8 Must-Have Productivity Apps for Web Designers

Whether you’re a freelance web designer or part of a team at a web design agency, staying productive throughout the day can be one of the most challenging aspects of your professional life. After all, the more productive you’re, the more you achieve in less time and the more quickly you're likely to crush those strict deadlines - which eventually leads to ultimate client satisfaction.

Technological advancements have proved to be both a blessing and a curse in this regard. While new technologies have put greater demands on web designers to become more productive, they have also introduced a multitude of game-changing productivity tools.

Let’s get familiar with some of the incredibly useful productivity tools that you as a web designer can use to become more efficient, effective, and productive in your daily work.

#Avocode

Built by the same team that developed PNG Hat and CSS Hat, Avocode is a platform-independent tool that automatically analyzes your PSD, AI, XD, Sketch, and Figma files and turns them into a beautifully designed, developer-first user interface.

With Avocode, not only you have the full control over how you export assets but also you have the freedom to adjust the code output. It works offline and there are also Photoshop, Sketch or Illustrator plugins available to keep your design files synced to the cloud.

Available for: macOS, Windows, Linux, and Web.

Price: A free 14-day trial, after which plans start at $14/month.

#Toggl

If you’re a freelance web designer who works on projects with fixed fees, then this awesome time tracking tool is going to be quite helpful for you. Making time tracking an extremely simple and easy task, Toggl increases your hourly output to the maximum extent.

With over 100+ app integrations, Toggl allows you to track your time as soon as you land to the dashboard area. You can even break down your hours by clients, projects, and tasks to figure out what's working for you and what's not. Moreover, you can use Toggl to monitor the productivity of other web designers in the team.

Available for: Web, Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome, Firefox

Price: Free to use for the basic version while paid plans start at $9/month.

#Monday

Slightly similar to a spreadsheet at its core, Monday is a simple, intuitive, and centralized team management tool, designed to help teams manage every single aspect of their day-to-day tasks as well as facilitate them to plan, organize and track their work progress through a single visual, collaborative space.

Used by more than 70,000 teams to manage their work, Monday features a highly-customizable dashboard where you can gain a clear overview of your work with crucial insights. Additionally, this project management tool integrates well with popular apps such as Trello, Zapier, Slack, Dropbox, and more.

Available for: Android, iOS, Web

Price: Offer a free 7-days trial and basic plan starts at $39/month for five users.

#ActiveCollab

As the name explains itself, ActiveCollab is a project management software built for creative professionals be more productive by organizing their entire work, including all tasks, files, team members and communication, with a single app.

The latest version of ActiveCollab, which was released in January this year, offers a game-changing feature: Task Dependencies with Automatic Rescheduling. In the new Active Collab, when you modify a parent task, each child task gets adjust automatically - saving you from excessive busywork.

Available for: Web, Windows, macOS, Android, iOS

Price: Comes with a free 14-days trial and the paid plan starts from $7per member, per month.

#Proto

Built with designers, developers, entrepreneurs, and product managers in mind, Proto is an easy-to-use application to create fully interactive and animated, low to high-fidelity wireframes, mockups, prototypes. There is no coding or special technical skills required to use this extremely lightweight prototyping tool.

Proto.io 6, the latest version of the Prototyping tool, features a completely redesigned UI with several outstanding features such as Visual Screens Navigator, Single-click Sharing and Exporting, New State Transitions, and more. Apart from that, Proto integrates well with popular user testing platforms like Lookback and Validately.

Available for: Web, Windows, macOS, Android, iOS

Price: Free full-featured 15-days trial. Paid plan starts at $ 24/month.

#Vaunt

Want to match your web design’s color scheme to a particular image you have found on the web? Try Vaunt - an immense time-saving app that uses a clustering algorithm to analyze an image and extract the most dominant colors from that image.

Extracting the most prominent colors from an image is as easy as one-two-three with Vaunt. All you need to drag and drop your image into the app and after a couple of seconds, the dominant colors will start appearing in a panel. You can then click on your favorite colors to add them to your clipboard.

Available for: Mac

Price: Free

#Brackets

Developed by Adobe and written in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, Brackets is a lightweight yet powerful modern text editor specifically built for web designers and front-end developers, making it easier for them to design and code in the browser.

With several focused in-browser visual tools and preprocessor support, Brackets allows you to make changes to your HTML5 and CSS3 code in real-time. Additionally, it also supports Language Server Protocol to facilitate the integration of other popular programming languages, such as PHP and Python.

Available for: macOS, Windows, and Linux

Price: Free

#GoVisually

Trusted and used by over 1,000+ companies around the world, GoVisually speeds up your design review process by providing you with a simple way to collaborate on the designs you’re working on. With this handy tool, you can get clear feedback and approval without sending and receiving those messy, frustrating emails.

To get started with GoVisually, you just need to upload your design files, after which, you’re given a link through which you can share them with your team members or clients to gather centralized feedback. You can even send reminders to members whose reviews are still pending. It is, overall, a great tool to make design proofing and approval easier and quicker for everyone.

Available for: macOS, Windows, and Linux

Price: Free trial. Plans start from $12 per month