Why Curium switched from Figma to Moqups

2026-06-29T00:00:00Z

Alex Simpson joined an insurtech startup where Figma was burning hours and stalling decisions. Here's how switching to Moqups changed not just the design process, but how the whole business thinks together.

Honestly, Moqups is my default app. It's always open to the point that I don't even think about it – I just use it.

Meet Curium

Curium is an insurtech scale-up with two core products, a full GRC system (governance, risk, and compliance) and a claims management system. Based in Australia, the company is expanding to New Zealand and currently eyeing the UK as their next market. Curium’s customers come from all segments of the insurance industry: brokers, underwriters, insurers, suppliers, and pension funds.

Meet Alex, the Product Manager

Alex Simpson joined Curium with over twenty years of experience as a Product Manager. Hired by the company’s founders as their first employee, Alex sees his role as twofold. First “to make sure our product has the right market fit, and that it does what our customers need it to do.” But also to act as “translator” between departments within Curium’s fast-growing team – ensuring that requirements and specifications get communicated quickly and accurately.

Alex Simpson, Chief Product Officer at Curium

The Challenge for Curium

“What distinguishes Curium from our competitors,” Alex explains, “is that we have deep industry knowledge baked into our product and process. We’re able to help users adopt best practices, build a compliance culture, and translate that into claims as well.” And Curium can do that quickly, often reducing an expected six-month implementation to only a couple of weeks.

But to provide that kind of service – and to move seamlessly between international markets with different compliance rules – Alex’s team needs to build a bulletproof framework into which Curium can pour its expert content. And that means finding the right visual communication tool so conversations happen at the right time and no detail gets lost.

The Problem with Figma

We were having discussions around high-fidelity design, but the thinking hadn't happened yet about the complexity of the actual feature we were building.

Before adopting Moqups, Curium tried Figma. But it just wasn’t right for their team, or for their needs. “We weren’t all experienced Figma users, so it was very complicated and cumbersome.” More critically, Figma’s focus on aesthetics was actually derailing the process.

“We had endless conversations about where we should put a button, or what color it should be," Alex recalls. "The focus was very heavily on design and colors. But the important thinking about the functionality – how things should actually work – was getting lost in the noise."

The team needed something more than a design tool: an app that any member of the team could use, and one that allowed for thoughtful explorations of a feature’s purpose. Enter Moqups.

The Solution

The breaking point came when Alex was trying to explain a key edge case to a developer. It wasn't overly complicated, but they'd already spent five hours in Figma just trying to get it to look right. "This is ridiculous," he thought. "I can't show what I want to communicate because I can't draw it quickly enough." Alex had used Moqups before, so that's what he turned to.

I said, let's just open Moqups. Within a couple of minutes, I'd mocked it up, and the developer got the idea. And I was like – well, let's just complete it here and send it off. We can have this developed by tomorrow.

From that point on, Figma was sidelined for product work. "Why are we wasting hours messing around in Figma," Alex asked the team, "when that's not what we need?"

One of Curium's projects in Moqups

The Moqups Advantage

Alex's approach with Moqups is deliberate: keep everything as simple as possible. He prefers grayscale boxes and shapes, and nothing that invites a conversation about color or shadows.

"My goal was to stop all of these premature design conversations," Alex explains, "and to start having a back-and-forth about what a feature actually needs to do, rather than just how it looks and feels."

With Moqups, we ideate in meetings and literally just drag and drop boxes onto the screen to collaborate, asking "What if we did this?" or "What if we did that?" We allow discussions about purpose and functionality to open up – without people focusing on the wrong things.

Once there's consensus about a new feature, Alex will map out the full user flow, adding the screens and requirements for each step. That way, when the developer opens the file, they can immediately see the entire journey – the flow, the UI, and the documentation together, in a single view. No switching between apps, and no missing context.

An App for the Whole Team

The product team initially adopted Moqups for their wireframing and prototyping but, one by one, other teams also found reasons to use the app. The development team now uses Moqups to comment on requirements. The Head of Operations uses it to build board-pack materials. Sales uses it for presentations and diagrams. Implementation teams produce client-facing assets in Moqups. And sometimes, when a new feature is pending, marketing will grab the wireframes, add color, and have promotional material ready to go.

The Curium Team

Alex says the key to this widespread adoption is Moqups' accessibility and ease of use: "When people join my team who have never used it before, it's literally a non-issue. I just say, "Here's your account" – and then they don't need any help onboarding. They just start doing stuff. That's it."

Everything from org charts to grant and award submissions to investment applications has been built in Moqups. As a result, the whole company's visual knowledge lives in one place, and that has helped break down bottlenecks and departmental silos. As Alex says, "All our people can access Moqups to do whatever they need."

Moqups for Complex Projects

Curium's claims-lodgement module presented a particularly demanding test case for Moqups. Insurance claim forms are dynamic – answer one question a certain way and you see a follow-up; answer it differently and you get a different path. These trees branch and branch again. A relatively simple form can produce a flow of 600 to 800 steps. Complex forms can produce thousands!

We use Moqups to communicate those flows to our clients: "Okay. Are we right? Is this good?" And then only once all the stakeholders have signed off in Moqups do we go on to create the actual forms.

For Alex's team, Moqups isn't just an internal tool – it has become part of how Curium works with its customers directly. The visual flow sits between both sides as a shared reference point: something to read, question, and agree on before anything is committed to code. The clarity of this sign-off process removes the ambiguity that normally causes implementation projects to drag. This sort of collaboration is only made possible by the fact that clients can use Moqups as easily as the Curium team.

Show, Don't Tell

There's a story Alex tells that gets right to the heart of Moqups. Working on some financial screens, he needed to show a developer how two fields in a form should interact – each one calculating from the other. Words weren't getting it across, so he mocked up the interaction instead. "Like this, see?"

Sometimes, words aren't enough. It's quicker to just show it.

It sounds simple. But that capacity to make thinking visible – and fast enough to be acted on – is what runs through every Curium use case that Alex describes. It's also, perhaps, why the idea of switching tools has never occurred to him. "It doesn't even enter my head," he says. "I don't even think about looking for another tool. Moqups is just a part of my day."

Try Moqups for free

Webpage and selection import with new Moqups Extension

2026-06-22T00:00:00Z

We are making it easier to bring all kinds of work into Moqups. As part of this push, we recently launched our Figma plugin so you can quickly move Figma designs into our app.

We've also just rolled out a native Balsamiq import so you can copy wireframes directly from Balsamiq and paste them right into your Moqups project, with no plugins required.

But today's release goes much further than that – and it has the potential to completely change your Moqups workflow.

This new release allows you to import whole webpages, selected elements, and AI iframes directly into Moqups – as fully editable hi-fi designs or as lo-fi wireframes. To make that possible, we've expanded the functionality of our browser extension.

Moqups Extension with webpage and AI design import

Capture webpages and bring them into Moqups as editable designs

Until now, our Moqups extension could only capture screenshots (and it still does!). And sure, that was useful for moodboards and research. But it also meant that when teams were doing updates to their websites, they had to build an editable design on top of each screenshot – just to change the design or text. This was tedious and time-consuming work, so we’ve eliminated that step entirely.

With our updated extension, you can now copy any webpage or AI iframe directly into a Moqups project. The designs come in as fully editable layouts – with each element separated for easy selection and customization. We've also added a neat feature that allows you to capture pages in whatever responsive design format you prefer: desktop, laptop or phone.

The extension also gives you the option of bringing in a design exactly as it appears – in high-fidelity – or converting that design into a grayscale, low-fidelity wireframe. The hi-fi option is great when you need to maintain or iterate on existing designs. And the lo-fi option lets you use existing designs as wireframe templates for more foundational work.

We’ve been using this feature internally for a couple of months now, both testing and refining it. It has simplified and accelerated our own workflow, and we think it will revolutionize the way your team works as well – both with your own webpages and with AI generated designs. Here’s how you can work with our extension:

Turn your live webpages into editable mockups

There are all kinds of reasons that teams might want to capture their live pages and edit them.

One is simple maintenance. Once pages are launched, they still need to be modified on a regular basis. Over time, all kinds of content – product descriptions, screenshots, feature lists, marketing language, and social proof – may all need updating.

Another reason is that teams often need to create additional landing pages, but may also want to ensure that those pages match the style of their already published assets. An example might be adding a new case study, product feature, or industry solution page. They may even want to build an entirely new type of page, but maintain the basic components and branding of the site as a whole.

You can also bring in a selection or element from a webpage

There’s also one of the most overlooked and under-discussed aspects of web work – one that we wrote about in our recent post about The Hidden Work in UI/UX Design: the iterations that occur within the internal hubs of large organizations. These portals are the back-office websites for insurance companies, retail outlets, health networks, universities, rental companies, financial organizations, municipalities and governments. The teams working on these data-heavy sites need quick ways of copying and adjusting input modals and dashboards across thousands of pages.

For each of these workflows, users had to take screenshots, and build new designs and content on top of them. This was time-consuming and frustrating work – matching fonts, colors, text boxes, and image placeholders. Now, with one click, they can bring those designs right into Moqups and start editing both layout and copy.

Convert hi-fi webpages into lo-fi wireframes

You can bring in webpages as hi-fi designs or lo-fi wireframes

Our extension also provides the ability to turn high-fidelity webpages into low-fidelity wireframes. On the surface, that would seem to reverse the normal lo-mid-hi-fi process, but there are several reasons why you might want to do this:

You’re in the process of rebranding – or adopting a different color scheme – and you want to preserve the basic components and copy of the layout, but start with a visual blank slate.
You want to compare a wide range of base layouts, experiment with different design solutions, and build your own template.
You want to find useful elements – sometimes from completely different domains – that help solve a tricky UI problem. In fact, one of the most flattering things we've ever heard from a client was that, when they got stuck with their UI design, they looked to our own app for a solution.

Responsive capture

In addition to bringing in webpages as hi-fi or lo-fi, we’ve also added a neat feature that lets you capture pages in whatever responsive design format you’d prefer: desktop, laptop or phone.

Import webpages in desktop, laptop or phone devise sizes

Design with AI

If you use LLMs in your design process, you can now turn AI-generated artifacts into editable layouts. Just click on the iframe in the AI window – or select a specific element within it – and copy the design straight into Moqups to start editing.

Bring in AI designs and edit them in Moqups

This means you can use AI as a template generator – providing the bulk of the layout and placeholder text – before you customize and finesse the details in Moqups. Your team can also jump back and forth between Moqups and your own AI tool, exporting sections for regeneration, and then refining the output step by step.

Here’s an example of what that workflow might look like:

Ask Claude to build a webpage based on all the existing documentation you’ve provided. If the LLM’s first draft isn’t ready for prime time, and needs a lot of tweaking for both style and content, use our extension to bring it into Moqups. Fix a couple sections in Moqups, then export that design as a PDF and ask Claude to take another shot at it – based on the direction that you’ve now established.

Jumping back and forth like that saves you tokens, gives you more control over the generated content, and helps your AI get better at the task as you work down the scroll.

Design briefs

This is a great tool if you’re working with AI and need to give it your branding guidelines. It extracts the style from any browser window to generate a design brief. You can then paste the brief into your AI prompt so it knows what specs – colors, typography, button and input style – to use as a reference for any new design generation.

Extract a website's styles, colors, and typography.

How to install the extension and what’s next

If you’ve already installed our extension, then you don’t have to do anything – it will update automatically. If you don’t currently have it, just go to the Chrome Web Store or the Firefox Browser Add-ons page to install it. If you use Safari as your browser, please be patient and stay tuned cause we are working on a version for you too! As always, we’d love your feedback at support@moqups.com

Install our extension here →

Move Your Work to Moqups with Balsamiq Import

2026-06-16T00:00:00Z

We have lots of clients who want to move their designs from Balsamiq to Moqups, and maybe you’re one of them. There are generally three reasons that you might want to switch:

You’ve used Balsamiq to create very basic grayscale wireframes but, as your project evolves, you need to move to mid or high-fidelity mockups. Moqups has more robust design tools to support that transition, including customizable fonts and colors, realistic charts and graphs, resize constraints, and reusable components.
Your product team wants to wireframe, brainstorm, whiteboard, strategize, and diagram in the same app. Moqups’ all-in-one capability lets you create all those project assets in one place. That way, team members don’t have to context-switch between apps just to get the job done.
Balsamiq’s recent pricing change from a per-project to per-seat model has made team collaboration much more expensive than working together in Moqups.

