30 Must-Try Mobile App Design Software Tools for Developers and Designers
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The top software development company in Vietnam, providing enterprise web and app solutions to businesses since 2013.
Need mobile app design software tools tailored to your project? This article by Designveloper brings you 30 impressive tools—ranging from beginner-friendly to expert-level, free and paid—that can transform your app development process. No matter your experience level, you'll discover the right tools to match your vision and workflow. Let’s get started and bring your app ideas to life.
What Is a Mobile App Design Software?
As the name indicates, mobile app design software is a specialized tool that helps you build user interfaces for mobile apps. Its main function is offering a unified, easy-to-use platform where any designer can build, edit, and optimize an app’s visual elements. This includes everything from the layout and typography to color schemes and icons.
However, mobile app design software is more than a visual design tool. It offers the ability to craft interactive prototypes. In other words, with these software tools, you can easily test the user experience and functionality of your design before the development stage begins.
Further, most tools now support teams to collaborate smoothly, share ideas, and offer real-time feedback. This not only ensures design consistency but also keeps the final product aligned with ultimate goals.
Why Do You Need a Mobile App Design Software?
Mobile app design software plays a crucial role in the development process. One research study has shown that the future of these software tools is promising, with an annual growth of over 18% from 2024 to 2031. So, what are the reasons behind this impressive rise? Let’s find out several immense benefits of these software tools to understand why they’re that popular:
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Top 30 Mobile App UI Design Software Tools in 2025
1. Adobe After Effects
Pricing: Start at $22.99/month (if billed annually) with a free 14-day trial.
Adobe After Effects is a program for making mobile apps for Windows and macOS. It’s not the easiest design tool to learn, but there are so many great things about it that you won’t be sorry about. Motion graphics, animation, and short movies can be made with Adobe After Effects. This tool makes sure that the design meets the requirements of the platform and is usable. It is also used to test out animations.
2. Adobe Illustrator
Pricing: Start at $22.99/month (if billed annually) with a free 14-day trial.
Adobe Illustrator allows you to customize brand assets using 3D effects, gradients, and other amazing features. It also helps you create incredible illustrations that scale infinitely by combining lines, shapes, and color. Further, you can use the Mockup functionality to automatically convert any blank product image into realistic results. Or you may leverage Project Neo to turn 3D designs into vectors.
3. Adobe Photoshop
Pricing: Start at $22.99/month (if billed annually) with a free 14-day trial.
Adobe Photoshop allows you to combine images to create something totally new or remove unnecessary objects. It also offers other amazing functionalities like Generative Workspace (for creating dozens of assets simultaneously), Generative Fill (for adding rich, detailed elements), or Adobe Substance 3D Viewer (for adding 3D objects mostly to your design). However, Adobe Photoshop has a middle learning curve. This means you can learn the basics easily, but it takes time to learn and master all the tricks.
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4. Affinity Designer 2
Pricing: Start at $18.49 for iPad and $69.99 for macOS or Windows. Or you can buy the v2 Universal License at $164.99.
Affinity Designer is stunning vector graphics software available for desktop versions and iPad. It helps you edit single pixels on icons, add texture to your illustrations, set up grids or guides, and adjust vector resolution seamlessly.
5. AppSheet
Pricing: Start at $5 per user/month.
This is Google’s no-code app development software that has a short learning curve. To develop your desired app, you can start everything with a Blank app, Gemini, existing data or available templates. Then, AppSheet’s flexible features allow you to design easy-to-navigate interfaces and create rules to automate your workflows.
AppSheet offers basic features for app creation, so it’s not suitable for complex apps. Instead, you can build internal apps for simple inventory management, project tracking, or onboarding.
6. Axure RP
Pricing: Start at $29 per user/month with a free 30-day trial.
Axure RP is a robust mobile app design software for professional designers. The software gives you all the functionalities you need to create the best app ever. If you’re struggling with delivering your design to developers, Axure RP is your ideal choice. Using this tool, you can publish an Axure RP file to Axure Cloud, and then show your design on the web as a complete picture, including everything you want to display — documentation, prototypes, visual design, you name it.
7. Balsamiq
Pricing: Start at $12/month.
Balsamiq is meant for app designing tools. Using this tool, you can completely focus on structure and content without being interrupted by colors and details. It’s easy to use, so you don’t need to worry about the learning curve. Balsamiq is available on the web, Mac, and Windows. You can integrate the app with Google Drive, Confluence, and Jira.
8. BuildFire
Pricing: Start at $85/month (if billed annually).
