I made a site to explore the best UI/UX design tools out there

Maybe you can add Penpot [1] It was released some time ago and it's open source and possible to self host. Featurewise it is comparable to Figma.

[1] https://penpot.app/

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26000257

I'll add it some time today, thanks for the tip.

Some feedback:

* add some left and right padding, i.e. center the table or at least make it match the padding in your navbar

* back button functionality is broken (Firefox 87)

* Popularity metric doesn't really tell me anything at the moment (i.e.: a "progress bar" without labels is fairly pointless)

* Some columns are too wide for their contents (e.g.: pricing)

* Not sure the supplementary text is needed next to some icons (e.g.: The green tick icon in Version control is enough, the "View file version history" text adds nothing)

Thanks for the feedback!

Noted.

I have pushed an update to solve the navigation issue.

Also I would suggest a way to filter by each column.

The result being that users could choose to see only apps that work offline, or only apps that have the pen tool and collaborative editing while still being free.

That makes sense, it is on my list of features to add.

I'm sad we don't have an open-source alternative to these. Something like Blender but for UX design. Surely it's nice to have a backing of a private company but they seem to switch every few years. Before Figma, Sketch was the big thing. Probably in a few years something else will come up and require us to convert to that. An open-source alternative would perhaps make it more easy to adapt and change based on the community's necessities?

https://github.com/akiraux/Akira

It has already been added: https://sleekui.com/product/Akira

Ok, but I wanted inform @sktrdie about Akira.

There was an open source Figma tool I ran into some time back with decent functionality. It was not Akira, but not sure that it was called. I'll try and find the tool and add it.

Pencil? https://pencil.evolus.vn/

Thanks, it has been added.

Also the best of breed, https://excalidraw.com/

Cool, I'll add that.

There is also Penpot, which was released some weeks ago. It is pretty usable and FOSS.

https://penpot.app/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26000257

Well, that's cool.

It looks good, and amazing that it's open source.

It has been added.

Quant UX? Don't have personal experience though.

https://www.quant-ux.com/

Looks interesting, I'll add it.

Good point about scrolling on mobile, I'll look into fixing that.

Oh and I've added a few more UX design tools, Quant UX is open source.

A website to explore UX tools and the first thing you see when you load the page is a popup asking to take a survey. I haven't even browsed your website yet.

Plus it breaks the back button. Shambles.

What browser are you using? I think it is the root url re-direct, but still looking into it.

The problem is the HN post links to https://sleekui.com/ which immediately redirects to https://sleekui.com/category/design - when you hit the back button, it tries to go back to the homepage but then is redirected again.

So it's not possible to get back to HN using the back button after clicking into your site.

One easy fix is to edit the HN submission link (if it lets you) to link to /category/design instead of the homepage.

I have pushed an update to solve the navigation issue.

You can close it.

You ask for feedback on usability, someone gives it to you, and your response is "you're using it wrong."

I didn't mean it that way :) It's a one question form, with a general question about the UI industry.

How did you mean it exactly? Did you genuinely think that the commenter didn’t know your popup could be closed?

We all say dum things including me :)

Please don't be a jerk on HN, regardless of what's in another comment. Especially when someone's sharing their work, it's important to be respectful and avoid aggressiveness.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I pointed out earlier that I shouldn't have made that comment.

I didn't mean to pile on!

I instantly thought it was a parody website for what the websites have come to nowadays. Where is the cookie popup? Where is my back button hijacking? Where is my adblock warning!?

The back button should be solved now, and I'm just trying to get some general feedback. Or maybe I'm creating a meme website :)

Adobe XD vs Figma as a developer I think figma wins. I get shared designs from both, Adobe xd URLs take ages to load and performance is extremely slow while figma URLs load quickly and are smooth even for huge designs.

I started out with Adobe XD in the beginning, but Figma works so well.

I don’t often like to rant but XD is fascinating to me as an example of trying to work out what went so wrong in building it. Every time I open it (and by force its companion Creative Cloud updater) it does something radical. Last time the updater just started playing a loud buzzing noise (like a crashed audio thread). If I have open a file open too long (a few minutes), it freezes then crashes when I try to exit. There was period where I’d have to click through slow you-don’t-have access dialogs to a file I do have access to. This is all on a single project over the last few weeks

Adobe has brilliant engineers and talent and some parts of XD are well built and I want XD to succeed. It makes me speculate if it's a case of the original team being moved onto other projects or management exploring outsourcing

Some of those bugs are almost hilarious, but also a sad state of the software.

The reason why I stopped using it was because every time I exported an asset, the image was blurry for some reason.

fact is that if XD wasn't part of Adobe's ecosystem it would have never gained any traction. It became as popular as it its because its pushed down with the same subscription as Photoshop and the rest of the gang so it makes no sense for someone who has the suite to also pay for another product but it is a very badly made piece of software even though they started it from scratch and doesn't have all the baggage that applications like Photoshop have.