In the past, teams switching to Moqups had to remake their projects, but no more! It’s now incredibly easy to move work from Balsamiq. Here’s how!

Copy and paste from Balsamiq to Moqups

To move single boards – or selected elements within a board – just copy from Balsamiq and paste onto your Moqups page. It’s that quick. Our converter will choose the closest equivalent Moqups stencil for each Balsamiq element, and you can start editing immediately.

Copy/paste wireframes from Balsamiq to Moqups

Drop Balsamiq files right onto your Moqups page

If you have a more extensive project in Balsamiq – especially one with multiple boards – you can export the project and drop the .bmpr file directly onto your Moqups page. Each board will become a separate page within your Moqups project, labeled with the previous board name. So, it’s easy to move your current or older projects into Moqups – and pick up right where you left off.

Bring in whole Balsamiq projects

Bring your work into Moqups

What’s Next

We are making it much easier to bring all kinds of work into our app. We recently launched our Figma plugin to make it easy to move Figma designs into Moqups.

And, now we’re putting the finishing touches on a new version of our Moqups Extension – one that has the potential to completely change your Moqups workflow.

Our new extension will let you bring live webpages, selected page elements, and AI artifacts right into Moqups as fully editable designs. So watch this space and stay tuned!

The Hidden Work in UI/UX Design

2026-06-04T00:00:00Z

At Moqups, we say we’re the perfect app for ‘hidden work’. But what is hidden work anyway?

Simply put, if you work in app design, but have a really hard time explaining what you do to your family and friends at BBQs and dinner parties, then you’re probably doing hidden work!

For us, ‘hidden' can mean a whole bunch of related things: behind-the-scenes, invisible to the general public, hard to define, under-discussed, under-represented and – occasionally – undervalued.

But chances are, you’ve never heard anyone use that specific term. And that’s not surprising, since we coined it internally to help our team describe the work of so many of our biggest clients.

These customers work in a wide variety of fields, and produce a very diverse range of projects, but they do have a bunch of commonalities – especially in what they want from an app – and these requirements have surfaced again and again in our conversations with them.

At Moqups, we've spent twelve years building tools for exactly these kinds of users, and we needed a short-hand, umbrella term to describe both the type of work that they do, and the industries that they work in.

Over time, we've come to think of this hidden work as falling into three overlapping categories – each one a little more ‘hidden' than the last.

Hidden behind the design

This is the kind of hidden work that most design professionals are familiar with, but that most people never encounter. It's everything that happens before a design takes shape. This includes, but is not limited to, user research, information architecture, wireframing, user flow mapping, data modelling, network diagramming.

Experienced teams spend a lot of time on this part of the workflow: brainstorming ideas, documenting requirements, exploring competing solutions, and checking with both clients and end users to make sure they’ve got things right. This process involves a lot of discussion about a feature’s purpose and functionality. It also involves a lot of tough decisions about what to leave in and what to leave out. A recent Reddit comment on r/design captured it perfectly:

Deeper UX thinking is usually when you start noticing invisible stuff like cognitive load, habits, emotional reactions, onboarding fatigue, decision paralysis, accessibility, all the annoying human behavior that makes perfect wireframes fail in real life. The funny part is the deeper you get into UX the less it feels like graphic design and the more it feels like psychology mixed with systems thinking and detective work.

This is the work that determines whether an app feels intuitive or infuriating – but it’s also the kind of effort that’s completely invisible in the finished product. When a banking app lets a customer check their balance in two taps, that customer can’t possibly imagine the dozens of wireframe iterations, user-path diagrams, and stakeholder reviews that made that simplicity possible. The hidden empathy, the streamlining, the problem solving – all of this just disappears (when successful) into the seamlessness of the experience.

Hidden from the public

This is the UX work that’s a big part of public life, but often flies under the radar because it isn’t public-facing. It involves design, but not the sort of layouts you normally see on Dribbble or featured in portfolios.

We’re talking about internal hubs for insurance companies, retail outlets, health networks, universities, rental companies, financial organizations, municipalities and governments. Organizations use these back-office websites to manage data about customers, staff, and suppliers – and their employees rely on them every minute of every day.

It’s the stuff you see when an agent behind a desk turns the monitor around to help verify your information, or walk you through the process. Behind that brief glimpse is a whole ecosystem of data-entry interfaces, case management tools, claims processing dashboards, inventory systems, and compliance tracking.

These data-heavy portals can be fiendishly complex, and may involve thousands of screens. Of course, someone had to design all those screens. Someone had to wireframe the layouts, map the user flows, document the requirements, and get sign-off before development could begin.

For teams that work on sites like these, accuracy is often far more important than aesthetics. The artistry here isn’t in pretty graphics or cool animations, but in the scaffolding of information so that mission-critical data is always right there, at the operator’s fingertips.

Hidden in heavy industry

This is the design and development work that takes place inside industries that are largely invisible to the wider world – despite the fact that they keep society running!

Logistical management, electrical generation, fuel storage and testing, water treatment, fleet tracking and maintenance, waste processing, mining operations, and container shipping.

These foundational, load-bearing industries are essential to the structure of our daily life, but they operate almost entirely outside the everyday experience of those of us who actually depend on them.

And all of these industries run on software. These kinds of interfaces may monitor a wind farm, dispatch a fleet of vehicles, monitor a water supply, or coordinate movements of goods across the globe. But one thing all these apps have in common is that they’re filled with data-dense screens built to precise technical requirements.

These are operational apps where aesthetics take a back seat to tables, status indicators, alerts, and real-time data. They're built for control rooms, field tablets, distribution centers, and factory floors – all environments where readability matters far more than visual polish. And these tools are used around the clock by people who need them to function clearly and precisely – every time.

The design work behind these systems is some of the most challenging in the field but, because it’s hidden deep in industrial infrastructure, it rarely gets talked about. For every well-known consumer app that’s launched with a high-profile PR campaign and a stylish website, there are hundreds of operational tools being quietly built and maintained in these sectors.

The people who design and build these interfaces are doing some of the most complex work in UI/UX, but they're doing it in fields that rarely make headlines – and for users who will never write a Trustpilot review of their efforts.

Why ‘hidden’ matters

Why are we so obsessed with ‘hidden’ work – so much so that we gave it a name?

Everybody broadly understands what web design looks like. They may have even built a layout for their own blog, or put together a website at work. And most people have a general sense of what coders do – they've seen it on TV, or they've peeked at the source code of a web page.

But very few people stop to think about how many screens and user paths they interact with in a single day. The payment interface at the fuel pump. The banking app on their phone. The intranet they use at work to submit a request. Someone had to design each of those experiences – had to figure out what data appears where, how navigation works, what happens when something goes wrong. That's hidden work.

And the further you delve into operational and industrial domains – logistics dashboards, compliance management systems, healthcare intake workflows, government permitting portals – the more hidden the work becomes.

Why is this kind of work hidden?

Part of the answer is that the tools and workflows that dominate the design conversation – ones featured in tutorials, showcased at conferences, and promoted by the big design platforms – are largely built with a different kind of work in mind. They tend to focus on smaller, more design-driven projects with relatively compact screen counts, strong visual identities – and teams where a trained designer is driving both the look and layout of the product.

That's perfectly valid. But it doesn't describe the reality for a huge number of teams building software right now.

Many of those teams work on projects with hundreds or thousands of screens rather than dozens. Their core challenge is not how to craft an elegant layout, but how to represent dense, statistical data in a clear and legible way. It’s work that demands both expertise and experience – and where generic, AI-produced content simply won’t suffice.

That’s why these teams include compliance specialists, domain experts, and operations leads. These are the folks who have the practical knowledge to determine what gets built and why – but who may not have the time or interest in learning a complex design application. And the stakeholders and end users who need to review and sign off on these kinds of wireframes tend to be far removed from the world of design.

These teams have been underserved – not deliberately, but as a side effect of an industry that tends to focus its attention on the more visible and aesthetic end of the design spectrum.

We chose the word ‘hidden’ intentionally, because it describes something that the people doing this work already feel but don't usually have a name for.

What hidden work needs from a tool

At Moqups, we didn't sit down twelve years ago and decide to build an app specifically for ‘hidden work’. What happened was much more organic than that.

Over time, teams doing this kind of work kept finding us, and what they told us about their needs shaped how our own product evolved. The features they asked for, the pain points they shared, and the workflows they told us about – all these have made Moqups what it is today.

And through that evolution, here's what we've learned about the needs of these teams.

They need to get to work immediately

In most hidden-work environments, the people building wireframes and mapping processes are not full-time designers. They're product managers, business analysts, solutions architects, implementation consultants, compliance officers, or domain specialists.

No matter the role, they all need a visual way to quickly communicate what they're thinking. They might open a wireframing tool every day, or come back to it after a pause of a few weeks when the next project kicks off. Either way, they need a tool that is intuitive and ready to get going when they are.

That’s why Moqups comes with thousands of built-in stencils, icons, and UI kits for web, iOS, and Android – all preloaded, all searchable, all drag-and-drop. There's no time-consuming setup required, no downloading separate component libraries, no configuring a workspace before you can place your first object on the page.

This immediacy matters if, for example, you're a product manager at an insurtech company and need to sketch out a new claims process before tomorrow's standup. It also matters when you're onboarding a new analyst who has never used wireframing software before. If your communication tool requires training before someone can contribute, it becomes a bottleneck. If everybody can just open it and start working on the same day, it becomes a shared language the whole team can use.

They need to work with data, not just layouts

A lot of wireframing tools were built primarily for the kind of consumer-facing app design that prioritizes whitespace, uncluttered menus, and simple visual hierarchies. That's a valid design approach, but it's a different discipline from what hidden-work teams typically need.

The projects built with Moqups can often look quite different. They might include table layouts with dozens of columns, dashboard screens packed with graphs and status indicators, or forms with conditional logic that branch into hundreds of paths. And they often represent interfaces where legibility in situ matters much more than visual elegance – because the end-user may be monitoring equipment from the mine office, or tracking patient data in the operating room.

This is why Moqups' data visualization capabilities go well beyond basic grayscale placeholders. Our table stencil lets you mock up complex data grids by adding rows, columns, headers, and content. Charts and graphs accept real data via CSV import, so teams can wireframe a dashboard using actual figures – and then use the quick chart switcher to test if a bar chart, line graph, or pie chart best displays these metrics.

For teams building operational dashboards in energy, logistics, healthcare, or financial services, these aren't secondary features. They're the core of their work, and we’ve built this functionality specifically for their kind of workflow.

They need structure for large, complex projects

Hidden-work projects tend to be big. Not big in the sense of a project that has dozens of beautifully art-directed screens that are spread over an infinite canvas; more like hundreds of screens, each with different data states, connected by branching user flows that span an entire business process. Projects like…

An insurance claims lodgement system using dynamic forms where every answer triggers different follow-up questions, and the resulting decision tree might involve thousands of steps.
A municipal website that offers both a public-facing and back-office portal for everything from maintenance requests to property tax payments, recreational bookings, employee scheduling, and injury reports.
A fuel logistics company that needs to map supply routes, track vehicles, monitor storage, schedule sampling, assign agents, record data, certify results, and report to stakeholders.

Work at this scale can get cluttered on the kind of infinite canvas that most design apps prefer. But Moqups’ page system is different, and purpose-built for exactly these kinds of complex projects.

With our page structure, your team can dedicate a page to each screen, nest pages, or organize them within folders to create hierarchies – and then apply colored labels to categorize pages or track status. This system can help your team bring clarity to chaos, and make even the biggest projects navigable.

They need non-designers to participate

This is perhaps the most important point, and one that makes hidden work different from more conventional design. In hidden work, the people who understand the domain are very rarely trained designers. Without their input, the product can fail at its most essential task: effectively supporting the people who depend on it.

Especially in safety-critical industries, getting something wrong can be catastrophic – so teams really do need to 'sweat the small stuff'. If stakeholders can't work on the project itself, then feedback happens through intermediaries – and becomes a game of broken telephone, with details lost in the process.

That’s why a visual communication tool should never be a barrier to non-designers. It needs to be intuitive enough that a team can include all stakeholders, and hear all voices.

That’s exactly how and why we built Moqups. Comments and annotations go right on the designs. Sharing is as simple as sending a link. And our UI is easy enough that new team members can just open it and start working.

They need more than a wireframing tool

Hidden-work projects rarely fit into a one-tool-only category. Within a single project a team might need a whiteboard to brainstorm ideas, user flow diagrams to map the process, wireframes to design the screens, ERD or UML diagrams to document the data model, and a clickable prototype to demonstrate a solution – all before a single line of code gets written. In a specialized-tool workflow, that's five different apps amounting to five subscriptions, five sets of permissions, five learning curves, and no single source of truth.

