easy for teams to visualize, design, and deploy tests with a wide range of targeting options. Other popular testing features include overlays and split URL testing.
Omniconvert core features include:
- A/B testing
- CSS and JS editor
- Audience segmentation
- Overlay templates
- Experiment debugger
- Reports and analytics
14. UserGuiding
- G2 Review Rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars
- Price: Starts at $69 a month
UserGuiding helps product teams deliver a better user experience targeted for onboarding. Its most popular feature is product walkthroughs. Product managers can quickly design and launch in-app support that guides users to follow funnel paths and learn about product elements for the first time.
The platform is known for its simplicity and quick implementation cycle, making it a great UX solution for smaller companies with an urgency to improve product onboarding metrics. Within minutes, your team can launch a resource center to centralize all the information users need to get started with your product.
UserGuiding core features include:
- Build resource centers
- Audience segmentation
- Launch NPS surveys
- No-code module editor
- Multi-format pop-up content
- Onboarding analytics
A robust user experience is defined by your customer’s ability to quickly onboard, seamlessly integrate product features into daily workflows, and overcome challenges without waiting for a customer service representative to become available.
Even with thorough user research and organized design systems, your target audience may need additional support to accelerate their ramp-up time. This is especially true if your website, app, or product has many functionalities or is rich with content to explore.
Whatfix gives your end users the self-service support they need to adopt a user journey tailored to their particular use cases and strengths. With no-code tools to segment, create, and test different product flows, you can optimize your user experience to surface elements that motivate higher conversions and retention.
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