Adobe Illustrator

Figma

Design Tools

4.8

Figma is the leading collaborative design platform that has revolutionized how design teams work together in real-time on user interfaces, prototypes, and design systems. Its browser-based architecture means designers, developers, and stakeholders can view and collaborate on designs from any device without installing software, with changes appearing instantly for all viewers. Figma's Auto Layout, Variants, and Component Properties enable the creation of sophisticated, responsive design systems that scale across entire product organizations. Acquired by Adobe for $20 billion (later abandoned) and then continuing independently, Figma serves millions of designers at companies like Google, Microsoft, and Uber, and has become the undisputed standard for product design collaboration.

Miro

Design Tools

4.7

Miro is a visual collaboration platform that provides an infinite digital whiteboard where distributed teams can brainstorm, plan, design, and manage workflows together in real-time. Its canvas supports hundreds of content types including sticky notes, diagrams, wireframes, mind maps, flowcharts, user story maps, and embedded documents, making it versatile enough for virtually any collaborative visual activity. Miro's 2,500+ templates and 100+ integrations (with tools like Jira, Slack, Google Workspace, and Figma) ensure it fits into existing workflows, while its facilitator toolkit adds timers, voting, and presentation modes for structured workshop activities. Used by 99% of the Fortune 100 and 60 million users worldwide, Miro has become the default digital workspace for remote and hybrid teams that need a shared visual space to think, collaborate, and create together.

Affinity Designer

Design Tools

4.6

Affinity Designer by Serif is a professional vector graphics editor that has become the leading Adobe Illustrator alternative, offering comparable capabilities at a fraction of the cost with a one-time purchase rather than a subscription. It uniquely combines vector and raster workspaces in one application, allowing designers to switch seamlessly between vector illustration and pixel-based painting without changing tools. Affinity Designer handles complex documents with thousands of objects smoothly thanks to its metal-optimized rendering engine, and supports every major file format including AI, SVG, EPS, PDF, and PSD with excellent compatibility. Available for Mac, Windows, and iPad with full feature parity across platforms, Affinity Designer has earned a passionate following among illustrators, brand designers, and UI designers who refuse to pay Adobe's subscription fees.

LottieFiles

Design Tools

4.5

LottieFiles is the platform for Lottie animations — lightweight, scalable JSON-based animations that have become the standard for adding motion to websites, apps, and digital products. The platform hosts over 100,000 free and premium animations, provides a web-based editor for customizing colors, speed, and layers, and offers plugins for Figma, Adobe After Effects, and other design tools. Lottie animations are 10-100x smaller than GIFs and MP4s while maintaining perfect quality at any resolution, making them ideal for loading animations, micro-interactions, icons, and illustrated sequences. Used by companies like Google, Disney, and Airbnb, LottieFiles has established the Lottie format as the industry standard for high-quality motion design that performs well on any device and screen size.

Spline

Design Tools

4.5

Spline is a revolutionary 3D design tool that makes creating interactive 3D experiences accessible to designers who have no traditional 3D modeling experience. Its browser-based interface uses familiar 2D design paradigms adapted for 3D, making it dramatically easier to learn than tools like Blender or Cinema 4D while still producing impressive results. Spline supports real-time collaboration, interactive animations, physics simulations, and can export directly to web-ready formats that embed in websites with a few lines of code. The platform has gained rapid adoption among web designers and product teams creating 3D elements for websites, apps, and marketing materials — bringing the kind of immersive 3D visuals previously reserved for gaming and VFX studios into everyday digital product design.

Lucidchart

Design Tools

4.5

Lucidchart is the leading web-based diagramming application that makes it easy to create flowcharts, org charts, network diagrams, UML diagrams, mind maps, and wireframes with real-time collaboration. Its intelligent diagramming features include auto-formatting, data linking (connecting diagrams to live data from spreadsheets, databases, and APIs), and conditional formatting that updates visuals as underlying data changes. Lucidchart integrates deeply with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Atlassian, Slack, and other business tools, enabling diagrams to be embedded and shared across the tools teams already use. Used by 99% of the Fortune 500 and over 15 million users, Lucidchart serves everyone from IT architects documenting cloud infrastructure to business analysts mapping processes to teachers creating educational content.