Moqups combines whiteboarding, diagramming, wireframing, and prototyping in one workspace. We've written at length about why we believe in the all-in-one approach, and also about the hidden costs of tool fragmentation, so we won't rehash the argument here. But for hidden-work teams specifically, the benefit goes beyond convenience: it means that all your artifacts and documentation can live in the same project, immediately connected and easily navigable. That way, when your dev team opens the project, they see the full context – not fragments scattered across four different apps.

Moqups for hidden work

If your team does the kind of 'hidden work' we've just described – even if you've never called it that – and you haven't tried Moqups yet, we'd love for you to give it a try. You can sign up for free, with no credit card required.

We think you’ll see what so many of our current users have discovered: that Moqups is the perfect tool for cross-function product teams working on complex logistical projects.

And, if you are already a Moqups subscriber, and working in one of these backbone industries or industrial sectors, we’re always looking for case studies and feedback about our app. So, please reach out to support@moqups.com. We’d love to hear from you!

Do your hidden work in Moqups

What’s New: May 2026

2026-05-27T00:00:00Z

9 New Features

We have a bunch of new features designed to improve your workflow and make it easier to work with your team. We already covered a couple of these in dedicated posts at the time of release, but we thought we’d review them here as well.

We often hear from users who are surprised by the features and utility Moqups has, and we want to make sure everybody has a chance to discover them – even if they missed them the first time around.

Figma plugin

Switching to Moqups as an alternative to Figma? Or maybe you’ve got a designer who prefers to work in Figma, while the rest of the product team uses Moqups for iterations, commenting, feedback, and maintenance. Either way, we have a plugin that makes it easy to bring Figma designs directly into your Moqups project in seconds.

First, visit the Figma to Moqups plugin page in the Figma Community and click the ‘Open in Figma’ button. The plugin will now be available in your Figma account under ‘Plugins’. Once the plugin is installed, you can copy and paste any selection from Figma.

Then, just open your Figma project and select the objects or frames you want to bring into Moqups.

Right click to open the Figma to Moqups plugin
Click the Export Selection button to convert to JSON
Click the Copy button to save the JSON to your clipboard
Paste the copied JSON directly into your Moqups project

Figma to Moqups plugin

iOS 26, Material 3 and M2 Design kits

We recently added three new stencil kits to Moqups – iOS 26, Material Design 3, and Material Design 2 – all with resize constraints applied.

The iOS 26 kit includes navigation bars, tab bars, buttons, toolbars, alerts, form controls, and more, available in both light and dark mode. Elements hold together as you adjust layouts and adapt between different viewport sizes.

Our new iOS and Material Design 3 kits available in app

Our new Material Design 3 kit covers the full component set, and also includes the recent M3 Expressive update with split buttons, button groups, docked toolbars, and expanded FAB menus. As with our iOS 26 kit, everything is fully resizable and available in both light and dark mode. We've also added the latest Material Symbols icon set, so you can work with the same icons used across the M3 system.

And, since M3 adoption on the web is still catching up, we've included a new M2 kit as well. All three kits are available now in the Stencils panel. For a deeper dive, check out our full post.

Resize constraints and bulk transform

These two features were released together because they both make it easier to work with multiple objects.

Resize constraints let you anchor elements within a group so they stay in logical, predictable positions as you resize. Anchors are applied automatically by default, but you can also set them manually for finer control. This feature is especially useful for building flexible, reusable components that adapt cleanly across different screen sizes and devices.

Constraints vs no constraints resize behaviour

Bulk transform, meanwhile, lets you select multiple objects and standardize their dimensions, position, or rotation in one step. Whether you're tidying up sticky notes after a brainstorm, standardizing diagram blocks, or aligning repeated UI elements for a polished look, bulk transform helps you clean things up fast and bring visual consistency to your work.

Bulk transforming notes to match size

If you want to experiment with either of these features, you can read the original post here, or look them up in our Help Center.

Expand comments

Some of our power users have hundreds of comments per project – even per page! And they rely on the thread window to specify requirements, add documentation, and log sign-off. That’s a lot of heavy lifting for a little window.

So, in response to customer requests, we’ve added expandability to comment threads. Click the new ‘Expand thread’ button and you’ll instantly have more room to review messages and reply in detail.

Expanding comment window to half screen

Team asset libraries

Previously, when you uploaded images, or created object templates, you could assign these assets to either your Account or a Project library. That helped keep the libraries clean of clutter, and made sure that essential elements were easily identifiable and accessible.

Because of user requests, we’ve now added a third option – a Team library – to both the Images and Templates panel. This way, you can designate assets for teams that work across a number of related projects.

Share images and template across project, team or account libraries

More UI themes

To make Moqups easier on your eyes, we’ve extended and improved our UI themes. You now have six options – including new Neutral and Midnight – so you can match your preference, workspace, or time of day.

Our favourite Moqups theme: midnight mode

Portuguese language

We have a lot of users in both Portugal and Brazil, so we’ve added localization in Portuguese to make it easier for teams working there. You can switch to Portuguese – or to German, Italian, Spanish, or French – in the Account page of your Dashboard, under the Profile and Password tab.

You can now set Portuguese as your language in app

Moqups press kit

For those of you who write about or review Moqups, we’ve made it easy to find the official Moqups brand assets – logos, colors, and fonts – all in one place. Our new Moqups Press Kit has all our Moqups brand assets and guidelines packaged, downloadable and ready to use.

Our new Moqups press kit

8 Improvements

If you’re adding users to your Moqups account with SAML, and you exceed your quota, any extra team members will be added as Reviewers (view and comment permission only) rather than being blocked.
We’ve improved Handoff in a bunch of ways, including:
- Reorganize handoff panel
- Handoff now remembers your settings and preferences
- The color list now includes the chart/graph palettes
- Hide text related properties section if there’s no text in the selection
When you use search or page-label filtering to find and select a page in the Pages panel, when you remove that search/filter, the page tree now automatically scrolls to highlight the selected page.
We’ve also added a ‘find text in objects’ suggestion to page searches to help you find what you seek.
Support for AVIF format-type images
Updated Framework7 (iOS) icons
Google fonts update
Performance improvements for projects with large image libraries.
We’ve added Apple Pay for non-Safari browsers.

6 Bugfixes

When you create a Trello card from a page in a Moqups project, that page’s URL link now displays correctly.
Removed the extra space that appeared around a group’s border as you zoomed in on that group.
Invoices now correctly display non-latin characters.
Fixed a bug that caused problems with an object's rotation once it was flipped.
We’ve made it easier to click and edit text stencils that are part of a selection that also includes groups.
When using the Copy-Properties button to apply Rounded Corner settings to new objects, the lock status is now successfully carried over as well.

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How to Create a Website Mockup in 6 Steps (With Examples)

2026-05-13T00:00:00Z

Why might you want to create a website mockup? Well, maybe you’re about to build a website, or in the process of redesigning an existing one. Either way, there always comes a point where you’ll need stakeholder consensus on the design. You may also want cost estimates from the dev team, preliminary testing with end-users, or final sign-off from clients.

And that’s exactly what a website mockup does. It gives you something to show: a realistic representation of the final product, so that everyone knows what to expect from the concept – and can agree on its general principles before everyone moves forward.

This guide covers what a website mockup really is, why it’s worth creating, and how you can build one in six practical steps – with real examples you can quickly customize to suit your own use case.

What is a website mockup?

A website mockup is a static visual representation of how a website will look – showing layout, typography, color, imagery, and styling – but without full interactivity.

Website mockups occupy the middle space between low-fidelity wireframes and clickable hi-fi prototypes. Like wireframes, they are quick to mock up. But like prototypes, they also have enough high-fidelity and branding elements to show the overall direction of a project.

Mockups are commonly used in the middle of the design process. In the early, conceptualization and ideation stage, most teams use wireframes to work out the basic structure and user flow. Then, at the end of the process, they create prototypes to realistically simulate the finished product.

In between, teams can use a mockup – sometimes called a mid-fi wireframe – to get broad alignment on a project’s aesthetic direction. To show that overall vision, they normally include logos, colors, representative images, and draft or final copy.

Example of a website mockup

Since every project is different, teams may polish their mockups to different levels of fidelity. For instance, a mid-fidelity mockup will use draft content, stock images, and approximate styling to establish a design direction and build consensus. A high-fidelity mockup gets closer to the final product by incorporating finalized copy, brand-accurate colors, and more precise (if not pixel perfect) spacing.

Most teams work somewhere in between – and that’s where a lot of the most productive design work happens. For a deeper look at how that mid-fi sweet spot works in practice, see our Complete Guide to Mid-Fidelity Wireframes.

Wireframe vs. mockup vs. prototype

These three terms are often used loosely and interchangeably. So, here’s a quick and practical primer to clear things up: wireframes, mockups, and prototypes represent different stages in the design process, each with a different level of detail and a different purpose.

Taking a service card design from a wireframe, to a mockup, to an interactive prototype

Wireframes are low-fidelity layouts that are deliberately built in grayscale using placeholder shapes and dummy text. Since these rough drafts are quick to create – and easy to throw away – they are perfect for early stage experimentation. They can act as a blueprint for later designs, and allow UX teams to figure out the intent, hierarchy, and user flow of each page – before anyone invests time in high-fidelity graphics.

Mockups add substance to a wireframe’s blueprint as the project evolves. With a layout’s basic structure in place, teams can start to get more specific about proportions, spacing, and content. By adding more realistic elements, they help bring the page to life. A mockup doesn’t require the exact final copy, colors, or graphics, but these details need to be close enough that stakeholders – including people with no design background – can evaluate the direction and give meaningful feedback.

Prototypes take a mockup, polish it to high-fidelity, and make it interactive. Generally, prototypes are pixel-perfect and have all the final content in place, both text and images. Additionally, the buttons click, the pages transition, and the menus open. A good prototype mimics the finished product close enough for user testing and final sign-off before development begins. However, by the time a design reaches the prototyping stage, big changes are much harder to make – which is exactly why the mockup stage is so important.

	Wireframe	Mockup	Prototype
Fidelity	Low	Mid to High	High
Interactivity	None	Limited	Full
Style	Grayscale with placeholders and dummy text	Realistic colors, logos, images, draft-to-final content	Pixel-perfect, brand-accurate, interactive
Best for	Hashing out concepts, iterating, establishing consensus	Aligning design direction, getting stakeholder buy-in	User testing, investor pitches, developer handoff

For a more detailed comparison, see our full guide: Wireframe vs Mockup vs Prototype: What’s the difference?

Why create a website mockup?

Experiment with aesthetics

Wireframes establish purpose and functionality – mockups let teams explore the visual identity. Try different hero images, color palettes, fonts, and gradients as you work toward a look that everyone agrees upon. Putting two mockups side by side is a quick, cheap way to compare design directions without building interactive prototypes for both – especially useful early in a project, when its visual identity is still taking shape.

Align and inspire the team

Use mockups to build cohesion and momentum. Give your copywriters and graphic designers the context they need by setting colors, font sizes, spacing, and proportions early. They'll work faster and with less back-and-forth when the layout is close to its final form. And, as the design starts to feel more like the eventual product – and the team sees their work taking shape – their enthusiasm will build.

Find problems early

The narrative flow of a webpage isn't always apparent until real copy and visuals are in place. That's when you notice sections in the wrong order, gaps in the story or logic that need filling, or a mismatch between the writing and the imagery. Use a mockup to identify these kinds of issues. Rearranging blocks or adjusting content density only takes seconds at this stage, versus hours once development is underway.

Make feedback more concrete

Some stakeholders engage easily with wireframes; others need to see something closer to the real thing before they can provide useful input. A mockup gives them that. And whereas wireframes invite structural feedback, mockups allow for conversations that are more about tone, messaging, and branding. They close the gap between what the designer imagines and what everyone else can see.

Skip the prototype to save time

If your dev team already works with an established design system, they don't need a pixel-perfect prototype to start building – just an accurate layout, realistic content, and clear component specifications. Give them a well-built mockup and they can get to work. This is common in data-heavy industries like finance, healthcare, and logistics, where accuracy matters more than visual polish.

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How to create a website mockup: a 6-step process

This guide assumes you've already decided on your website's purpose, audience, and content. But, if you're still in the exploration phase, doing research, brainstorming, and planning – don’t worry. With Moqups, your whiteboards, flowcharts, and sitemaps can all live in the same workspace, so you don't need to switch tools when it's time to start designing.

