Table of Content
Accessibility Tools
Accessibility is the practice of creating websites and apps usable for all people, including individuals with visual, motor, auditory, speech, or cognitive disabilities. Here you will find web accessibility tools, accessibility testing tools, and accessibility apps both for developers and designers:
A11ygator — a web tool to analyze websites against WCAG rules. Also available as Google Chrome browser extension and as Twitter bot.
Accessibility Insights — helps developers quickly find and fix accessibility issues.
Accessible Palette Builder — an Elm-based prototype to help designers build accessible color palettes.
AChecker — accessibility testing web app used to evaluate HTML content for accessibility problems.
ANDI — accessibility testing tool for web content (bookmarklet). It will automatically detect accessibility issues, give suggestions to improve online accessibility, and check 508 compliance.
Axe — accessibility engine designed to work on all modern browsers and with whatever tools, frameworks, libraries, and environments you use today. It’s an automated accessibility testing tool for developers.
ColorBox — a web app that algorithmically builds accessible color systems. Done by the Lyft Design team.
Colorable — a free web-based contrast tool.
Color Oracle — a free color blindness simulator.
Contrast — a macOS app for designers and developers to get quick access to WCAG color contrast ratios. -
Contrast Checker — helps check the contrast between the background of an element and the page itself.
Contraste — an app for checking the accessibility of text against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Inclusive Design — a methodology and a set of tools provided by the Microsoft team.
Hex Naw — helps you to test entire color systems for contrast and accessibility.
Leonardo - generate color palettes by desired WCAG contrast ratio. Open source web tool & npm module for designers and engineers. Made by Adobe.
PA11Y 1 — accessibility testing tool to find issues with your web pages. It runs HTML CodeSniffer from the command line for programmatic accessibility reporting. It’s an accessibility developer tool.
Sim Daltonism — a color blindness simulator for macOS and iOS that lets you visualize colors as they are perceived with various types of color blindness.
Stark — a paid Sketch plugin that will let you simulate different types of color blindness. -
Toptal’s Color Filter — lets you test your website and shows you how people with different color blindness will see your pages.
tota11y — an accessibility visualization toolkit. Interesting fact: inside the tool name you can see “a11y”. It’s an abbreviation of accessibility as “a” followed by 11 more letters, followed by “y”.
WAVE — allows you to evaluate web content for accessibility issues directly within Chrome and Firefox. It’s a web accessibility checker.
90 Examples — a free collection of accessible color themes.
Animation Tools
Animations guide people through the product friendly and smoothly. Live interactive UI makes users feel delighted with instant feedback and emotional touch. These free and paid tools are designed to make animation creation easier. If you plan to make animated transitions, micro-interactions or scroll-based animations, go through these tools:
After Effects — digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing application developed by Adobe.
BeatFlyer — a web tool that lets you create very quickly loopy and catchy animations from your multi-layer compositions.
Dokyu Motion — simplifies motion design in After Effects so any editor can tell stories that won′t be ignored.
Flare — a powerful design and animation tool, which allows designers and developers to create animations for their app or game.
Flow — a professional animation tool for Sketch designs that also exports production-ready code for iOS, Web or SVG files. -
GSAP — a suite of tools for scripted, high-performance HTML5 animations in all major browsers.
Haiku Animator — keyframe-based animation connecting your UI tools to code that developers can easily use.
Keyshape — 2D animation tool that allows for animated SVG export. -
Kite Compositor — a powerful animation and prototyping application for Mac & iOS. -
LightBox — 2D, Hand-Drawn animation package. -
Lottie — a mobile library for Android and iOS that parses Adobe After Effects animations exported as JSON with Bodymovin and renders them natively on mobile and the web.
Mantra — a web-based timeline animation tool.
Meteoritic — animation delights library for iOS and Android. Choose from a variety of animations that suits different app styles.
Naker.Back — integrate an interactive background for free to draw more attention to your website.
Naker.Story — make your web content interactive to engage your visitors like never before thanks to 3D.
OFFEO — an online video maker for small businesses to create video ads like the Big Brands without the big budget.
StorySwag — create stylish animated posts for Instagram and Facebook in just a few taps, all from your mobile phone. -
Spirit — the animation tool that helps you to create and manage the animations in real-time in the browser. -
Stylie — a web-based graphical CSS3 animation tool.
Tumult Hype — the HTML5 animation/interactives creation app for macOS. -
Drama, Principle, Framer, Invision Studio, Flinto are also among UI & UX animation apps and software animation tools.
Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality is a technology that upgrades our real world, by adding a layer of digital information to it. The use of AR increases day by day with dozens of new AR apps, development kits, and AR frameworks. So in this section is collected different augmented reality tools for creating, projecting and prototyping apps focused on AR:
Daqri — delivers professional-grade augmented reality for the workforce by overlaying digital information onto the physical environment.
EasyAR — a mobile application and an Augmented Reality Engine, making AR easier.
HP Reveal — adding value to printed content through visual interactivity.
Layar — find various items based upon augmented reality technology.
Lens Studio — create, publish, and share your own AR experiences for Snapchat with or without code.
Lightform 1 — a design tool for projected AR.
Spark AR Studio — сreate AR experiences for Instagram without code. -
Torch — a cloud-based 3D design and prototyping app focused on mobile AR. -
Unity — build high-quality 3D and 2D games, deploy them across mobile, desktop and VR/AR.
Vectary — сreate 3D and AR for your website.
Vuforia — SDK for mobile devices that enables the creation of augmented reality applications.
Wikitude — empowers your iOS, Android & Smart Glasses apps with Image & Object Tracking, Instant tracking (SLAM), Geo AR, and more.
Collaboration Tools
Looking to try some tools for agile design and development collaboration? Good idea because such tools make the lives of designers and developers much easier, save time, and improve productivity. Well, you know all that in the Slack-driven era. Here you’ll find the best collaboration tools for product teams:
Airtable — part spreadsheet, part database, and entirely flexible, teams use Airtable to organize their work, their way.
Asana — the work management platform teams use to stay focused on the goals, projects, and daily tasks that grow business.
Basecamp — the project management suite designed to organize employees, delegate tasks, and monitor progress right from one place.
Freedcamp — the most innovative way to manage projects, completely free… forever.
Droplr — screenshot, file sharing, and screencasts to help you capture and explain your ideas.
Excalidraw — a whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams with a hand-drawn feel.
Filestage — an agile content approval software that helps you to review videos, designs, and documents with clients and co-workers.
Float — a tool to plan your projects and schedule your team’s time all in one place.
Gallery — a collaborative tool for uploading design work, getting feedback, and tracking revisions.
HiveDesk — an automatic time tracking for remote employees with screenshots. It makes it easier to monitor the productivity of remote employees and manage projects.
Jira — software development tool used by agile teams.
Jitsi — multi-platform open-source video conferencing you can install yourself or use on their servers.
Keybase — a free collaboration app with built-in end-to-end encrypted chat, file sharing, git repositories, and more
Lumeer - an easy visual collaborative tool to plan, organize and track anything, anywhere, anytime.
Mattermost — a flexible, open-source messaging platform that meets even the most demanding privacy and security standards.
Milanote — an easy-to-use, collaborative tool to organize your ideas and projects into visual boards.
Mixed — real-time whiteboard and collaboration tools for distributed teams.
Moqhub — fast online proofing for creative projects. Get feedback for images and PDFs.
MURAL — think and collaborate visually. Anywhere, anytime.
Nextcloud — open source collaboration platform for files, kanban boards, chat & calls, calendar and more.
Notion — write, plan, collaborate, and get organized. Notion is all you need — in one tool.
ProofHub — the one place for all your projects, teams and communications.
RealtimeBoard (Miro) — whiteboarding platform for cross-functional team collaboration. It was recently renamed to Miro.
Slack — a collaboration hub for work, no matter what work you do. It’s a place where conversations happen, decisions are made, and information is always at your fingertips.
Sunsama — a beautifully designed, team-oriented task manager that consolidates Trello/Jira/Asana tickets into a single, calendar-oriented view.
Taskade — team productivity made simple, fun and designed for remote teams. Taskade is collaborative and syncs in real-time across the web, mobile, and desktop.
Trello — a web-based project management application that enables you to organize and prioritize your projects in a fun, flexible and rewarding way.
Witeboard — simple real-time whiteboard for collaboration work.
Workzone — a simple, powerful project management software.
Wrike — an online project management software that gives you full visibility and control over your tasks.
Zenkit — a tool to schedule meetings, track the project’s progress, and brainstorm new ideas.
zipBoard — an online visual bug tracking and website annotation tool
Zulip — combines the immediacy of real-time chat with an email threading model, helping to focus on important conversations while ignoring irrelevant ones.
