Balsamiq Mockups review

Requirements gathering is where most software projects quietly go wrong. Everyone agrees on words, nobody agrees on what the words mean, and six months later you’re staring at a feature nobody wanted. Mockups break that deadlock. When stakeholders can see something—even a rough sketch—the conversation shifts from abstract agreement to concrete feedback.

I’ve been using Balsamiq Mockups on a recent requirements-gathering project, and it’s changed how I think about the tooling side of this problem.

The alternatives I came from

Before Balsamiq, my options were Microsoft Visio and Serena Prototype Composer. Visio works, in the way that a Swiss Army knife works for everything: technically capable, never quite right for the task at hand. It’s built for diagramming, not interface design, and you feel that friction constantly. Serena Prototype Composer is more purpose-built but brings its own complexity. Both tools require you to spend cognitive energy managing the tool itself, which is the last thing you want during a requirements conversation.

What Balsamiq gets right

The interface is deliberately rough. That’s not a bug—it’s the core design decision. Balsamiq renders everything in a hand-drawn style that signals “this is a sketch, not a finished design.” That visual cue matters enormously in practice. When you show stakeholders a polished mockup, they comment on fonts and colors. Show them something that looks like a napkin sketch and they talk about functionality. Balsamiq steers the conversation where it needs to go.

The component library is comprehensive without being overwhelming: buttons, containers, tabs, accordions, charts, video players, and more. Drag-and-drop placement works as you’d expect, and alignment guides handle the fidgety work of getting elements to line up. The properties panel is accessible and clear. You’re never hunting for options.

Export to XML and PNG covers the two things you actually need: sharing with developers and dropping screenshots into documents. The community at mockupstogo.net provides additional templates when the built-in set falls short.

Measured against Visio, I’d estimate Balsamiq saves around 40% of the time for equivalent output. That’s not a precise number—but as a practitioner’s sense of pace, it feels right.

Where it falls short

Grouping behavior for nested elements is confusing. When you group controls and then try to ungroup a subset of them, the interaction model doesn’t do what you expect. You can work around it, but you’ll hit this friction repeatedly.

The deeper limitation is multi-select for ungrouped controls. Without grouping first, selecting multiple independent elements to move them together is cumbersome. For complex layouts with many small components, this slows you down.

Neither issue is a dealbreaker. Both are the kind of thing that suggests room for iteration in future versions.

The bottom line

Balsamiq is the right tool for interface mockups. It’s fast, it keeps stakeholder conversations focused on the right things, and the learning curve is measured in minutes. If you’re still doing requirements work in Visio, try Balsamiq on your next project. The difference is immediate.