Now, if you're ready to create your website mockup, here are six quick steps to get you there.

Step 1: Create a free Moqups account

Sign up at moqups.com – it’s free, no credit card required. Moqups runs in the browser, so there’s nothing to install, and your whole team can access the same project from anywhere.

Step 2: Start with a wireframe or template

Every good mockup starts with a solid structure. You can start from one of our website wireframe templates, or build a wireframe from scratch using our drag and drop library of grayscale components. At this stage, focus on basic layout blocks, content hierarchy, navigation, and page flow. These structural choices are much easier to make before any detailed design elements are added. For a complete walkthrough of this lo-fi process, see our guide on how to wireframe a website.

Choose a website mockup template that start your project

Step 3: Customize the structure and content hierarchy

With your wireframe in place, start customizing it. Add or remove elements, resize sections, and reorder the blocks to fit your needs. Decide what messages deserve the most visual prominence, how much space your content requires, and where the calls-to-action should sit. If you’re working with a copywriter, bring them in so they can write directly on the page, matching their text to the layout’s proportions and density.

Customise our template to suit your needs

Step 4: Introduce branding, colors, typography, and graphics

This is where the wireframe starts to become a mockup. Replace the grayscale palette with your brand’s own colors and fonts. Swap all the placeholders with actual images, icons and graphics. With Moqups’ replace tool, just drag the new elements onto the old placeholders and go from lo-fi to mid-fi in minutes. Remember, the goal isn’t pixel perfection – it’s to establish a visual direction your stakeholders can respond to.

Add colors, images, icons and fonts

Step 5: Add real content and refine proportions

Replace any remaining ‘lorem ipsum’ or dummy text with real headlines and copy. Once you’ve added that content, refine the spacing and proportions until the visual weight feels balanced and the page reads fluidly. For data-heavy designs like dashboards or admin panels, import CSV data directly into your charts to see how your visualizations look with actual numbers in place.

Share the project link with your team, stakeholders, and – if possible – end users. Work together – async or in real time – by leaving comments and notes directly on the design. The kind of feedback you’re looking for depends on the mockup’s purpose: broad reactions to visual direction if you’re still establishing that, or detailed rules and requirements if the mockup is intended as a spec for developers.

Share your project

Website mockup examples

Nothing explains a website mockup better than a few concrete illustrations. Here are five examples from the Moqups template gallery, each designed for a different use case. Every one of these samples is a working template that you can open and use as a starting point for your own project.

SaaS website landing page

This template lays out a complete SaaS landing page: hero section with a value proposition and CTA, feature highlights, social proof, and a conversion-focused footer. It's built at mid-fidelity – enough detail to evaluate layout and hierarchy, but with room to add your own branding and copy. It’s a good starting point if your team wants to work on the overall structure before the visual design work begins.

SaaS Website Wireframe Template

Use this template

Pricing page mockup

A single-purpose page focused on plan comparison and conversion, with tiered pricing columns, feature comparison rows, and prominent CTAs. Pricing pages are deceptively complex since small changes in how the information is grouped can dramatically affect user decisions. This is why it’s important to mock them up – and work through all the options – before development begins.

Pricing Page Mockup Template

Use this template

High-fidelity website mockup

This template shows what a website mockup looks like at the higher end of the fidelity spectrum – refined typography, realistic imagery, and precise spacing. If your team needs a near-final visual reference before handing off to developers, this is the level of detail to aim for. Compare it with the mid-fi examples above to see how much difference fidelity makes, even when the underlying process is the same.

High Fidelity Wireframe Template

Use this template

Financial dashboard

Dashboards are a different kind of website mockup challenge – dense data, multiple visualization types, and navigation built for daily use. In data-heavy industries like finance, insurance, and healthcare, the mockup is often created by engineers and domain specialists who understand the requirements better than a designer would. And if the dev team already works within a design system, they can build right from the mockup.

Financial Dashboard Mockup Template

Use this template

Carbon Design dashboard

Built on IBM's Carbon Design System, this template shows how a website mockup can work within an established design framework. The visual language – components, spacing, interaction patterns – is already defined by the system, so the mockup's job is to specify what gets built, not how it should look. This is another scenario where non-designers – product managers, business analysts, domain specialists – can create mockups that a development team can implement directly.

Carbon Design Dashboard Mockup Template

Use this template

All of the templates above are available in the Moqups template gallery. Pick the one closest to your use case and start customizing!

Make mockups work for your team

The whole point of a website mockup is that you don't have to jump from a blank page to a polished design. Start with structure, add branding and content, then refine based on feedback. Each step increases fidelity, and each step gives your team another chance to iterate – or course-correct – before the expensive work begins.

For some teams, the mockup is just a stage on the road to a pixel-perfect prototype. For others – especially those in data-heavy industries with established design systems – a mockup is actually the final deliverable. Either way, the process is the same: mock it up, get feedback, and iterate until the design is right.

Moqups is built for exactly this workflow. It's easy enough that non-designers can contribute from day one, flexible enough to take a project from rough wireframe to polished mockup, and collaborative enough that every voice on the team gets heard.

Start your first mockup

All-In-One vs. Specialized Tools for Product Teams

2026-05-04T00:00:00Z

A reviewer recently called Moqups “the Swiss Army Knife of design tools: fast, lightweight, and surprisingly robust.” It’s a great comparison, and one we made ourselves way back in 2016 when we first added diagramming to our initial wireframing and prototyping features.

At the time, we wrote a short fable, The Curious Case of the Bent Blade. It explained that we were expanding Moqups’ feature set because new functionalities were essential to our users’ workflow and we wanted to meet their needs. Eventually, we added whiteboarding tools for exactly the same reason.

Meeting the needs of users was also the intent of the original Swiss army knife too. It was made to help field soldiers open cans of food and maintain their rifles. The knife still does that for the Swiss military, but it also helps campers around the world and NASA astronauts on space flights.

That’s the advantage of a great multi-purpose tool. It meets you where you are, and provides precisely what’s required to accomplish a task. As we like to say at Moqups, “all the features you need, and none that you don’t”.

In this post, we’re going to do a deep dive into both the advantages of all-in-one tools and the hidden costs of specialized apps. We'll also bust a few myths about multi-purpose apps. Finally, we’ll look at how Moqups was built to meet the specific needs of product design teams.

What is an ‘all-in-one’ tool?

Let’s talk for a second about what all-in-one tools are and what they aren’t. No one is advocating for a bloated app that’s packed with unwanted features. Nor a dog’s breakfast of unnecessary functionality filled with overlapping menus and whack-a-mole windows.

What we are talking about is an app whose features have been carefully curated – and its UI refined – so that it perfectly matches a specific workflow. Think of how a carpenter’s toolbox or a surgeon’s Mayo stand guarantees that everything they need is near at hand and instantly available so they can maintain their focus and complete their job.

In the world of product management, that’s Moqups. We’ve built an app so your team can brainstorm and strategize, document your requirements, sketch out designs, and mock up prototypes without ever launching another tool. That’s what we mean by all-in-one.

Of course, for every step in a product's evolution, you can find specialized apps that focus on that particular stage. For instance, Miro specializes in brainstorming, Lucidchart in diagramming, Balsamiq in lo-fi wireframing, and Figma in hi-fidelity design. But, we believe that most product teams can benefit from an all-in-one solution like Moqups as their core visual communication tool. And here are the reasons.

How an all-in-one tool saves you time and money

The benefits of having a team wide – or company wide – visual communication platform come down to three main arguments: cost, accessibility and focus.

One tool, less overhead

Let’s start with cost… and not just financial cost. Obviously having one subscription is less expensive. But there’s also less administrative overhead. Instead of managing licenses, permissions, billing and renewal dates across multiple tools, teams get one admin panel and one invoice. That allows for more predictable budgeting, and avoids the shock of sudden per-seat increases across multiple apps.

Another saving, and something we hear repeatedly from our clients, is that onboarding requires less time and fewer resources. There’s only one tool to master, and Moqups is also famously easy to learn. As a product lead said in a recent case study: "When people join my team who have never used Moqups before, I just say, 'Here's your account' – and then they don't need any help onboarding. They just start doing stuff. That's it."

A Forrester analysis estimated organizations save 15–20% on total technology costs when consolidating tools effectively. - Forrester analysis cited in Monetizely article.

More voices, faster alignment.

The whole point of an all-in-one app is that it avoids the steep learning curve of specialized tools. Of course that makes for quicker training. But it also means that you can welcome more voices into the process. That includes team members and stakeholders who may lack experience with design software, but have the required domain expertise for the product itself.

Accessibility is especially valuable in industries like energy, healthcare, logistics and fintech where the people shaping a product aren't just designers. In these fields, a lot of product design involves systems engineers, solutions architects, business analysts, product owners, implementation consultants, and subject-matter experts.

And that’s just the core team. There’s also a wide range of other stakeholders who may also need to participate. In the design of complex web portals and mission-critical apps, clients and end-users often get involved to review wireframes, validate flows, and sign off on requirements. These kinds of contributors need a platform that's easy to use, without weeks of training. Using an accessible tool that keeps everyone connected means faster consensus and fewer expensive surprises downstream.

Less context switching, more momentum.

Every project manager knows how important it is to have a single source of truth for the team. That way, as the project evolves, everyone knows where to go to find the latest iteration of requirements, layouts, or flows.

But, if team members still have to jump between different apps to build those iterations, momentum can still be lost. The cumulative effect of that context switching – one app for whiteboards, one for diagrams, one for wireframes – is called ‘tool fatigue’ and it has a real impact on focus and productivity.

Workers switch between tabs, apps, or platforms an average of 33 times per day, with 17% switching more than 100 times. 22% of them lose 2 or more hours per week to tool fatigue. – Lokalise Tool Fatigue Productivity Report, Feb 2026

This is an even bigger issue where brainstorming, planning and design are part of the same project. Especially within cross-functional teams, work doesn’t happen in separate time boxes: ‘now I’m designing’, ‘now I’m planning’, ‘now I’m managing’.

Ideally, team members want to slide seamlessly between types of tasks, and bring their workmates along in that process. With an all-in-one tool, that can happen. Everything your team needs to build a product can live in the same app, breaking down silos to keep everyone and everything connected in the same workflow.

Start using Moqups free

A mismatch between tools and teams

Specialized apps exist for good reason and no one is arguing against their utility or their efficacy. Professional designers will want to use Figma for pixel-perfect layouts. And database architects may prefer Lucidchart’s dedicated diagramming features. Obviously, teams with deep specialists should equip them accordingly.

The problem isn't specialization itself. It's when the entire team – including the non-specialists – is expected to work across multiple, complex tools that were intentionally designed for experts.

There are lots of cross-functional teams where product owners, business analysts, safety engineers, and client stakeholders need to collaborate on product development. This is especially the case in medical, industrial, and logistical fields where domain expertise may be more important than design skills. And where accuracy trumps aesthetics.

The hidden cost of specialized apps

An insurtech company recently moved their whole team to Moqups after realizing that Figma's complexity was holding them back. Team members who weren't experienced designers found themselves wrestling with the interface instead of focusing on the product – and important conversations about functionality were getting lost in the noise.

In this case, the company switched apps because their employees were honest and vocal about their frustration. The worst-case scenario is when team members don’t complain, or even ask for help – either because they’re embarrassed, or because they don’t want to bother the team.

This shame is the hidden cost of specialized apps, and one that doesn’t show up on any dashboard. And it isn't just lost productivity, it's also lost input. If a team member has a hard time using a tool because it's too complex, they tend to disengage. And that means the team loses their perspective, their domain expertise, their ability to catch problems early.

Discussions happen and decisions get made without important voices providing feedback. And requirements get signed off without the stakeholders who might have spotted gaps. That's a cost that compounds silently over the life of a project.

Busting myths about all-in-one tools

All-in-one tools tend to attract more than their fair share of criticism. That's not surprising if you think about it. A single multi-purpose app can potentially replace three or four specialized competitors. That's three or four companies with a vested interest in convincing teams that the all-in-one approach is fundamentally flawed. So it's worth examining some of the most common myths – and checking whether they're actually valid and hold up to scrutiny.

Myth 1: "All-in-one means jack of all trades, master of none."

Breadth of functionality is not inherently a weakness. What matters is whether the range of features was developed with intent, and to serve a coherent workflow. A bad all-in-one tool is just a bad tool – the same way a bad specialized tool is just a bad tool.

