Best Design Tools in 2026

Maze is a user research platform for testing prototypes, surveys, and concepts with real users. It turns designs into interactive tests and delivers actionable metrics. It was founded in 2018.

Framer lets you design and publish responsive sites visually, with real CMS, animations, and SEO built in. Go from idea to live in an afternoon.

Whimsical is a visual collaboration workspace with flowcharts, wireframes, mind maps and boards. Teams brainstorm and map processes together with real-time multiplayer editing.

Figma is where teams design together in real time, from first idea to final handoff. Prototype, comment, and ship without leaving the browser.

Excalidraw is a free, open-source virtual whiteboard for sketching diagrams in a hand-drawn style. It supports real-time collaboration and exporting, and runs directly in the browser.

Rive is a collaborative tool for creating and animating vector graphics that run in real time. Designers can build interactive animations with a state machine and ship them to web, mobile, and games. It was founded by twin brothers Guido and Luigi Rosso.

Marvel is a cloud-based design platform for wireframing, prototyping, and user testing. Teams can turn static screens into clickable prototypes and gather feedback. It was founded in London in 2013.

Coolors is a color palette generator that helps designers create and explore color schemes quickly. It offers palette generation, browsing, and tools for contrast and gradients. It was created by Fabrizio Bianchi in 2014.

Jitter is a browser-based motion design tool for creating animated graphics and videos. It offers presets, templates, and Figma import on a collaborative canvas. The company was founded in France in 2020.

Zeplin is a design delivery platform that bridges designers and developers. It generates specs, assets, and code snippets from design files to streamline handoff. The company was founded in 2014 and went through Y Combinator.

Milanote is a flexible tool for organizing ideas and projects on visual boards. Creatives use it to collect notes, images, links and tasks in a freeform, moodboard-style workspace.

Penpot is an open-source UI design and prototyping tool that runs in the browser and can be self-hosted, with support for components, design tokens, and open formats like SVG and CSS. It is built by the Madrid-based open-source studio Kaleidos.

Khroma is an AI color tool that generates palettes based on colors you like. It trains a personalized model to surface combinations, gradients, and typography pairings. It was created by designer George Hastings.

Iconscout is a design resource marketplace offering icons, illustrations, 3D assets, and Lottie animations. It provides plugins and tools for designers to find and edit assets. It was founded in 2016 and later acquired by LottieFiles.

CouturAI is an AI-powered design platform built for fashion designers. It enables users to generate complete clothing collections from text prompts, streamlining the design process from concept to finished collection in minutes rather than hours or days.

Rotato is an app for creating 3D mockups and animations of apps on devices. Designers can drop in screenshots and produce rotating, animated product shots. It was founded in 2019.

LottieFiles is a platform for creating, editing, and shipping Lottie animations. It provides a marketplace, plugins, and developer tools around the JSON-based animation format. The company was founded in 2017 and later created the dotLottie format.

AppIconVault is a design reference archive featuring real app icons from the iOS App Store and Google Play Store. The gallery includes 48,663 apps across 49,796 icon versions from 33,376 developers, organized by 78 charted categories. Each icon entry provides...

Mockuuups Studio is a mockup generator that lets designers drop their work onto thousands of device, apparel, and print scenes to produce realistic product visuals. It integrates with Figma, Sketch, and Photoshop and is self-funded.

Linearity Curve, formerly Vectornator, is a vector graphic design app for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. It offers illustration, logo, and layout tools with an intuitive interface. It was founded by Vladimir Danila in 2017.

Shotmora is an AI-powered tool that transforms a single real product photo into a full set of Amazon listing images, including main images, lifestyle photos, infographics, comparison visuals, and A+ content. Users can upload up to three product angles, review...

ProtoPie is a prototyping tool that lets designers build high-fidelity, interactive prototypes without code. It supports sensors, conditions, and variables to simulate realistic app and device behavior. Made by Studio XID, it launched in 2017.

Kittl is a browser-based graphic design platform built for designers, with text effects, vintage fonts, templates, and AI tools for branding, posters, and merch art. It grew out of the founders' Heritage Type Co. vintage font marketplace.

Uizard is an AI design tool that turns text prompts, screenshots, and sketches into editable UI mockups. It helps teams rapidly wireframe and prototype apps and websites. It was founded in Copenhagen and later acquired by Miro.

Favico Studio is a comprehensive favicon generator designed for modern websites. It enables users to create, preview, and fine-tune icons for every platform, ensuring sharp appearance across browsers, devices, and Google search results. The platform also...

Relume is a web design system and component library for Figma and Webflow. It lets designers assemble sitemaps and wireframes quickly using thousands of pre-built sections. The company launched its library in 2021.

CleanShot X is a Mac app for capturing screenshots and screen recordings with annotation and cloud sharing. It includes tools to hide desktop clutter, add backgrounds, and record GIFs. It was released in 2020 by a team in Poland.

FreeOGImage is a privacy-first Open Graph and social share image generator that operates entirely in your browser. It offers hundreds of designer-made templates for creating crisp, pixel-perfect images for platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. No...

PNG to SVG is a suite of fast image tools that convert and compress images entirely in your browser. Convert PNG to SVG, swap between formats like JPG, WebP, and PNG, and shrink file sizes without uploading anything to a server. All processing happens locally...

FontGen.art is a free browser-based font generator that converts any text into 100+ stylized text formats including cursive, bold, gothic, bubble, and decorative styles. The tool runs entirely in your browser with no signup, no ads, and no server uploads....

Blur & Unblur AI is a free private image editor built for fast face privacy workflows. Upload a photo locally in your browser, detect faces automatically, remove false detections, draw manual lasso masks when needed, blur selected faces, unblur selected face...

Color Mapper is a free, browser-based color toolkit that combines palette generation, gradient building, WCAG contrast checking, and color format conversion in one place. It includes 9 specialized color tools and 18 format converters supporting RGB, CMYK,...

Spline brings 3D design to the web, so you can model, animate, and ship interactive scenes without specialized software or code.

Cursive Generator is a free online tool that converts plain text into cursive styles, offering both Unicode copy-paste options and downloadable images in PNG and SVG formats. Users can preview real cursive fonts, compare styles, and export their chosen design...