Visio is a diagraming tool that makes it easy and intuitive to create flowcharts, diagrams, org charts, floor plans, engineering designs, and more, using modern templates with the familiar Office experience. On this page, you can access some of the top templates and sample diagrams available in Visio, or request ones that you want. Today, we are excited to announce an early release of Microsoft Web Template Studio, a cross-platform extension for Visual Studio Code that simplifies and accelerates creating new full-stack web applications. Web Template Studio addresses a top community ask from developer surveys and 1-1 conversations with developers: Make it easy to create a new cloud-based web.
Web design is constantly changing and adapting. We've put together a list of the best professional web design software tools and resources available today.
Featured Deal: WebWave
Build professional, custom websites tailored to any brand without having to code. Learn more
In this post, we’ll explore 43+ essential paid and free web design tools available in the market today.
When it comes to web design, things can change rapidly. Look no further than how the coronavirus has forced websites to rethink their designs when it comes to COVID-19 communications.
Not only do design trends change seemingly overnight, but the software we use also comes and goes. It’s a dog-acquire-dog world out there. Often, designers and site owners will find themselves forced to migrate after an acquisition or sudden transition (RIP Magento Go).
But web development and design aren’t going anywhere.
With the rise of the no-code movement (and drag-and-drop everything), today’s web design scene can best be described as a race to provide the best flexible, all-in-one design-to-code solution for developers, designers, and small business owners who wear all the hats.
Here at AppSumo, we’ve put together a list of the best professional web design software and resources available today, sorted by category:
Let’s get clickin’.
RelayThat helps you quickly resize and remix brand assets into agency-level designs. This tool’s magic lies in its ease of use and automation. Once you upload your brand colors, fonts, pictures, and other assets, RelayThat will automatically generate dozens of pre-made designs to choose from. You can even magic-import assets from a URL. RelayThat’s easy drag-and-drop interface helps you quickly finalize branded designs that look incredible.
JumpStory is a photo repository of 15 million+ images, videos, vectors, and illustrations. But JumpStory doesn’t just give you access to use these photos for commercial use: it’s got a whole suite of tools to help you find and edit the right image. The AI-powered TextMatch tool helps you quickly find the best images based on search terms. In addition, use the HighJumper feature to get data-powered suggestions for top-performing images on social.
JumpStory has left the AppSumo store, but you can check out their website here.
With StockUnlimited, you get 1 million+ royalty-free assets that include graphics, photos, fonts, icons, and audio files. Search audio files by genre, mood, instrument, and sound effect. With no download limits and an SVG and JPG present canvas editing tool, StockUnlimited gives you the assets you need to run a business for the digital age.
Grab a $49 lifetime deal for unlimited access for a limited time in the AppSumo store.
If you’re making graphics for the web or social media today, you’ve likely used Canva. With easy drag-and-drop layouts, you can build everything from branded Instagram story graphics to book covers. Canva is a graphic design goldmine with millions of stock images, vectors, and illustrations, photo filters, and hundreds of free fonts, icons, and shapes.
Canva has a free version. Plans start at $9.95 per month.
We’ve also written in-depth about Canva alternatives, so be sure to give that post a read if you’re searching for just the right tool.
Google Web Designer helps you make interactive HTML5-based ads, designs, and animations. From static cue cards to 3D images, Google Web Designer is the go-to tool for creating motion graphics for today’s digital advertising and marketing collateral.
Plus, it’s free to download and use.
With Design Wizard you can create videos and image designs in minutes. The free features allow you to magically resize your designs. You can also upload fonts, photos, logos and create custom color palettes. The library holds over 1 million premium images and thousands of high quality videos. Every video and image has also been licensed for commercial use! The Pro plan, starting at $9.99 a month, gives you 60 image design downloads per month, image and font uploads, free previews and 1GB storage.
Design Wizard has left the AppSumo store, but you can check out their websitehere.
Epicpxls gives you a quick mockup superpower with easy, downloadable premium design assets. Choose from a well-curated selection of beautiful UI kits and website design templates in various common file formats. You can also download from a library of fonts, graphics, and icons. Preview zip files and make sure your design is in the right format. After you download the zip, create your own customized site or app.
Grab a $39 Epicpxls lifetime deal, available for a limited time in the AppSumo store.