The best all-in-one tools aren't built by adding random capabilities. They're shaped by users who push the tool in new directions by trying to do things inside the app that it doesn't yet support. They improvise workarounds because the alternative of switching apps and losing context is worse than the hack.

If a tool's developers pay attention to this kind of feedback, and respond to it thoughtfully, the result isn't bloat. It's a tool that fits users' workflow like a glove. Moqups has spent over twelve years doing exactly that – listening, testing, and building the features that product teams were already reaching for.

Myth 2: "Specialized tools always deliver better results."

In their specific domains, sometimes they do. But specialization often comes with its own set of limitations. Balsamiq deliberately stops at low-fidelity, so teams outgrow the app when a project needs to evolve. Miro's wireframing capabilities feel like an extension of its whiteboard – good enough for rough sketches – but lacking fundamental design aids like rulers, measurement guides, and resize constraints. And Lucid approaches wireframing from a diagramming mindset, so its formatting options are very limited,and can feel restrictive.

In each case, the tool does one thing well. But the moment your work extends beyond that one thing, you're forced to buy, learn, and manage a second tool, and then a third. After a while, your team is left to juggle a bunch of apps, each with its own limitations, its own learning curve, and its own subscription. At that point, whatever you gained in depth, you've lost in the fragmentation of your workflow. And that won’t produce better results.

Apps like Adobe and Figma try to mitigate this drawback by bundling separate apps into a suite of tools. But just because they share a brand, that doesn’t mean they’ll play well together – just try to copy/paste text between Photoshop and Illustrator!

Myth 3: "More features means more complexity."

This is probably the biggest myth. A good all-in-one app should actually be the antidote to complexity. The whole point is to be easier to use than a specialized tool. At Moqups, our trick is to add only the functionality that most users need. And then to make the UI consistent, across the app, so that learning one part of the tool teaches you how to use the rest.

As one user recently said about Moqups: "It's very simple to get started. But it's also pretty powerful. As you use the app more, you figure out how to do more things." The goal is an app that’s simple to learn, but with capability – not complexity – that reveals itself as you need it.

How Moqups' multi-purpose approach suits product management

As you can probably tell by now, we believe in and are proud of our app’s capability as an all-in-one tool for product design and management. Here’s a quick list of how and why we think Moqups might be a good fit for your team:

Built from wireframing outward, not bolted together: Moqups started as a wireframing tool in 2012 and grew its capabilities in direct response to user behavior and feedback. Users were already building diagrams inside Moqups with workarounds before native diagramming was added. Every capability exists because users were already trying to do it inside the tool.

Everything you need and nothing you don't: Moqups covers the complete product design workflow: whiteboarding for brainstorming; wireframing for early-stage design; diagramming for UX flows, ERDs, UML and network diagrams; hi-fi design and prototyping for validation and presentation; plus planning and project management frameworks. These aren't random features that we’ve tossed together. They’re the things that product teams actually do, often within a single workday.

Designed for the whole team: That’s not just designers, but PMs, BAs, architects, developers, and non-technical stakeholders like clients and end-users. Our interface is simple enough that non-designers can contribute right away, which guarantees that people with domain knowledge aren't locked out of the design process.

Pre-loaded and ready to go: All stencil libraries, icon sets, UI kits, and diagram blocks come built-in. No plugin hunting, no community imports, no paywalled basics.

Purpose-built for complex projects: Charts, graphs, tables, and dashboard wireframing capabilities, together with structured page management (nesting, pinning, color-coded status labels) makes Moqups ideal for data-heavy projects with hundreds of screens.

Low to high fidelity without switching tools: Start rough and refine as you go. No ceiling that forces you into a second tool when the project evolves and matures.

Constraints, components, and collaboration: Syncing components, resize constraints, sticky commenting with assignment and tracking, real-time editing, and team roles. These are features that separate a mere quick-sketch tool from one where your team can easily manage complex, evolving projects.

For more than a decade, Moqups has proven itself with more than 2 million users in the industries that need us most.

See how Moqups works for product teams

New iOS 26 and Material Design 3 UI kits

2026-03-25T00:00:00Z

Two of the most widely used design systems are now available as stencil kits in Moqups — and both are ready to use today.

Last month, when we released Resize Constraints, we explained that we developed the feature, in part, because it would “help our own team create better stencils and templates for our users.”

Not only did we want you to have the most recent UI kits at your fingertips, but we wanted them to resize without the layout breaking. Well, promise kept.

We've added a complete iOS 26 UI kit and a brand-new Material Design 3 kit to the Stencils panel. So, whether you're designing for Apple platforms, Android, or both, you now have the components you need to move quickly from early wireframes to high-fidelity mockups without ever leaving Moqups. We’ve also added an M2 kit for teams working on desktop applications.

iOS 26 UI Kit

Our new iOS 26 kit includes a full set of components – navigation bars, tab bars, buttons, toolbars, alerts, form controls, and more – available in both light and dark mode. Our new resize constraints are built in, so elements hold together properly as you adjust layouts, and adapt easily and cleanly between iPhone and iPhone Plus viewport sizes.

Our iOS 26 Light and Dark kits

Two quick notes about the iOS kit:

We chose not to replicate the Liquid Glass effect due to performance considerations and uncertainty around its longevity in future Apple releases. It just felt like the wrong tradeoff.
Similarly, Apple's San Francisco font isn't available for bundling due to licensing restrictions, so we've substituted a close alternative that keeps the look and feel intact.

Material Design 3

Our new M3 kit covers the full component set, including the recent M3 Expressive update, which introduced split buttons, button groups, docked toolbars, and expanded FAB menus.

Everything is fully resizable and available in both light and dark themes. We've also added the latest Material Symbols icon set, so you're working with the same icons used across the M3 system.

Our Material Design 3 kits (light and dark)

Material Design 2

Since M3 adoption on the web is still catching up, we've also included an M2 kit that’s focused on web design. If you're building web interfaces, or your projects are still built on M2, this kit provides a solid set of elements to work with. Together, these two Material Design kits should cover most of what you'll need, no matter whether you're working for mobile, web, or both.

A behind-the-scenes screenshot of our designer preparing the M2 Kit

Where to Find Them

All of the above – the iOS 26 kit, Material Design 3, Material Design 2 – are available now in the Stencils panel, under their respective categories. Just search by name to get started.

Find all the new UI kits in our Stencils Panel

As always, we'd love to hear what you think, so drop us a line at support@moqups.com.

Try them in Moqups

What's Next

We’re already working on a set of new Misc UI Stencils – things like File pickers, WYSIWYG, Colorpickers, Dialogs, Captchas etc. – that will fit naturally alongside anything you’re building. All these new elements will have constraints applied, so they’ll be easy to adjust and adapt. And that’s not all. We’ve also got new Bootstrap 5 and shadcn/ui UI kits in the pipeline, so stay tuned!

Resize Constraints and Bulk Transform

2026-02-18T00:00:00Z

We’re proud to introduce two really terrific new features. Both are designed to help you work faster and more reliably with multiple objects:

Resize Constraints for objects in groups
Bulk Transform for a selection of objects

We’ve developed these tools as a result of your feedback and requests, but also because they’re helping our own team create better stencils and templates for our users.

Simplify for your workflow with Constraints and Bulk Transform

Resize Constraints

What are resize constraints in Moqups?

Constraints allow you to anchor the various elements of a group to the top, bottom, sides, and center of that group as a whole. This means that, as you resize the group, the elements within it will remain in logical and predictable positions. In simple terms, your design elements won’t ‘break’ as you change a group’s size and shape.

It’s important to note that constraints can only be applied to grouped objects (i.e. not a selection of objects). Also, if you nest a group within a parent group, constraints can be applied to the nested group as well.

Here’s a quick overview to get you started, but if you want a deeper dive, check out Resize Constraints in our Help Center.

Stretch (no constraints) vs Constraints

How do constraints help the wireframing process?

Constraints make it much easier to adjust layouts for responsive design, from desktop to tablet to mobile.
Constraints allow you to build reusable UI components that can be repurposed in a variety of different contexts. For example, if you create design elements to use on a variety of webpages, dashboards, and devices, constraints make it easy to adapt these groups to those layouts. This is especially important if you’re using syncable components and design systems.
If your team creates apps for on-site commercial and industrial monitoring, adding constraints allows you to quickly adjust designs for those specific, proprietary devices.

We’re particularly proud of this feature because it’s normally found in more specialized design tools like Figma. But we also felt it was important to have constraints as part of the Moqups toolkit. So many of our clients take projects all the way from lo-fi wireframes to hi-fi prototypes, and we wanted to give them better control over their layouts at every single stage in that process.

As part of this release, we’ve also improved the precision of resize in general. For instance, we now respect the aspect ratio lock on all objects when resizing, and have made it much easier to adjust the dimensions of grids and cells.

How do I use resize constraints in Moqups?

In Moqups, Constraints are turned off by default. This means that, as you resize a group, the objects within that group will stretch (if their aspect ratio isn’t locked).

Our default stretch behaviour on resize

If you do want to use constraints to anchor elements within a group, you first have to enable the feature for that specific group.

The exception would be some of our latest compound stencils, like our new iOS 26 kit, that come with constraints both built in and enabled.

Enable resize constraints

To enable constraints, you first need to click on a group. Doing so will open the Format panel, and also reveal the group’s contextual toolbar. Then, you can either:

Select the ‘Enable resize constraints’ checkbox in the Format Panel
Click the ‘Enable resize constraints’ button in the contextual toolbar

Enabling resize constraints

This will enable our Automatic constraints feature. If you want to override the automatic settings to apply manual anchors to individual objects, you can do that too. We’ll cover manual constraints further downscroll.

Automatic constraints

After you enable constraints, anchors are automatically applied to each object within the group. If you resize the group, automatic constraints should be sufficient to maintain a logical layout for most use cases.

You can see these anchors in the Constraints section of the Format panel: applied anchors are highlighted in blue and, on the page, dotted blue lines show where a selected object is anchored.

Auto constraints and anchors

Manual constraints

You can always override automatic constraints to select manual anchors for objects within the group. To apply manual constraints, select an object inside the group and click on an anchor button to apply it to that object.

For instance, in the example below, we manually anchor the ‘Cancel’ button to the right in order to keep it adjacent to the ‘Submit report’ button when we resize the layout.

Setting manual constraints

Anchors can be applied both horizontally and vertically and, if you hover over any anchor button, a tooltip will explain its purpose.

If you want to go back to automatic anchors for an object, just re-select the ‘Adjust automatically’ checkbox.

Proportional constraints

To set proportional constraints for an object, click the percentage symbol at the end of the anchor buttons. This option will adjust the object’s distance from each anchor point proportional to any resize.

Proportional constraints buttons in the Format Panel

Here’s a quick visualization of how proportional constraints work compared with the other resize options.

Proportional constraints demonstration

Constraints for nested groups

When you enable resize constraints for a parent group, any nested groups are treated like individual objects of their own, and can have either automatic or manual anchors applied to them.

If you want to set anchors for objects within those ‘child’ groups, you’ll need to enable constraints for them separately. After that, you can set anchors for objects within the nested group, just as you would for the larger, parent group.

Try constraints in Moqups

Bulk transform

What is bulk transform in Moqups?

Our second new feature is a bulk transform option that applies to multiple, selected objects. The drive for this feature came internally, from our own team’s experience with whiteboarding and planning.

Since we use Moqups for brainstorming, flowcharts, and Kanban boards, we wanted the ability to quickly resize multiple objects on the page – especially sticky notes and diagram blocks.

Below, you can see an example of how we use bulk transform – in combination with our align tools – to quickly clean up our board.

We love using bulk transform to tidy up after brainstorming

Initially, this tool was intended to apply only to resizing. All we really wanted was a quick way to clean up a page by standardizing object dimensions. But, in the end, we decided to extend it to all transform options (x y coordinates, widths and heights, and rotate) to give users even more control.

How can I use bulk transform to improve my workflow?

Bulk transform is a terrific tool, not just for whiteboards, but also for the fast adjustment of any UI layout. Here are a few examples of how this new feature might help your workflow:

After group brainstorming, bulk transform lets you standardize the dimensions of your sticky notes, and align them in straight rows or columns.
As you build a diagram and adjust elements to fit the text, things can get messy. Inevitably, you end up with blocks of different sizes and proportions. Once you’re done, bulk transform makes it easy to make those elements the same size and apply some visual consistency.
During initial wireframing, you don’t want to worry about the size of every icon, graphic or card you add. You just want a fast, rough draft. But, once you’ve decided on the optimal layout, you probably want to match both the size and position of repeated elements to bring a more professional look to your design – especially as you move from low to mid or high-fidelity.