Color Picker Tools
If you are looking for an eyedropper tool, color identifier or color capture, check this section. With the color pickers mentioned here, you will be able to create new color combinations and define great ones. Almost all of these tools are free:
BrandColors — the biggest collection of official brand color codes around.
Calcolor — a web-based color palette management tool which provides a new way to interact with digital colors.
Chroma — free web app which allows you to identify the color.
Color — create color schemes with the color wheel or browse thousands of color combinations from the Color community. Made by Adobe.
Color by Cloudflare — a tool to preview palettes against UI elements, cycle through accessible color combos and create palettes manually, via URL import, or generatively.
Color Deck — an HSL driven color palette collection. It’s also open-source.
Color Hexa — free color tool providing information about any color and generating matching color palettes for designs.
Color Hex Picker - a tool for getting the name of any color from any image. You also get the HEX code and RGB value for the color.
Color Hunt — free and open platform for color inspiration with thousands of trendy hand-picked color palettes.
ColorKit — a tool for blending colors and generating a color’s shades and tints.
Color Leap — leap through time and see the colors of history.
Colorpicker — a complete and open-source color manipulation tool with picking.
ColorSlurp — the ultimate color productivity booster for designers and developers. -
ColorsWall/ — place to store your color palettes or easy generate.
Colorwise — search through the color palettes of the most voted products on Product Hunt.
Colour Cafe — colors inspiration that has selected a modern color palette on Instagram.
Colourcode — an online designer tool, which allows you to easily and intuitively combine colors.
Coolors 1 — the super-fast color scheme generator. -
Culrs — thoughtfully crafted and easy-to-use color palettes.
Geenes — a tool to create harmonious color themes with code and sketch file export.
Image Color Picker — image color picker and color scheme generator.
Instant Eyedropper — a minimalist eyedropper tool for windows, supports multiple color formats for both designers and developers.
Just Color Picker — Free portable offline color picker and color editor.
Khroma — AI-based tool to generate color palettes based on your preferences.
Material Colors Native — Google’s material design color palette in the form of a mac app. -
Material Design Palette Generator — get perfect Material Design color palettes from any hex color.
Paletton — a designer tool for creating color combinations that work together well.
Picular — a rocket fast primary color generator using Google’s image search.
Pigment — a color palette generator with innumerable color configurations suggested by the app.
Pikka — color picker & color schemes generator for macOS. -
React Color — a collection of color pickers from Sketch, Photoshop, Chrome. It‘s free and open-source.
Sip — a better way to collect, organize and share colors. Global eyedropper tool for macOS. -
Skala Color — works with a huge variety of formats, covering everything you’re likely to need for web, iOS, Android, and macOS development. -
Swatches — iOS app that lets you collect, inspect and share the colors that inspire you in your daily life. -
Tint & Shade Generator — display tints and shades of a given hex color in 10% increments.
Viz Palette — color picker for data visualizations.
Design Feedback Tools
How do you provide and get feedback during the development process? This process is usually pretty messy for many product teams, which caused product delays and time waste on back-and-forth communication. So if you wish to get fast and structural feedback on UI issues or visual bugs — take a look at this tool:
Flawless Feedback — review and annotate iOS apps then share your feedback in Jira or Trello. -
GoVisually — online proofing, design review & approval software.
Design Handoff Tools
Design handoff happens when designers finish the work and need to deliver designs to developers with all specs and assets. Design handoff tools allow to automatically generate style guide, comment on the design, inspect elements. These tools minimize guesswork and improve the effectiveness of the design process.
Avocode — open designs without design tools. Export images without preparing layers. Click on layers to get code.
Flawless App — a tool to compare the expected design and the real app right inside iOS Simulator (useful for designers who use Xcode or mobile developers). -
Inspect — prepare designs for development. Made by Invision.
Sketch Measure — Sketch redline plugin. Annotate distance and size of elements.
Specctr — in the unfortunate event you’re designing UI in PS, AI, or ID this tool creates redline annotations.
Sympli — automated specs and assets handoff from Sketch, Photoshop and Adobe XD. Integrated with Jira, Xcode and Android Studio.
Zeplin — handoff designs and style guides with accurate specs, assets, code snippets automatically.
Design Inspiration
The creative process can be tough. So if ideas don’t come to your mind right away, try to search for inspiration in the work of other designers. These design inspiration sites feature design patterns, user flows, email markups and creative solutions of popular companies and great products:
Behance — an online platform to showcase & discover creative work.
CodeMyUI — handpicked collection of web design & UI inspiration with code snippets.
Collect UI — a platform for your daily inspiration collected from Daily UI & beyond. Based on Dribbble shots, 14419 handpicked designs.
Creative Portfolios — a curation of the most creative portfolios made by designers & developers.
Design Hunt — a daily collection of the best products, apps, and inspirations for all creatives. -
Dribbble — an online community for showcasing user-made artwork. A great resource to get inspired by others work.
Ficture — a font in use archive that will inspire you.
Inspiration UI — a community that aims to provide the best design resources for those who create for the web.
Hover States — showcase great work from the bleeding edge of digital culture for, and with, the creative community.
Httpster — an inspiration resource showcasing rocking websites made by people from all over the world.
H69.Design — landing page colletions & Free resources for designers.
Lapa Ninja — landing page design inspiration from around the web. 1800+ landing page examples and updated daily.
Mobile Patterns — a design inspirational library featuring finest UI UX Patterns (iOS and Android).
Mobbin — browse mobile design patterns for popular apps. Explore common user flows such as onboarding, account sign up and log in, core functionality, and more.
One Page Love — a collection of beautiful unique One Page websites for website design inspiration.
Owwly — home for digital products crafted with passion to design.
Page Flows — user flow videos and screenshots to inspire you when you’re stuck. Discover mobile and web design patterns for over 160 different tasks.
pttrns — design patterns for popular mobile apps.
Really Good Emails — 4,150+ handpicked email design.
ReallyGoodUX — screenshots, and examples of great UX from real mobile and web products. Discover the best UX examples—including onboarding tours and walkthroughs.
Saas Landing Page — iscover the best landing page examples created by top-class SaaS companies, and get ideas and inspiration for your next design project.
Saas Pages — a collection of the best landing pages with a focus on copywriting and design.
The Design Team — comics about a design team for a tech startup in Silicon Valley.
Typewolf — helps designers choose the perfect font combination for their next design project.
UI Garage — the one-stop shop for designers, developers, and marketers to find inspiration, tools and the best resources.
UI Sources — over 500+ interactions from the best designed and top-grossing apps on the App Store today.
UI Recipes — weekly 15 min lessons on UI design from the hottest apps.
UX Archive — browse more than 400 user flows across 120 mobile apps. Examine tasks such as booking, logging in, onboarding, purchasing, searching, and more.
Waveguide — a design knowledge bank with thousands of artificially enriched examples of product and brand experience (examples of Mobile App, Landing pages, eCommerce, CX/UX Patterns).
Web Design Museum — over 1,200 carefully selected web sites that show web design trends between the years 1994 and 2006.
Design System Tools
I bet you heard about Design Systems, as it’s a pretty trendy topic. Design systems provide consistent, robust design patterns to keep design and development in sync. They are essentially collections of rules, constraints, and principles, implemented in design and code. Here you can find tools to build, maintain and organize your design system.
Cabana — a Premium Design System for Sketch that helps you create amazing products faster than ever before.
Catalog — a living style guide for digital products, combining design documentation with real live components.
Design System Manager — Invision’s design system manager.
DSK — short for “Design System Kit” – a workbench for collaboratively creating Design Systems.
EOS Design System — an open-source and customizable built on top of Bootstrap following the Atomic Design concept.
Eva Design System — customizable design system, available for Sketch with Mobile and Web component libraries.
Frontify — create graphical guidelines, patterns libraries, design systems.
Interplay — connect design and engineering around a single source of truth. The tool is not publicly available yet (beta).
Lingo — create a shared asset library with your entire team. -
Lucid — tool for creating, managing and sharing a design system. From a simple component library through to detailed descriptions of your styles.
Modulz — design, build, document and publish your design system—without writing code.
Prime Design System Kit — it includes device templates, charts, UI kit and even illustration kit. -
Specify — a tool to create, scale and maintain a design system.
Storybook — an open-source tool for developing UI components in isolation for React, Vue, and Angular.
Symbol Design System — design System for Sketch-based on atomic elements.
Toolabs — design systems and components based design, prototype and development tool. It’s not public yet but you can apply to the early access.
Zeroheight — style guides created by designers, extended by developers, and editable by everyone.
We can also add to this in Sketch, Figma, UXPin and Framer X (Framer X Team Store).
