Product Review: Moqups
Moqups (pronounced “mockups”) is an online mockup, wireframing, and UI prototyping tool that also offers robust collaboration capabilities. Moqups characterizes itself as a Balsamiq competitor; in fact, Moqups founders explicitly created this product to address what they perceived to be gaps in Balsamiq’s design catalog and collaboration capabilities.
Product Philosophy
Moqups sees its product as a solution to the ongoing challenges around requirements definition. In their view, creating good requirements is “more art than science.” Engaging a diverse swathe of people early in the process and continuing to question and refine initial hypotheses is key to generating the best possible set of requirements.
Moqups claims its non-prescriptive environment for requirements creation helps teams do their best work. Consolidating design and collaboration capabilities into one product reduces the friction and potential loss of information that teams may face in maintaining and synchronizing information across multiple tools, eliminates interoperability concerns, and ultimately reduces costs.
Design Features
One of the main selling points for Moqups is its versatility. You can use Moqups as a wireframe tool, flow chart maker, graph maker, online whiteboard, and UML diagram tool. It is also a cloud-based tool that accommodates collaboration across multiple potential users and geographic locations. This is appealing for teams that may find themselves permanently adjusting to a virtual, rather than a physical, white board.
Specific design capabilities include:
A stencil library, including mobile stencil options; icon sets; and numerous font options
The ability to import images from other sources and edit objects
Page management tools that let you create master pages that you can then scale across projects
Whiteboarding type tools that let you overlay shapes, arrows, and the like on top of your existing designs.
Design Templates
In addition to letting you design from scratch, Moqups offers a multitude of design templates in categories ranging from wireframes and mockups (inclusive of lo- and high-fidelity options) to diagrams & flows to charts & graphs. For PM nerds such as myself, Moqups also boasts a suite of business strategy templates useful for both product and project managers (e.g., user persona, customer journey map, Kanban board.)
Once you select one of the templates, you’ll find them user-friendly and readily editable. You can easily drag new design elements from the formatting panel and drop them on the page. You can also mix and match across different templates and stencils.
The robustness of Moqups’ template library and its ease of use are major pluses. I wouldn’t necessarily agree that the product has zero learning curve, but Moqups is certainly intuitive for first-time users.
Collaboration Features
Finally, Moqups offers robust collaboration features including the ability to:
Share pages with different members of your organization
Insert comments and @mention colleagues
Add designer notes to indicate future areas of development (these notes show up as little Post-Its btw…beyond cute)
Add speech bubbles or thought bubbles to augment designs
Chat with collaborators real-time.
Pricing
You can sign up for a Moqups account for free—no credit card required. The free plan offers one active project, up to 200 stencils, and 5MB of image storage. This plan does not include master pages capabilities, privacy setting adjustments, project archiving, or the ability to export your designs to either PNG or PDF.
Not being able to export makes the free plan kind of a dealbreaker. That’s not to say that you couldn’t use the free version for team collaboration and thought exercises, but if this brainstorming doesn’t translate into tactical execution, this PM wonders why you’d bother.
Paid options include the Pro or Unlimited plans.
The Pro plan comes to $16/month for up to 3 users, without limits on the number of projects or objects and inclusive of Jira and Confluence integrations. This price point could be perceived as a little steep, but keep in mind that Moqups doesn’t assess fees per user per se. This means that, as your company scales, you’ll derive greater benefits from the higher priced Unlimited option, available for use from 4 to infinity users. Additionally, if you use the tool as intended across a plethora of functions (e.g., collaboration, white boarding, design), its value multiplies.