How do I use bulk transform in Moqups?

To use Bulk Transform, first make sure the feature is enabled in the Format panel. Then, select multiple objects by dragging over them or use Shift + Click to select them individually. Now you can enter new values for width and height (or for their X/Y position).

Using bulk transform to quickly resize notes

If you want to apply the size of one object to a bunch of others, you can do that too!

First, make your selection. Then, click on any object within the selection to designate it as the reference object. The reference object will be highlighted with a thick blue outline, and its dimensions and position will appear in light gray in the format panel.

Then, to apply any of those values to the other objects in your selection, just re-type those exact numbers over the grayed-out values, and hit the Enter/Return key.

Head over to our Help Center if you want more details about our Bulk Transform feature.

Using a referance object for bulk transform

What’s coming next?

At the beginning of this post, we mentioned that one of the motivations for developing our constraints tool was so that we could build better stencils and templates for our users. That’s already under way.

A completely updated iOS 26 UI kit, with resize constraints applied, is already live in-app. You can find them in the Stencils panel, in both light and dark mode. And our in-house designer is working on revamping the Material library too. We’ll highlight both of these in a future blog post.

In the meantime, please let us know how you like these two new features, and pass on any suggestions to support@moqups.com.

Try these features in app

Top Figma Alternatives for Wireframing in 2026

2026-02-14T00:00:00Z

Our team did a hands-on test of top Figma alternatives. Here are our recommendations, and an honest report of what they found.

If you’re reading this post, it’s likely because you’re seeking an alternative to Figma. Maybe you’re a Figma user who’s looking to switch. Or, maybe you’re considering subscribing to their app, but want to explore all options first – so you can choose what’s best for your team.

Why look beyond Figma?

The truth is, despite Figma’s dominance in design, it isn’t the right tool for everybody. We hear this all the time from our own customers. Often, they tried Figma first – before jumping to Moqups (we even built a Figma-to-Moqups plugin to help folks bring their Figma designs into Moqups.)

And, generally, the reasons they abandon Figma fall into three categories:

Learning curve: Many teams find Figma too complex and hard to learn. They want to get down to work without a long and difficult onboarding process. And, they want every member of the team to contribute, not just trained designers. They are looking for tools like Figma, but one that’s simpler and much more user-friendly.
Workflow: A lot of teams prefer wireframing tools without the complexity of a full design suite. Figma may be overkill for these use cases, especially if they want a fast, lightweight UI for real-time collaboration. They may also need additional or specialized functionality like diagramming, whiteboarding, or specific UI kits.
Price: Figma becomes pricey as teams scale. That can push it out of reach for agencies and startups that need multiple seats on tight budgets. And, for large teams where many people need edit access (i.e. product managers, content writers, marketing), Figma can get very expensive, very fast.

So, if you’re looking for apps like Figma that might better suit your team, read on!

Comparison Table: Top Figma Competitors

Tool	Primary Strenght	Best For	Fidelity	Learning Curve	Starting Price *
Figma	Advanced Design Tool	Design systems and pixel-perfect layouts	High	Hard	$21/seat
Moqups	All-in-one Wireframe, Prototype, Diagram	Big projects with wireframes, diagrams, and prototypes	Low, Mid, High	Easy	$6/seat
Balsamiq	Speed & Simplicity	First drafts and low fidelity layouts	Low	Easy	$16/seat
Miro	Collaboration & Whiteboarding	Whiteboarding that includes wireframes	Low to Mid	Easy	$8/seat
Uizard	AI-Powered design & Prototyping	Reapid AI-driven concept generation	Mid-High	Easy	$12/seat
Justinmind	Advanced Prototyping & Simulation	Advanced prototyping for UX research and testing	High	Hard	$19/seat
Lucidchart	Diagramming & Process Mapping	Diagramming that includes simple wireframes	Low	Easy	$9/seat

* Price as of May 2026

How we compare wireframing apps

In this article, we compare six wireframing and prototyping tools, explore the pros and cons of each, and make recommendations based on different use cases.

Obviously we’re biased. We think Moqups is the best wireframing tool out there – and the best deal in the wireframing/diagramming/whiteboarding space. But, we understand that every team has their own preferred workflow and particular focus. So, we’re also determined to be objective, fair, and honest in our assessments.

There are a ton of comparison articles out there, but a lot of them are AI slop filled with generalities and misinformation. We wanted something more accurate, specific and practical – so we asked our own team to take the following apps for a test drive, and then tell us what they found. But, before we look at Figma alternatives, let's take a look at Figma itself. It’s important to understand why it became so popular, and why it might not be right for every team.

Figma

Figma editor

Figma has been around for a decade now, and has usurped Adobe XD by combining functionality from Photoshop and Illustrator. As the dominant app in UI/UX design, Figma shines for pixel-perfect, high fidelity design and prototyping. It offers powerful vector editing tools, an extensive plug-in ecosystem, live collaboration features, and developer hand-off. So, if your team is building a design system, then Figma is the logical choice.

However, as we hinted at earlier, Figma isn't perfect for every scenario or workflow. Figma is a highly capable and complex design tool – but its difficulty, depth and cost may be unnecessary for teams that focus more on ideation, user‑flow mapping, and low or mid-fidelity wireframing. More importantly, its complexity may act as a barrier for team members who are non-designers – and who contribute to early-stage concepts.

Our Take

Here’s what we found most noteworthy during our hands-on testing with Figma.

Elements and Components

Figma’s strengths are in both its system of components and its constraints feature. Components can be nested, have multiple variants, sync across complex projects, and there’s a handy component list in the sidebar. For teams that are building scalable design systems, this is terrific.

But its out-of-the box elements can also be hard to access, or insufficient, for quick mockups, brainstorming or annotation. Figma’s own “Simple Design System” – and its default UI kits – seem too detailed, or tied to specific functions, for wireframing. They’re fine for precise editing in hi-fidelity, but can feel more restrictive than helpful when working in lo-fi.

Templates

As for templates, Figma relies mostly on their Community. That’s a bit of a double edged sword, depending on your perspective and requirements. There are a lot of pre-made resources there, but they tend to be very use-case specific, and finding and importing them is unnecessarily cumbersome. Well-defined templates can definitely make work faster, especially if you're familiar with Figma. But overly defined examples – with variables, style guides, auto-layouts – can be slow and hard to edit, even for experienced Figma users. For example, simply moving a button can require dismantling complex instance relationships – and this requires advanced Figma knowledge.

Working with community templates and UI kits can also feel like using someone else’s computer because each has its own learning curve, and requires a significant adjustment period.

Beyond Wireframing

If your team does a lot of brainstorming, annotation, and diagramming, Figma has separate tools for that (like FigJam), but switching back and forth can add friction and be frustrating.

Best Use Cases vs. Limitations

Where Figma excels:

High-fidelity design and prototyping
Complex design systems management
Team collaboration on detailed interface work
Developer handoff and implementation
Projects requiring sophisticated interactive prototypes

Where alternatives might serve better:

Rapid concept wireframing and ideation
Early-stage validation where simplicity outweighs sophistication
Simple stakeholder communication and feedback gathering
Projects involving non-designers in the wireframing process
Teams needing quick iteration without component system overhead

Is this tool right for you?

Figma is a sophisticated tool for trained designers. If your end-goal is super-high fidelity and production-ready design then Figma is a good choice. However, the very features that make Figma excellent for final UI design can work against it in low and mid-fi wireframing. There's a lack of versatile, general-purpose elements that let you start from scratch or mock up quick concepts. To work effectively in Figma, it’s almost as though you have to build your own design system before starting.

If you don’t have a team of designers, then Figma may not be your best choice for wireframing. It’s intimidating, hard to start from scratch, and it may exclude non-designers, domain specialists, and other stakeholders who need to contribute to projects.

Figma price: There's a limited free plan, and paid full seats run from $21- $120 per month depending on the plan.

Now, let’s take a look at six Figma alternatives for wireframing, starting with Moqups.

Moqups: The Top Alternative to Figma for Wireframing

Moqups editor

Launched in 2012 as an online wireframing app, Moqups has evolved into a versatile tool for both product and project management. It’s one of the few apps in the wireframing space that’s equally adept at diagramming and whiteboarding.

With Moqups, your team can develop concepts all the way from ideation to prototyping, and move seamlessly through low, mid and high-fidelity. The app has extensive, out-of-the-box libraries of wireframing stencils, diagram blocks and icon sets, as well as robust commenting, annotation and live editing tools. That makes Moqups perfect for cross-functional and remote teams looking for an all-in-one visual collaboration tool.

Moqups also has well-developed charts, graphs, and tables that are great for dashboards and data visualization. This makes it a good choice for teams working on complex, logistical projects where data representation is more important than aesthetics (i.e. health, energy, shipping, fintech, etc.) – especially if users want their mockups to live in the same space as their user flows, network and UML diagrams.

However, if you’re a designer creating fully functional, pixel-perfect prototypes, there are probably better tools. Sure, you can build a high-fidelity design system in Moqups, but that isn’t its real strength.

Get started with Moqups

Our Take

Ease Of Use

Moqups is very fast, lightweight and easy-to-learn. The app’s strength is that all its assets come pre-loaded and ready to go, including wireframing shapes, UI elements, icons kits, and diagram blocks. You can sign up and get right to work, with little to no learning curve.

Templates

If you don’t want to start from scratch, Moqups also has an extensive in-app library of templates. These cover wireframing (in both low and high fidelity), as well as all kinds of diagrams, charts and graphs, and project management frameworks. The templates are professionally designed and well-thought out, but Moqups doesn’t have a community library with as many niche use-cases as some competitors.

Moqups wireframing templates

Advanced Capabilities

Moqups is not a complicated design app with the functionality of Figma, Sketch or Photoshop. Nevertheless, it’s easy to create a quick layout in lo-fi, and add detail until you have a polished, hi-fi prototype of your mobile app or website. You can make designs interactive by applying hotspots, page, or object interactions, but Moqups lacks the pre-built animations of dedicated prototyping apps.

Constraints and Components

Moqups has both auto and manual constraints, something that most Figma alternatives lack. Constraints anchor elements to the areas of a design to make adjusting and resizing layouts quick and easy. And, like Figma, Moqups has a system of components that sync across all instances within a project. That means you can make changes to a 'parent' element, and have those changes propagate to all copies made from that original. This makes late-stage changes and maintenance much easier. However, unlike Figma, Moqups doesn't have a dedicated component library.

Page Structure

One of the features that distinguishes Moqups from other wireframing apps is its page structure. You can create an almost infinite canvas if you want to, but Moqups is set up for folks who want to create a separate page for each screen or modal. Pages can be pinned, nested, hidden, and color-coded for status and project management. This is a key advantage if you’re working on complex apps with hundreds or thousands of screens. At that scale, an infinite canvas can get very cluttered and hard to navigate.

Commenting

Moqups’ commenting tool is another great feature for big projects. Comments are sticky, expandable, and have a shape and color system for assignment and tracking. The ability to add comments right on the design, combined with a wide range of notes and annotations, makes it easy to communicate requirements, and document business rules.

Moqups commenting feature

Best Use Cases vs. Limitations

Where Moqups excels:

Rapid wireframing and early-stage ideation
All-in-one workflows (wireframing + diagramming)
Cross-functional team collaboration with non-designers
Information architecture and user flow planning
Strategy-to-execution transitions in one platform

Where alternatives might serve better:

Complex design system management
Pixel-perfect high-fidelity design work
Advanced animation and micro-interaction prototyping
Specialized single-purpose tool ecosystems
Reliance on AI to build designs

Is our free Figma alternative right for you?

In terms of best use cases, Moqup is a bit of a paradox: It is an easy app for inexperienced users new to wireframing and design. But it’s also a powerful workhorse for teams building complicated projects in technical and industrial domains. And for cross functional teams who want wireframe, whiteboard, diagram and prototyping without changing apps or creative context, it’s the best choice out there.

Moqups price: There's a limited free plan, and paid seats run from $4 - $8 per month depending on the plan.

Balsamiq

Balsamiq editor

Balsamiq is a no-frills wireframing tool that’s the digital equivalent of a pen and paper sketch. It’s one of the oldest names in the wireframing space, and its hand-drawn style serves to keep the spotlight on structure and function, rather than design aesthetics.