Design to Code Tools
Everyone can learn development but it takes time and effort. If you need a website or an app right now and you don’t want to hire a developer, pay attention to the website builders. Such design to code tools will help you to make a portfolio, simple landing or an app pretty fast and beautiful.
Anima 1 — a web app with a Sketch plugin that converts Sketch to HTML. -
Blocs — a fast, easy to use and powerful visual web design tool, that lets you create responsive websites without writing code. -
Bootstrap Studio 1 — a powerful web design tool for creating responsive websites using the Bootstrap framework.
Draftbit — visually design and build mobile apps directly from your browser.
EasyLogic Studio — fantastic css+svg design tool, also it is converted into code as shown.
Grapedrop — design your components, web projects and publish them instantly online, with an easy to use editor.
Mobirise — an offline drag and drop website builder software that is based on Bootstrap ¾ and \ AMP.
PageCloud — the fastest and most customizable website builder that allows anyone to create their ideal website.
PaintCode — vector drawing app that instantly converts drawings into Swift, Objective-C, JavaScript or Java code. -
Pinegrow — a professional visual editor for CSS Grid, Bootstrap 4 and 3, Foundation, responsive design, HTML, and CSS.
px.div — a proper site build tool for developers and designers.
Readymag — a visually-pleasing tool for designing on the web from landing pages to multimedia long-reads, presentations and portfolios.
Sparkle — the easiest way to make a real website, no code, no jargon. -
STUDIO — design from scratch, collaborate in real-time and publish websites.
Supernova Studio — import designs from Sketch and convert them into Android, iOS or React Native code.
Tilda — create a website, landing page or online store for free with the help of Tilda modules and publish it on the same day.
Wix — the easiest and fullest-featured website builder, that allows you to create your own highly customized site.
Webflow — build responsive websites in your browser, then host with us or export your code to host wherever.
Design Version Control
Developers actively use version control tools for a long time, probably since 2005 (Git first release). Using a version control system is a brainer for dev teams, while the design version control system appeared only recently. This market is rapidly developing and we expect to see even more in version control for designers:
Abstract — a platform for design teams to version, manage and collaborate on Sketch files.
Folio — a simple version control system for design teams based on Git. -
Kactus — design version control without changing your tools. Manage changes, document work and keep your team in sync. -
Plant — Mac app and Sketch plugin offering complete version control for designers and teams. -
Relay for Figma — Relay pushes your latest assets from Figma directly to your codebase (not released yet).
Versions — a version control tool for designers with visual diff, merge and conflict resolution. Works with GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab and Azure DevOps.
Development Tools
This section mentions development tools and browsers. Development browsers have features that help developers and designers create and test websites and apps.
Blisk — provides a development workspace to develop and test modern web applications twice faster.
Firefox developer edition — developer edition of the Firefox browser.
Litmus — an email campaign creation platform that, amongst other things, lets you see how HTML emails will appear in a wide variety of email clients.
Polypane — a browser built from the ground up to create and test websites and apps.
Storybook — an open source tool for developing UI components in isolation for React, Vue, and Angular. It makes building stunning UIs organized and efficient.
Styleguidist — isolated React component development environment with a living style guide.
Experience Monitoring
Listening to users is important but seeing the real usage is even more crucial. For these, you need to install different analytic tools, experience monitoring software, and user behavior apps. Just use those analytics solutions concerning users data:
Amplitude — understand your users, rapidly release better product experiences, and grow your business.
Chalkmark — increase your customer conversion and task-oriented success rates by getting quick feedback on designs before you implement.
Fathom — provides simple, useful websites stats without tracking or storing personal data of your users.
FullStory — an app that captures all your customer experience data in one powerful, easy-to-use platform.
Google Analytics — measure your advertising ROI and track your sites and applications.
Heap — automatically capture every web, mobile, and cloud interaction then retroactively analyze your data without writing code.
Heatly — free heatmap tools to understand the website’s user experience better.
Hotjar — see how visitors are using your website and collect user feedback.
Inspectlet — record videos of your visitors as they use your site, so you can see everything they do.
LiveSession - high-quality user’s session replay analytics.
LogRocket — see what users do on your site, helping you reproduce bugs and fix issues faster.
Mixpanel — get insights across all of your user-centric data to make smarter decisions and act faster based on how customers use your product or website.
Mouseflow — record mouse cursor movements.
Pendo — measure and elevate the customer experience within their applications.
Smartlook — user session replay and user engagement analytics.
Usabilla — build future-proof customer experiences by asking the right questions at the right time.