Sketch is a leader in the web design world, a “digital design toolkit” with interactive prototyping, smart layouts, and a vast library of integrations and plugins. Right now, the software just launched “Sketch for Teams,” which allows user experience designers to share and collaborate on workspaces. Unfortunately, as a native Mac app, you’ll need to be Team Apple to enjoy all the ease of use and functionality Sketch has to offer.
You can get Sketch for $99, but you’ll need to renew your license every year to continue to receive updates.
Figma’s strength is that it’s a web-based app with auto layout, asset libraries, and shareable prototyping features. Never worry about losing a thing with auto-save. Add as many team members as you want as free “viewers” to get stakeholder feedback via comments on your design. Sketch and Figma share some plugins and integrations, so you can often find that additional functionality—or even build it yourself—if you need it.
Pricing starts free for 3 projects with 2 editors and scales up to $12 and $45 per editor from there.
Adobe XD is the standard in UX/UI design that allows collaborative design and prototyping of intuitive web pages, apps, and much more—including voice interfaces! Add animations, build design systems, and build responsive web designs with content-aware layouts, responsive resize, and set reusable states for various components.
Adobe has a free starter plan. Pricing starts at $9.99 per month per user.
Webflow is an all-in-one responsive web design tool that folds a CMS, managed web hosting, and free SSL certificate all in one no-code platform. Build interactions and animations into your own website, drag-and-drop unstyled HTML elements. Or make use of pre-built elements like sliders, tabs, and background videos. The tool features a master component library of core layouts, components, and patterns Plus, Webflow gives you the ability to prototype and export code to hand off to developers if you don’t want to launch a site on its native subdomain.
Webflow starts free, with plans going up from $12 per month.
Vev is a collaborative, design-oriented WYSIWYG responsive website builder made for the 2020s. Browse the Vev Store for interactive components and animations you need (or code your own in React and CSS if you’re into that sort of thing). Store template sections to reuse again and again. Vev has great collaboration tools built with designers, developers, and content editors in mind.
Vev starts at $29 per user monthly.
RapidWeaver is a native web design software exclusively on and for Mac. Choose from 50 built-in or over 100 community-built themes, and instantly see how your designs will look on various Apple devices. The software integrates with Unsplash and has a big focus on giving you SEO-friendly code.
RapidWeaver has a free trial. Download it for $84.99.
Dreamweaver is a simplified coding engine allowing real-time preview of your content as you made edits to the code. Start your next responsive website project from a template or build from scratch. With Git support and code hints, you can custom-build all kinds of HTML assets like emails, eCommerce sites, portfolios, blogs, and more.
Start with a free trial. Plans start at $20.99 per month or $52.99 per month for the entire Adobe Creative Cloud. (Prices vary for students, teachers, and businesses.)
openElement is a free WYSIWYG web editor with a whole host of editing features that support many different page elements such as text, images, tables, lines. Some web elements are even drag-and-drop. Users praise it for being lightweight and SEO friendly.
openElement is free.
Atom is an open-source hackable desktop code editor from GitHub. Use this tool to access thousands of open source packages, explore text editor themes built by the Atom community, and work in CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. You can also run Teletype for Atom to share workspaces for synchronous code editing.
Atom is free.
Quill is an open-source API-driven text editor trusted by some of the biggest companies in the world. As a cross-platform editor, you can code in HTML without worrying about inconsistent production.
Quill is free.
Froala is a Javascript web WYSIWYG HTML editor. As a lightweight yet rapidly-expandable editor, Froala is simple and easy to use and yet has a depth of functionality and powerful API that has attracted some of the world’s largest companies. It also has over 30 plugins.
Get a license with 1 year of updates starting at $239 (including unlimited users and developers).
CoffeeCup HTML Editor was built for WYSIWYG precision and excellence. Work from scratch in HTML, CSS, and PHP or choose from an existing theme. Use the “Open from Web” option to take any website as a starting point for your new design. With a components library, code validation tool, and live preview, you’ll have your next web design up and running quickly.
Try for free or buy it for $29.
Flutter allows you to build write-once deploy-everywhere native apps. As Google’s free, open source UI toolkit, Flutter allows you to use a single codebase to building native apps for mobile, web, and desktop. Layers allow for complex and expressive interface design, and its Hot Reload feature helps you see design elements as you refine them in the code. With both Material Design and Cupertino widgets, you get the best of both Android and iOS.
Flutter is free.
Shopify is quickly becoming the go-to digital storefront platform. Every Shopify store comes with an SSL certificate and you can buy domain names directly from them. The team is continually revising the shopping cart experience. That way, they can help reduce cart abandonment and give store owners and dropshippers the flexibility they need to dynamically determine shipping rates, taxes, and more. Shopify also has a suite of marketing tools a mature third-party integration ecosystem to help you sell more.
After a free 14-day trial, Shopify starts from $29 per month. (There’s also Shopify Lite for $9 per month for pre-existing websites.)
With over 40M sites, Weebly is Square’s powerful drag-and-drop website builder that’s doubled down on eCommerce features in recent years. Choose from template designs and get all the brand assets you need to launch your site quickly. Weebly also has abandoned cart and welcome email features, dynamic shipping pricing, and inventory tracking. It’s a website builder at heart, so you’ll have access to more themes and a lot of easy, user-friendly design functionality for putting your site together as you want it.
Weebly starts free and moves up from $6 per month (billed annually).
Squarespace is a feature-packed website builder with over 90 flexible designer website templates. It offers customer account functionality for online stores as well as inventory management, discount codes, and abandoned card recovery. This site builder is gorgeous, so if you’re looking for flawless layouts and bleeding-edge artistic vibes, Squarespace may be the right eCommerce site option for you.
Squarespace starts with a free trial and moves up from $12 per month from there.
BigCommerce is an enterprise eCommerce solution. For smaller businesses, there’s BigCommerce Essentials, which offers 80 responsive designs, no-code editor, advanced product search, and CRO tools – including an abandoned cart saver feature. Plus, choose from a really wide variety of payment gateways.
BigCommerce Essentials starts with a 15-day trial and goes up from $29 per month.
Constant Contact Builder, a free website builder from a top email service provider, allows you to build a free mobile-responsive website. Powered by AI, Constant Contact Builder’s drag-and-drop builder and layout options are very easy to use. Though it doesn’t have the high-powered eCom features other tools on this list may have, it does provide analytics, inventory and order management, and secure checkout with discounts and free shipping.
Plus, it offers SSL encryption, unlimited bandwidth, free CDN, and free web hosting.
Constant Contact Builder is free to start, but if you want to attach a custom domain or sell more than three products, plans begin at $10 per month.
As the world’s largest open-source CMS (content management system), WordPress has a wide variety of solutions for all your web design needs, including WooCommerce, a top eCommerce platform. As of 2021, WordPress powers over 36% of the internet.
SecondLineThemes features WP themes built for podcasters, with all the plugins you need to grow your following.
Get SecondLineThemes for life for just $49 for a limited time in the AppSumo store.
Elementor is a drag-and-drop WordPress page builder used by over 4M people.
The tool is free, but paid plans start at $49 per year.
ProteusThemes offers 20+ SEO-optimized WordPress and WooCommerce themes with a lightweight page builder, so you can create unlimited websites.
Get ProteusThemes for life for just $49 for a limited time in the AppSumo store.
Divi is a powerful WYSIWYG WordPress theme and responsive page builder.
Try it free for 30 days. Plans start at $89 per year.
Oxygen is an advanced drag-and-drop WordPress and WooCommerce visual editor that’s really popular among Sumo-lings (i.e. agency and small business owners!).
The site build starts at a one-time fee of $99. (No free trial, but they do offer a 60-day money-back guarantee.)
If you’re curious about more WP page builders, you may want to check out our blog post on Elementor alternatives.
Now for the fun part. As web designers, we’re constantly looking for free tools and resources that help us design smarter. Tools like Browser Size speed up workflows and power up our design capabilities. For now, I’ve listed color palette tools and font-picker tools. Feel free to list more free web design tools in the comments below.
BONUS: For a limited time, check out the FREE Brizy UI Design Kit in the AppSumo store for over 250 different UI site blocks for Sketch, InVision Studio, or Figma. Gotta love those freebies.
That’s it! What are your favorite web design tools and software for 2021?