When it comes to making apps for iOS and Android, many designers opt for BuildFire. The first reason is that this tool is 100% free to build, meaning you can create a mobile app design software without spending a dime. You won’t have to pay unless you publish it. Besides, you don’t need to have any coding knowledge to create an app on this platform.
9. Claritee
Pricing: The free plan is available for up to 3 projects. Meanwhile, the paid package, Pro+, offers $190 per seat/year with a free 7-day trial.
The design software helps you visualize design requirements and speed your teams through the planning phase by providing features like Page Hierarchy, Visual Sitemaps, and Visual Layouts.
It also allows for real-time feedback, collaborative editing, and revisions. Plus, its AI capabilities help generate visual sitemaps, wireframes, or mockups based on your project requirements. Besides, you can drag and drop thousands of built-in components into your pages and apps. This saves you significant time and effort in designing.
FURTHER READING:1. 12 Mobile App Development Tips to Help You Grow Faster2. 3 Essential UI Mistakes and How to Fix It
10. Figma
Pricing: It provides a free-forever plan for up to 3 collaborative design files. Paid plans start at $15 per month for a full seat.
Figma is a leading collaborative UI design tool in the world. It helps you create effective design systems, UX designs, wireframes, and prototypes. Accordingly, your team can brainstorm, collect contextual feedback from stakeholders in real time, and build realistic, no-code prototypes to test the user experience.
11. Flinto
Pricing: Start at $99/month for a yearly license with a free trial.
Flinto is a Mac app design tool to create interactive and animated prototypes. The software offers a bunch of features like sound effects, gestures, scroll animations, animated transitions, etc. You won’t find any trouble when working with Flinto, for sure.
12. Fluid UI
Pricing: Start at $8.25/month.
With Fluid UI, you can prototype and share your design instantly. This tool supports faster prototyping, epic collaboration, interactive previews, fluid UI, and more. You can’t miss it!
13. FramerJS
Pricing: Start at $5/month for individuals and $75/month for businesses.
Compared with the tools above, FramerJS is a bit difficult to start with. You need some time to get familiar with the software and its features. Despite that, FramerJS is still the right choice if you don’t mind getting some training early. It covers all the features that the typical mobile design app software should have.
14. IconJar
Pricing: Start at €25/year or buy a lifetime license at €65.
If you have a lot of icons but don’t know how to organize them, you should use a mobile app design tool named IconJar. The name tells it all — this tool works like a “jar” where you can keep your icons inside and manage them the way you want. For example, you can drag icons from IconJar to any app, export icons in any size/type/color, or use Smart Sets to similar icons. There are unlimited possibilities for you to work with this awesome tool.
15. HotGloo
Pricing: Start at $11/month for up to 4 users and 2 projects.
HotGloo is an optimized mobile app design software. It runs in your browser, so you need an Internet connection to work with this tool. Apart from that, GotGloo is useful for creating interactive wireframes and prototypes. It currently offers a 7-day free trial.
16. JustInMind
Pricing: It has a free forever plan. Paid plans start at $9 per editor/month.
JustInMind is the standalone mobile app design software for wireframe and prototype designers. This tool supports fully interactive, responsive prototypes, smart forms, and data, along with free UI kits. You can also import your work from Sketch or Microsoft TFS to JustinMind and edit images in Illustrator or Photoshop.
17. Lunacy
Pricing: Start at $11.99 per user/month (if billed annually). The free plan is available as well.
This mobile app design software comes with built-in graphics (e.g., icons or illustrations), collaboration features, and AI tools. These functionalities enable you to create responsive designs even in offline settings, create working prototypes, and collaborate in real time. AI capabilities also streamline your design process by automatically removing background, upscaling images, generating text, etc.
18. Marvel
Pricing: Start at $12/month. The free plan is also available.
Marvel allows you to design, prototype, and work with your team quickly. You can see how your potential users will interact with your designs in real-time. Even if you’re a newbie in the world of designing Android/iOS apps, Marvel makes you feel like you’re professional. It’s actually the all-in-one mobile app design software for everyone.
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19. Mockplus
Pricing: It offers a free-forever plan. Paid plans start at $13.9 per user/month for teams (billed annually).
Mockplus is a free and web-based mobile app design tool for designers to quickly create UI design elements, wireframes, and prototypes.
It provides an intuitive drag-and-drop builder and tons of ready-made components, UI library, and reusable assets, speeding up your design work and saving you a lot of workload. With Mockplus, you can also import designs from Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, and PS for further collaboration and handoff.
20. Moqups
Pricing: Start at $9 per seat/month. The free plan is available as well.
Are you looking for powerful visual collaboration software? So don’t ignore Moqups. This tool allows you to share ideas, map workflows, and build interactive mockups for UI/UX designs by dragging and dropping graphical elements.