I do have XD installed just to view designs but I don't really design in it and what amazes me is how often it gets updated, almost weekly.

XD is free. Some features like online sharing are restricted to Creative Cloud subscribers.

But at least XD allows you to save your design files locally. Figma forces you to use their cloud storage, which is pretty much a non-starter for me. I like to store my design files with the rest of the project, which is impossible with Figma.

Why should I use your website over uxtools?

https://uxtools.co/tools/design

I'm aiming to make something a bit more comprehensive, making it easier to compare tools with different feature sets.

Ok, good luck. One thing I'm missing in both sites is lack of some search box, where I could type feature and I would show me which apps have it and which don't.

That's on the list of things to add for sure.

It's one thing to make your own comprehensive solution, but taking it directly from uxtools.co seems shady.

All data is independently researched. In some cases you will inevitably have overlaps, because it makes the most sense to order content in a certain way.

The datasets are also fundamentally different, because I have drawn my own conclusions during my research.

Yeah, this looks like a copy of UX Tools. Same exact layout and everything.

All data is independently researched. In some cases you will inevitably have overlaps, because it makes the most sense to order content in a certain way.

The datasets are also fundamentally different, because I have drawn my own conclusions during my research.

The columns are even in the same order. Looks like a copy cat.

All data is independently researched. In some cases you will inevitably have overlaps, because it makes the most sense to order content in a certain way.

The datasets are also fundamentally different, because I have drawn my own conclusions during my research.

This is cool and would definitely be a useful resource if I were choosing a design tool right now. I see some other feedback but didn’t see this mentioned: scrolling on mobile is a bit disorienting because it doesn’t seem possible to scroll in only one direction. This is especially jarring trying to track the vertical position I was previously at as I scroll horizontally, and requires icon recognition.

Figma has been such a blessing while running our UI/UX studio. We work with technical teams (mostly SaaS) and Figma has 10X our productivity internally and made it a lot easier for the dev teams we work with to implement the designs. Having all files neatly organized in a shared online environment that isn’t platform specific, with all the inspector tools in place is huge.

It's difficult for Sketch to compete with Figma being platform agnostic.

I am a backend developer who somehow ended up a full stack developer... aka... you can do html so you can also do the frontend. So what is figma and for what should I use it?

You can use it to make mockups, to plan the layout of your apps. And then use the markup output to build the front-end. Makes coding easier.

Your list takes a while to populate on page load. I would add some placeholder rows and a loading indicator.

You are right, I'll add that.

Surprising to see XD in second place, I thought uptake was a bit lower than that.

I’ve actually noticed more people using Figma as a (painful) Illustrator replacement than XD in the wild anecdotally, must be outside of my bubble.

It's very difficult to find a common metric that is reliable, unless I have user generated inputs for that. Currently, it's based on Google search volume. Mostly for the domain, but sometimes that is not possible, and for Photoshop I have to use "photoshop ui design" to get a good estimate for how popular it is among UI designers

There's a pretty reliable measure of popularity here: https://uxtools.co/tools/design

You may even notice it looks shockingly similar to OPs site.

All data is independently researched. In some cases you will inevitably have overlaps, because it makes the most sense to order content in a certain way.

The datasets are also fundamentally different, because I have drawn my own conclusions during my research.

How do you measure popularity? What does it even mean?

Is website traffic your proxy?

It's very difficult to find a common metric that is reliable, unless I have user generated inputs for that. Currently, it's based on Google search volume. Mostly for the domain, but sometimes that is not possible, and for Photoshop I have to use "photoshop ui design" to get a good estimate for how popular it is among UI designers.

It seems that in Figma's case search traffic will be extremely unreliable given that you navigate to the website to use it, while you use a local app for Sketch and others.

This looks exactly like https://uxtools.co/tools/design.

Each tool has been independently researched, of course there are going to be overlaps when comparing some of the same services.

Breaks the back button (Firefox 87). Don't do that.

Are you sure it breaks? I'm performing a temporary re-direct from the root url.

Yes it does happen to me too

I hit the homepage. I click on Figma. That all works fine. Figma page loads, I browse the info on it. I click back, it takes me to the main page again. I click back to leave the site and go back to HN, it prevents that action. I hit back again, same result; I can no longer use the back button to navigate backwards.

Yeah it broke the back button, for one reason or another. I'm 100% certain I can't traverse backwards using back.

Just tested it again.

Edit: tested it in Chrome 89.0.4389.114 (on Windows 10). Same problem.

I can replicate something similar if I visit the site via http and not https, because there is an application level re-direct.

I have pushed an update to solve the navigation issue.

It also breaks on iOS Safari

I have pushed an update to solve the navigation issue.

No PowerPoint? ;)

Sounds like an interesting tool

It’ll never catch on