This app’s design philosophy offers minimal styling options, rough-sketch visuals, and a feature set that stops short of high-fidelity. The intent is to help stakeholders concentrate on layout, flow, and structure – without getting distracted by fonts, gradients, or colors. Balsamiq’s narrow focus makes it good for quick, low-fidelity drafts where clarity matters more than polish.

The trade-off is that Balsamiq is not well suited for mid or high-fidelity work and it lacks the diagramming, whiteboarding, and prototyping capabilities of modern competitors.

Our Take

Ease of Use

Balsamiq is very approachable for beginners. Its simple drag-and-drop interface, keyboard shortcuts, and limited formatting options make it hard to over-complicate a design. This simplified-on-purpose approach can be very helpful for users new to design.

Still, the experience isn't friction-free. Since objects are listed alphabetically, users will often have to rely on search to find what they need. And, while adding and rearranging elements is easy, both selecting and resizing small objects can be awkward. Additionally, editing text in Balsamiq is still syntax-based, so you can’t just type and see a live preview; the text-editing interface also occupies a huge part of the screen, so working with small objects or complex data tables can be frustrating. The result is a tool that’s simple on paper, but not always smooth in practice.

Templates

Balsamiq is leaning into an AI-first approach, essentially replacing the traditional template library with a dynamic Balsamiq AI generator. It’s a capable builder that stays true to the classic Balsamiq aesthetic. It can even sketch out user flows in the chat or prompt for missing details when the initial vision is a bit blurry.

For now, the scope is strictly limited to web and mobile interfaces; those looking for AI-driven diagrams or general whiteboarding will find the tool hasn't expanded into those areas just yet.

Advanced Capabilities

Balsamiq deliberately avoids advanced capabilities. For instance, the app doesn’t offer auto-layout or constraints. The app’s focus is clearly on basic editing, and that includes a transform tool that lets users turn one kind of UI element into another with a single click.

While ambitious, the Balsamiq AI experience currently carries an "early access" feel, with occasional unresponsiveness suggesting the tech is still maturing. A good example is their AI Prototypes feature. By rendering wireframes in an iframe with auto-applied fonts and colors, giving off a distinct TailwindCSS vibe, it feels less like a literal prototype and more like a "suggested implementation." This approach skips the fine-grained control usually required in a professional workflow.

For those who prefer traditional prototyping, the app still includes basic interactions that link elements to other pages using hotspots. However, managing more than a few clickable areas can be a chore, and you won’t find the kind of animations typical of dedicated prototyping tools.

Balsamiq does have a syncable component system, but editing these also requires switching contexts entirely. This constant toggling between component mode and group mode can slow down workflow, especially compared to tools like Moqups or Figma.

Page Structure

Balsamiq uses a multi-page project structure, which is excellent for organizing individual screens of an app or website. However, it does not offer nested pages, or the advanced project management features like color-coding or pinning that are useful for large, complex projects.

Comments and Annotations

Commenting is not Balsamiq's native strength. While you can add text notes as objects, it lacks the sticky, assignable, and trackable commenting systems built for team collaboration. For detailed feedback, teams might need to rely on a separate platform.

Best Use Cases vs. Limitations

Where Balsamiq excels:

Replaces pencil and paper sketches
Rapid lo-fi wireframing
Initial drafts and concept exploration
Stakeholder presentations where you need to prevent aesthetic fixation
Non-designers who need an approachable entry point

Where alternatives serve better:

Mid to high-fidelity design
Team-based collaboration and annotation
Complex projects with data-driven layouts
Prototypes and interactive demos
All-in-one workflows with diagramming and whiteboarding

Is this tool right for you?

Balsamiq occupies a specific niche: it's the best tool for keeping wireframes deliberately rough. If you need to work with screenshots, create quick demos of existing designs, or progress beyond the initial concept phase without switching tools, you'll likely find Balsamiq's constraints more limiting than liberating. But for teams who value the enforced discipline of lo-fi work, Balsamiq remains the perfect choice.

Balsamiq price: There’s no free plan, a 14 day trial, and paid seats run from $16 - $35 per month depending on the plan.

Miro

Miro editor

Launched as a digital whiteboard in 2011, Miro has a full complement of terrific real-time, visual collaboration features like sticky notes, voting, timers, and a native video chat. It also has integrated AI tools, a wide range of templates, and its own community. Miro’s clear focus is to help teams with their real-time brainstorming and strategy sessions, but it has begun to expand into the wireframing space as well.

Miro categorizes wireframing under the label ‘Prototyping’, suggesting that its toolset is geared more toward user testing and stakeholder presentation. But this is a bit of a misnomer. Sure, you can make designs interactive in Miro, but it’s a paid functionality, and the app generally lacks the feature-set to take your ‘prototype’ much beyond rough drafts. They also have a paid AI prototyping feature, but it still relies on their limited library of elements.

If your only use case is low-fidelity and collaborative sketching, then Miro’s wireframing capabilities may be sufficient. But if you design in mid or hi-fi – or build complex, data-heavy apps – then a wireframing-first solution might work better.

Our Take

Ease of Use

Miro is intuitive for diagramming and whiteboarding, but wireframing with the app is less fluid. Its wireframing UI kits are tucked away in the menu, feeling more like an afterthought or plugin than a core function. Basic shapes are presented in a diagramming context, and the tool lacks fundamental design aids like rulers, guides with measurements, or resize constraints.

On the plus side, click-through prototyping is fast and easy. Each object or group has a built-in option for linking to other frames, and drag-and-drop connections are intuitive. Interactions are right next to selected objects or groups, allowing for simple drag-and-drop to target frames. Fullscreen previews are available for each screen, and they effectively emulate a device look, but the device frames themselves don't feel as polished as Figma’s equivalents.

Templates

In Miro, getting started with wireframe templates requires much more effort than it should. Wireframe templates aren’t highlighted in the main dashboard, and you have to dig into “Explore more templates” to find them. And once you open a template, all objects are auto-selected by default — an odd quirk that adds friction right away. The app does offer a respectable library of templates, but they often feel like afterthoughts compared to its main whiteboarding and brainstorming sets.

Advanced Capabilities

Miro’s wireframing tools are focused on lo-fi work. There are no shadows, gradients, rounded corners, or detailed styling options – nor is there an image-function to swap placeholders for actual images. That makes it hard to transition from low to high-fidelity as projects evolve. For any kind of detailed work, the contextual toolbar feels both inadequate and frustrating. And the lack of proper measurement tools makes it difficult to maintain consistency across screens.

The resize tool ‘scales’ elements – rather than resizing them precisely – and that can cause misalignment and mismatched font sizes. Customization is also restricted, as there’s only one icon set and about twenty fonts available, while brand-colors and custom fonts require a premium plan. For quick sketches and workshops, these limits aren’t dealbreakers, but they do make it hard to advance beyond early-stage wireframes.

Elements and Components

Miro does not have a true component system like Figma or Moqups. You can create and reuse your own elements, but they do not sync as instances. Changes to a parent component are not propagated, making late-stage edits on a large project both a manual and a time-consuming process.

Canvas & Frame Structure

Miro’s infinite canvas can be both a strength and a drawback for wireframing. It's perfect for free-form brainstorming and connecting ideas across a vast space, but can quickly become cluttered when organizing multi-screen apps. The lack of a structured page system – with nesting and status tracking – makes it hard to manage complex projects with hundreds of screens.

Commenting & Collaboration

This is where Miro really shines. Since it’s fundamentally a big whiteboard, multiple team members can work together in real time, adding sticky notes, diagrams, and wireframes in the same space. Comments are sticky, assignable, and threaded. This ability to have dozens of stakeholders view and comment makes Miro perfect for gathering feedback and running collaborative workshops.

Best Use Cases vs. Limitations

Where Miro excels:

Early-stage brainstorming and strategy sessions
Workshops where wireframing is one activity among many
Gathering feedback from cross-functional stakeholders
Clickable lo-fi prototypes for quick demos
Fast AI diagram building and sticky-note ideation

Where alternatives serve better:

Workflows where wireframing is the primary activity
Mid to high-fidelity interface design
Pixel-perfect prototyping
Complex and multi-page projects
Design system development and management

Is this tool right for you?

Miro’s wireframing tools are best seen as an extension of its whiteboarding platform, not a replacement for dedicated design software. For quick sketches, interactive click-through demos, and collaborative workshops, it fits the bill. So, if your team already lives in Miro, the wireframing features may be good enough. But if you need a true design tool – something for scalable wireframes, polished prototypes, or handoff-ready systems – Miro is unlikely to meet your needs.

Miro’s price: There's a limited free plan, and paid seats run from $8 - $16 per month depending on the plan.

Uizard

Uizard editor

Uizard is an AI-powered design tool that can generate wireframes, mockups, and prototypes from prompts, screenshots, or hand-drawn sketches. Next to Adobe, it was one of the first design tools to incorporate LLMs, and those in-house AI features remain its main differentiator. The app’s core promise is speed: describe an app, and have an editable mockup in minutes.

The tool’s AI features – branded as ‘Magic’ are clearly targeted at non-designers who need to quickly produce professionally-looking mockups. This can be really useful for users who are new to wireframing and have never designed before. But the app’s focus on AI comes at the expense of the precision, control, and craft that more experienced users may expect. Uizard feels more like a design generator than a genuine design tool – great for visualizing a concept, but frustrating for detailed or intentional work.

Our Take

Ease of Use

Uizard promotes its AI-assisted workflow above all other approaches. The app’s onboarding suggests starting from an AI prompt or scanned sketch, instead of building manually. The app includes AI buttons in nearly every toolbar and menu. This makes it easy for beginners to get rolling, but it can also feel more intrusive rather than intelligent once the novelty wears off.

For basic wireframing, Uizard offers lots of blocks and pre-built UI elements, but building from scratch can be challenging. Their UI library, in the left sidebar, is chaotic and hard to navigate; categories are poorly organized, and search queries often show irrelevant results.

The app also restricts users to three preset screen sizes (Mobile, Tablet, and Desktop) and you can only adjust height – not width. This focused approach works for standard responsive designs, but it's limiting when working on custom or proprietary interfaces. It’s also a barrier for teams who want to build diagrams or whiteboards alongside their wireframes.

AI Features

With the app’s ‘Magic’, you can use a text prompt to create screens, fix a design, or propose alternatives. It can also transform screenshots into editable layouts and provide AI-generated feedback on your work.

How much you like Uizard’s AI features will probably depend on your own workflow and design capabilities. The AI functionality is impressive on the surface, and may meet the needs of non-professionals wanting a quick mockup or prototype. So, if you’re new to the game, you’ll likely love the speed and ease with which you can create.

But experienced designers will notice its drawbacks right away. For one thing, the AI output tends to be generic, repetitive, and image-heavy. And in our own testing, we found editing with the AI both slow and disruptive. Even small adjustments – like asking it to “update colors” or “improve layout” – can take several minutes to process, so you end up staring at the screen instead of moving on to other work. And, regardless of your prompt, the AI often insists on creating five or six screens. For all these reasons, we found that using the AI for edits was more cumbersome than simply adjusting the designs manually.

One important caveat here is that most of the ‘Magic’ main outputs are hidden behind upgrade prompts, so the best-looking results often sit behind a paywall.

Advanced Capabilities

There's no true component system comparable to Figma or Moqups; you can reuse elements, but there's no syncing, no instances, and no systematic approach to maintaining consistency across large projects. And the mode switcher between wireframe and mockup fidelity is conceptually interesting but doesn't quite compensate for the lack of precision tools.

On the plus side, creating click-through prototypes is quick and straightforward. Linking screens together into flows is really easy. Uizard’s integrations with Unsplash and Giphy are also handy for populating quick mockups, and you can import designs from Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD.

Uizard supports real-time collaboration, which is good for quick workshops, but it lacks the kind of structured commenting, assignment, and tracking features that are needed for serious design reviews. Teams working on a larger scale may also miss having structured page hierarchies, batch operations, or advanced status labeling for managing hundreds of screens.

Best Use Cases vs. Limitations

Where Uizard excels:

Rapid, AI-driven concept generation
Transform screenshots or photos into editable designs
Fast, professional-looking mockups for non-designers
Quick clickable prototypes for early-stage validation
Import from XD /Sketch /Figma for AI iteration

Where alternatives serve better:

Large, complex projects requiring handcrafted design
Design systems and component management
Teams needing precise layout control and constraints
Workflows that include diagramming, whiteboarding, and annotation
Project management with page structure and labeling

Is this tool right for you?