21. OmniGraffle
Pricing: Subscribe to Mac-iPhone-iPad versions at $12.99/month. Or you can buy a license once, starting at $59.99. A free 14-day trial is also available.
As a diagram design tool, OmniGraffle will help you create screen flows, strategy maps, wireframes, and many other diagrams you want. This tool offers advanced features like artboard presentation, artboard layers, automation with JavaScript, etc. Currently, it’s available for Apple products only.
22. Origami Studio 3
Pricing: Free.
Origami Studio 3 allows you to create prototypes with intuitive layers. You can also bring Sketch layers to Origami and edit them with masks, animations, behaviors, etc. Besides, it comes with pre-designed material and iOS components, which allows you to design faster. Here is the fact: Origami Studio 3 is a product of Facebook engineers, and it has been used to develop Facebook Messenger as well as Instagram! What’s more? It’s the best app design software!
23. Principle
Pricing: $129 for each computer.
If your designs need complex animations and interactions, you can use Principle to create them. It doesn’t matter that you’re making a multi-screen app or a new animation, you can do that with this app. The principle is now available for Mac only, and it supports all the Mac features you love: Full-screen mode, a Retina interface, and AutoSave.
24. Proto.io
Pricing: Start at $24/month (if billed annually). A free 15-day trial is also available.
Proto.io is trusted by companies such as Amazon, Evernote, PayPal, and Disney. This free app design software is easy to use and doesn’t require coding skills. It also offers a wide range of design and prototype templates. The latest version of Proto.io comes with useful features like preset templates, gradient colors, visual Easings Manager, etc.
25. ProtoPie
Pricing: The free plan is available for two prototypes. Paid plans start at $25/month.
If you’re looking for the best tool to create working prototypes easily without coding knowledge, ProtoPie is a good option. Accordingly, you can drag and drop different components (e.g., Map, Orders, or Favorite) and add triggers to create dynamic interactions for your app interface. In addition, ProtoPie enables you to add designs from Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD through available plugins.
26. Sketch
Pricing: Start with $10 per editor/month, along with a 30-day trial. You can also buy an annual license at the full price of $120 if you work alone and only need the Mac app.
Many big names like Nintendo, Google, Facebook, and even Apple have been using Sketch to create design masterpieces. This tool provides a unique vector editor to build anything from icons. You can also leverage its hundreds of free templates, component libraries, and artboard presets or reuse graphical elements across your design to save time and effort.
Sketch also allows you to build a working prototype with animations to validate your app idea. You can even work on Sketch individually or collaboratively with other workers for real-time editing.
27. Visily
Pricing: Start at $11 per editor/month, but a free plan is still provided.
This UI design software has a short learning curve. In other words, it allows you to design hi-fidelity wireframes and prototypes right away without worrying much about design systems, libraries, and plugins. Further, its AI functionalities facilitate your workflows by turning your app idea or sketch into a design. You can access more than 1,500 prebuilt templates to create your design efficiently.
28. Uizard
Pricing: it has a free plan for students and hobbyists. Paid plans start at $12 per user/month.
Uizard is one of the first AI-powered design tools in the world. It helps you visualize your product ideas fast and easily with AI capabilities. In particular, you can create realistic UI designs by using a drag-and-drop editor and effortlessly control the fidelity of your mobile app. With hundreds of available templates, you can kickstart any product design, whether it’s a mobile app, website, or tablet app.
29. UXPin
Pricing: Start at $6 per editor/month with a free trial.
UXPin is a UI/UX design tool with a compelling drag-and-drop feature, available for Mac and Windows. The software platforms also support a vast collection of built-in elements, so you’re free to design anything you want. Also, UXPin continually adds new features to do your work more effectively.
30. Zeplin
Pricing: The free plan is available. Also, you can pay based on projects or seats, with a starting price of $13.75 per month for 1 project or $13 per seat/month respectively.
Want a perfect mobile app design tool to work with developers? Look no further! Zeplin will be your best choice. It’s considered the ultimate collaboration tool for designers to share their designs with engineers. More importantly, Zeplin supports many integrations with popular apps like Sketch, Adobe XD, Figma, Photoshop, Slack, and Trello.
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Conclusion
This article has provided 30 incredible mobile app design software tools that can realize your app ideas and boost design productivity. Each comes with unique features and benefits that cater to different needs. Remember to choose the tool that aligns with your skill level, common goals, and budget. So, do you have any suggestions about mobile app design software? Which tools are you using, and how do you feel about them? Share your thoughts with us on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn!