Pencil Reviews & Product Details

It is easy to copy images into this program and quickly put together a mock up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It take a while to get used to the system and it can get very finicky. When tyring to wrap text or move things around sometimes it can have issues. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pencil is a free and open-source GUI prototyping tool that is quick, easy and works across multiple platforms.

This is a good software ONLY for beginners. The problem in this is that you can't draw smoothly... even if you have a graphics tablet, it will be hard to draw in pencil.

Pencil also supports any exports formats including PNG and HTML. When exporting to HTML you can even define links and behavior , allowing you to 'walk' clients through the UI mockup with buttons which actually work.

Don't be fooled by the fact that it is free! With regard to Pencil, free does NOT mean inferior.

Pencil also supports exporting documents into popular formats including OpenOffice/LibreOffice text documents.

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Pencil used to a good software ,nothing to dislike it and something I faced during the ,I had some problems with XulRunner which was being used from Firefox in Ubuntu, but that was easily fixed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Lots of premade controls, just drag and drop and can design layout easily Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Can have more plugin (Currently just ~ 20 plugins available) and controls Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Clean GUI. Fine-grained control of the GUI elements, i.e., you can hide panes for a wider onscreen work area. I especially liked the fine-grained controls to the appearance of the Tree control under the Desktop - Sketcky GUI.

Visual stencil builder.

Extensive options on defaults.

Fine-grained control of GUI object properties, such as sizing.

Snap-in-place grid - not just guides alignment, but enforces it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Slow to open or launch; it takes more than a minute for the opening screen to appear.

From Windows Start, when selecting to open a recent Pencil file program, a Recent Document dialog box appears where you have to select the file again.

What should be quick, intuitive tasks such as renaming pages is done in a deeper menu (under Properties). Best if when you click on 'Unnamed Page', you can directly edit the page name. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ease of use, the small libraries that come along to provide more UI elements to play with. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I still haven't find how to put comments on the mockups I create with Pencil. This would be really useful to remember what was the intention behind this or that UI element (or to explain them more easily to co-workers) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ability to create quick grayscale wireframes Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not very easy to use

Very basic shapes and stencils are available. Many icons have to be imported from outside which disrupts the look and feel.

Each page in a project is a tab. Moving between pages becomes difficult as number of tabs increase. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is open source and can be easily extended with sprite packs (I recommend this one https://github.com/nathanielw/Android-Lollipop-Pencil-Stencils) and export templates (I recommend this one made by me: https://github.com/DaniGuardiola/pencil-material-template Demo: http://daniguardiola.github.io/pencil-material-template).

It is based in svg and can be easily customized sprite by sprite. You can also create your own collection of sprites by modifying or joining existing ones.

The software is being updated frecuently in Github by the community and it improves on every update.

Some stability issues have been corrected since I started using it and that means the maintainers listeen to the users and solve bugs when needed.

This tool can be used to prototype on different screen sizes and platforms, and if you have some decent coding and designing skills you can make your own export template to be useful for your needs or professional so that you can make a good impression when trying to sell a concept.

Pencil is definitely the right tool for fast design iteration and I will continue using it for a long long time. I already recommended it to a lot of my designer and coder friends. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Through my experience with pencil I had some problems with XulRunner which was being used from Firefox in Ubuntu, but that was easily fixed. Aside from that, the only thing I lack is interaction prototyping. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pencil is a really easy to use program with a beautiful and useful GUI. From the very beginning you can start designing your project thanks to it's intuitive interface. It has some standard collections of stencils and templates that are good enough for simple designs but at the same time it allows you to add your own or third party ones. Also supports the creation of diagrams, which are very helpful show links between elements. And finally it has a lot of export options, with beautiful features like links on the design that when you export it to html, they actually work and send you to the different parts.

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I think that the standard collection should improve, adding more elements and different designs. It would be also nice that it could be exported in a Presentation format (powerpoint, libreoffice impress,...) that works like the html version, with links working etc... Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Unbelievable for tool with such set of functions, but Its free. :)

It's extendable (export templates, collections of elements).

It supports different types of data (interfaces, flowcharts, regular charts).

I can create dynamic prototypes with it.

It supports bootstrap styles (and a few more styles for the moment, but its free library is growing constantly) of elements (with additional library) which adds opportunity to create high fidelity wireframes.

Basically it has almost everything what UI/UX designer needs in their everyday work.

It also gets my bonus points for mobile (android & iOs) stensils.

I like the fact it's cross-platform: even though I'm completely Windows user, I like that I have a choice: if, on some point of my life, I'll move to MacOS, my previously created on Windows Pencil projects will stay available for editing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I don't like the fact that during exporting project pages, it puts them on 1 large html page. I would prefer to see them on different pages. Axure does it great - with list of pages in left frame, and active page on right hand side.

Also, the same thing I miss in Balsamiq - lack of multi-level pages management. I would like to keep multi-level structure of project pages.

I would like more active development of this product (seems like it's sort of abandoned :(). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like best about Pencil (apart from the fact that it is free, both as in "free beer" as well as in "free speech") is the large set of available stencils. You have sketchy stencils for early wireframes, but also native UI stencils that are drawn using your system's widget theme, as well as Android and iOS controls, common web elements, flowchart elements and more.

The GUI stencils are not simply "dumb" vector graphics, but have properties like disabled, default button etc. Wireframes for different UI states can be interconnected using hyperlinked UI elements to create simple "interactive" mockups and export them as PDFs or HTML documents.

You can create your own "dumb" stencils just by combining and editing existing stencils and then adding the result to your personal collection, or you can create stencils with all the bells and whistles by writing them in XML. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only two things I'm missing is online collaboration and the ability to create highly interactive prototypes.

Real-time collaboration simply isn't possible with Pencil, so you're left with sending your mockups back and forth between team members. Online wireframing tools like myBalsamiq have the advantage in that regard.

If you want to do highly interactive prototypes that can be animated and change states dynamically, you'll need tools like Axure RP. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.