Uizard’s AI-driven workflows tend to skip over both the wireframing and handcrafted design process. In that sense, the app feels more like a production engine than a design tool. You don’t really design in Uizard, you produce outputs. For teams that just need something clickable, visual, and shareable – especially for pitches or early validation – it may be a great solution. But for teams working on complex projects where domain-specific design, structure, and precision are important, the app’s AI-generated designs may seem too generic and restrictive.

Uizard’s price: There's a limited free plan, and paid seats run from $12 - $39 per month depending on the plan.

Justinmind

Justinmind editor

Justinmind is a desktop-based prototyping tool that specializes in interactive, high-fidelity simulations for mobile and web apps. Its main strength is its extensive prototyping features – something missing from simpler wireframing tools.

The app offers an impressive range of interactions, animations, and conditional logic that lets you create fully functional prototypes. You can set hover states, transitions, form validations, and even embed actual HTML or websites within projects. This endgame makes it an obvious choice for UX researchers that want to do user testing on realistic prototypes.

However, these capabilities also come with significant complexity. Justinmind has a steep learning curve, with complicated elements, context-switching workflows, and an interface that prioritizes prototyping features over basic wireframing. For teams that just need to sketch concepts or create straightforward mockups, Justinmind may feel like overkill.

Our Take

Ease of Use

Justinmind’s extensive prototyping capabilities come with a complicated setup. The UI dedicates a large portion of its space to interaction panels, state management, and conditional logic, all of which can be overwhelming for newcomers. Still, once you know your way around, the ability to work offline and fine-tune every property provides lots of control for advanced users wanting to simulate real app logic.

Nevertheless, the experience is complicated by an inconsistent editing experience. The app mixes clickability with editing in a way that often feels confusing, and many of its basic stencils are surprisingly complex. Additionally, basic UI kits are not enabled by default, hard to find, and require manual setup before you can begin.

Unlike Figma and Moqups, Justinmind lacks constraints which help layouts stay consistent and predictable when elements or frames are resized.

Elements and Formatting

Justinmind comes with a full library of elements, but many are pre-loaded with intricate, nested interactions that can feel excessive for basic wireframing. For instance, a dropdown menu element comes with 10 submenus, icons, and pre-built interactions. Justinmind also includes vector editing capabilities; every element is a vector that you can subtract, extend, and perform other vector operations upon. You can manually edit default styles for basic elements in a separate modal, control individual borders, and even apply margins around elements, a feature that’s relatively unique among design tools.

Components and Libraries

Justinmind’s syncable components are called Masters, and the panel displays them as a list. This makes it very easy to locate and reuse them across projects. On the other hand, unlike other tools like Figma or Moqups, editing them requires switching to a separate screen; this tends to break your workflow context and makes it less convenient for quick iterations.

Justinmind's UI libraries are almost entirely community-made, and elements often have pre-set interactions (hover states, cursor changes), which can be helpful – but can also mean more to learn, and potentially undo.

Overall, Justinmind has an impressive object library, but most elements break when you try to resize them, and this is a real limitation for quick wireframing.

Advanced Features and Prototyping

This is Justinmind’s true standout capability. The app dedicates a lot of UI space to interactions, offering every type of behavior you can imagine: transitions, animations, conditional logic, and more. You can create fully functioning demos by adding interactive text inputs, allowing testers to type directly into fields. For teams doing heavy interactive UX testing, these features are a real selling point.

Of course, the trade-off here is complexity. Setting up these interactions requires both time and expertise. For teams just wanting simple, clickable wireframes, it's more than they’d need – and the learning curve can be prohibitive.

Commenting & Collaboration

Justinmind’s feedback system is different from most Figma alternatives. Users can add detailed comments and requirements, but not directly on the design. Instead, comments live in a dedicated screen that can be sorted by author or date, more like a research repository than a quick collaboration tool. It’s obviously tailored for formal UX research, not casual team conversations. It works well for usability studies, but less so for the quick back and forth of live collaboration and internal design reviews.

Best Use Cases vs. Limitations

Where Justinmind excels:

High-fidelity, interactive prototyping and simulation
Making static wireframes and mockups interactive
UX research, usability testing, and behavioral validation
Offline work without internet dependency
Teams that prioritize interaction realism over quick iteration

Where alternatives serve better:

Fast, low-fidelity wireframing and early-stage ideation
Cross-functional collaboration with non-designers
All-in-one workflows that include diagramming and whiteboarding
Users seeking minimal learning curves
Browser-based tools without installation requirements

Is this tool right for you?

Justinmind is a serious prototyping tool that includes wireframing capabilities, rather than a wireframing tool with prototyping features. The app is powerful for testing and demonstrating user flows but heavy for visualizing concepts or quick iteration. So, if your workflow depends on prototyping real behavior with user input and conditional logic, then Justinmind is a great option.

However, its steep learning curve and desktop approach make it less suitable for teams that prioritize speed, simplicity, and seamless collaboration with stakeholders. If your goal is fast wireframing, documentation, or diagramming, then other tools, like Moqups, are a better choice.

Justinmind’s price: There's a limited free plan, and paid seats run from $19 - $59 per month depending on the plan.

Lucidchart

Lucidchart editor

Lucid was launched in 2010, primarily as a diagramming app, but they now offer two products under one umbrella: Lucidchart for diagramming and Lucidspark for brainstorming. This addition brings them close to Miro as an online collaboration platform; but, whereas Miro’s roots are in whiteboarding, Lucid’s are in diagramming.

Recently, Lucidchart has also expanded into wireframing with its "UI mockup" shapes, putting them in competition with an all-in-one tool like Moqups that also offers wireframing, diagramming and whiteboarding. That’s why we tested it – to see how it stacks up against the other wireframing apps.

The quick answer is that Lucidchart is a great tool for creating flowcharts, network diagrams, org charts, and a variety of technical and business documentation. However, its wireframing capabilities feel too much like an extension of its diagramming engine, rather than a dedicated feature set.

Our Take

Ease of Use

Lucidchart is easy to use and well organized, but everything seems oriented toward diagram creation. All shapes behave like diagram nodes: they snap to grids, automatically suggest connectors, and move in ways that make sense for flowcharts but feel clunky and unintuitive for UI design.

The app also lacks fundamental design tools like layout constraints, rulers, and precise measurement guides. Formatting options are very limited, with no color palettes, few font choices, and minimal styling controls. These exclusions make it difficult to create anything beyond a basic low-fidelity boxes-and-lines sketch. For diagrams, this simplicity works, but for wireframing, it can feel restrictive.

Templates and UI Elements

Lucid's template library is comprehensive for diagramming and process mapping, but very limited for wireframing. The selection of mobile and web examples is underwhelming, and even the most basic ones require a premium subscription. It’s unclear why these simple templates are paywalled, but it creates a poor user experience from the start. The platform does support custom data sources so, in theory, you can populate dashboard templates with CSV data, but the process is neither easy nor automatic.

The UI mockup shapes – Lucid's wireframing toolkit – are also premium-only. We tested them and found them outdated, frustrating to edit in lo-fi, and insufficient for mid-fi design work – especially the iOS and Android UI kits. They're roughly comparable to legacy stencil sets that other tools offer for free.

Advanced Features and Prototyping

Because Lucid lacks a true component system, you can't create syncing instances where changes to a parent element propagate across all copies. If you’re working on projects with repeated UI elements, this means tedious manual updates. And, although Lucid does have ‘assisted layout’ containers that helps preserve the basic layout within groups, it lacks a full constraints feature like Figma or Moqups.

The concept of "Frames" in Lucid acts primarily as a container, not as a functional artboard or screen-frame found in dedicated design tools. This, combined with the infinite canvas, can lead to disorganization on multi-screen projects. And there is no structured page system with either folders or nesting, so it can be difficult to manage complex apps at scale.

As far as interactions and prototyping go, the app offers simple linking to pages or urls like Balsamiq, or to other projects within Lucid. But it doesn’t support object interactions or animations.

Commenting & Collaboration

On the collaboration side, Lucidchart works well. You can share, live-edit, embed, and export. Lucid’s commenting system supports replies, linking, resolving, mentions, and task assignments. There’s a dedicated comments panel for managing feedback, but comments aren't sticky on the canvas and there's no search functionality. For quick team collaboration, it gets the job done, but it lacks the sophistication of tools built for design review workflows.

Best Use Cases vs. Limitations

Where Lucid excels:

Diagramming and process mapping with light UI sketches
Teams already using Lucid for architecture or flow diagrams
Integrations across enterprise platforms
Auto-converting existing infrastructure setups into diagrams
Data-linked diagrams for dashboards and reporting

Where alternatives serve better:

Detailed wireframing or UI design work
Complex multi-screen projects
Projects requiring mid to high-fidelity mockups
Teams needing robust formatting and design controls
Workflows combining wireframing, prototyping, and diagramming

Is this tool right for you?

Lucidchart is a diagramming tool that happens to include wireframing shapes. So, if your team spends most of its time mapping processes, documenting systems, or creating flowcharts, and only needs occasional rough UI sketches, Lucid might be sufficient. But if wireframing is a core activity – or if you need to move beyond basic lo-fi mockups – you'll quickly hit Lucid's design and prototyping limitations. In a way, Lucid feels like a more technical, corporate version of Miro.

The premium paywall for basic wireframing features is particularly frustrating. Shapes and templates that should be standard are locked behind subscriptions, and when you do pay for access, the quality doesn't really match the price. For teams serious about wireframing, tools like Moqups offer far more capability at a better value – and without forcing diagram-centric workflows onto interface design work.

Lucid's price: There's a limited free plan, and paid seats run from $9 - $10 per month depending on the plan, but bundled together, Lucidchart and Lucidspark run from $13.50 - $15 per seat.

Final Thoughts

If you're looking for Figma alternatives, the wireframing space isn't short of options. The goal of this guide is to help you narrow the field and make a decision that suits your workflow. A solo founder pitching an idea has different needs than a cross-functional product team documenting complex flows, or a UX researcher building testable prototypes.

Every app we tested excels in different areas – from low-fidelity ideation to polished prototypes, from simple sketches to complex systems. The right choice depends on who's doing the work, what stage you're at, and how your team collaborates. So, we hope this hands-on comparison helps you find the best match for your own team.

Why Curium switched from Figma to Moqups

Meet Curium

Meet Alex, the Product Manager

The Challenge for Curium

The Problem with Figma

The Solution

The Moqups Advantage

An App for the Whole Team

Moqups for Complex Projects

Show, Don't Tell

Webpage and selection import with new Moqups Extension

Moqups Extension with webpage and AI design import

Turn your live webpages into editable mockups

Convert hi-fi webpages into lo-fi wireframes

Responsive capture

Design with AI

Design briefs

How to install the extension and what’s next

Move Your Work to Moqups with Balsamiq Import

Copy and paste from Balsamiq to Moqups

Drop Balsamiq files right onto your Moqups page

What’s Next

The Hidden Work in UI/UX Design

Hidden behind the design

Hidden from the public

Hidden in heavy industry

Why ‘hidden’ matters

Why is this kind of work hidden?

What hidden work needs from a tool

They need to get to work immediately

They need to work with data, not just layouts

They need structure for large, complex projects

They need non-designers to participate

They need more than a wireframing tool

Moqups for hidden work

What’s New: May 2026

9 New Features

Figma plugin

iOS 26, Material 3 and M2 Design kits

Resize constraints and bulk transform

Expand comments

Team asset libraries

More UI themes

Portuguese language

Moqups press kit

8 Improvements

6 Bugfixes

How to Create a Website Mockup in 6 Steps (With Examples)

What is a website mockup?

Wireframe vs. mockup vs. prototype

Why create a website mockup?

Experiment with aesthetics

Align and inspire the team

Find problems early

Make feedback more concrete

Skip the prototype to save time

How to create a website mockup: a 6-step process

Step 1: Create a free Moqups account

Step 2: Start with a wireframe or template

Step 3: Customize the structure and content hierarchy

Step 4: Introduce branding, colors, typography, and graphics

Step 5: Add real content and refine proportions

Step 6: Share, gather feedback, and iterate

Website mockup examples

SaaS website landing page

Pricing page mockup

High-fidelity website mockup

Financial dashboard

Carbon Design dashboard

Make mockups work for your team

All-In-One vs. Specialized Tools for Product Teams

What is an ‘all-in-one’ tool?

How an all-in-one tool saves you time and money

One tool, less overhead

More voices, faster alignment.

Less context switching, more momentum.

A mismatch between tools and teams

The hidden cost of specialized apps

Busting myths about all-in-one tools

Myth 1: "All-in-one means jack of all trades, master of none."