Uncovering the Best Alva Alternatives for Modern Design Workflows
Alva is a powerful tool for integrating production frontend components into a living styleguide, enabling fast iterations and a single source of truth for design and development. It excels at arranging and content editing pages while leaving component implementation to developers, ensuring up-to-date web pages instead of static mockups. However, for various reasons such as specific feature needs, platform compatibility, or budget constraints, you might be looking for an Alva alternative. This article explores some of the top contenders that offer similar, or even complementary, functionalities to enhance your design and development workflow.
Top Alva Alternatives
Whether you're seeking free and open-source options, powerful commercial suites, or specialized tools for UI/UX design, this list has you covered. Dive in to find the perfect replacement or addition to your design toolkit.
Inkscape
Inkscape is a professional vector graphics editor that stands out as an excellent Alva alternative, especially for those prioritizing free and open-source solutions. Available on Linux, Windows, and macOS, it offers robust features like SVG editing, support for layers, vector drawing, and the ability to vectorize raster images. While Alva focuses on integrated style guides, Inkscape provides powerful vector creation capabilities essential for designing the components themselves, making it a strong foundational tool for developers and designers.
Affinity Designer
Affinity Designer offers a fast, precise, and smooth vector graphic design experience, making it a compelling commercial Alva alternative. Available for Mac, Windows, and iPad, it boasts a clear and fast workflow, support for layers, and responsive design capabilities. Unlike Alva's focus on living styleguides, Affinity Designer excels at the initial creation of UI components and designs with its vector and pixel personas, and importantly, it offers a perpetual license rather than a subscription model.
Pencil Project
Pencil Project is a free and open-source standalone app or Firefox extension ideal for creating diagrams and UI mockups. As an Alva alternative, it's particularly suited for the early stages of design, focusing on wireframing and sketching. While it lacks Alva's deep integration with production components and real-time collaboration, its simplicity and focus on prototyping make it a valuable tool for quickly conceptualizing UI/UX, available on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Sketch
Sketch is a popular design toolkit built specifically for UI design, making it a strong commercial Alva alternative, particularly for Mac users. It features live preview, cloud sync, and robust vector drawing capabilities. While Alva bridges design with live components, Sketch is focused on the design creation aspect, offering powerful tools for creating responsive designs and symbols that can be exported for developer use, and integrating well with other prototyping tools like InVision.
Photopea
Photopea is a free, web-based online photo editor that can work with PSD, XCF, and Sketch files. As an Alva alternative, it provides a versatile solution for editing raster and vector graphics directly in your browser. While Alva focuses on styleguide integration, Photopea offers comprehensive image editing and file conversion, including importing from Sketch and supporting layers, making it a convenient tool for quick design adjustments or component preparation, accessible from any platform with a web browser.
Figma
Figma is a collaborative interface design tool that has emerged as a leading Alva alternative, especially for teams. Available as Freemium for Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone, and iPad (web-based), its real-time collaboration and cloud sync features are unparalleled. While Alva focuses on component-based style guides, Figma offers robust UI design, prototyping, and wireframing capabilities directly in the browser, allowing designers and developers to work on the same file simultaneously, enhancing team communication and efficiency.
Adobe XD
Adobe XD is a vector-based tool for designing and prototyping user experiences for web and mobile apps. As a Freemium Alva alternative available on Mac, Windows, Android, iPhone, and iPad, it excels in interactive prototyping, UX design, and animation. While Alva focuses on integrating live components, Adobe XD provides a comprehensive environment for designing flows and interactions, offering features like repeat grid and live preview, and supporting extensibility via plugins to streamline the design-to-development handover.
Vectr
Vectr is a free graphics editor that works both in your web browser and as a native desktop app on Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS. As an Alva alternative, it offers collaborative vector drawing capabilities, similar to Google Docs. While Alva manages living style guides, Vectr provides a straightforward platform for creating and editing vector graphics, suitable for designing individual UI elements and icons with ease, and facilitating simple image sharing.
Lunacy
Lunacy is a free native Windows app specifically designed to open, edit, and store .sketch files, making it an excellent Alva alternative for Windows users who collaborate with Sketch users. While Alva focuses on dynamic style guides, Lunacy offers robust GUI and UX design features, vector drawing, and the ability to import from Sketch, ensuring seamless workflow even offline. Its focus on Sketch file compatibility makes it a unique and valuable tool in a cross-platform design environment.
Adobe Fireworks
Adobe Fireworks is a commercial combination bitmap and vector graphics editor, specializing in web graphics and web design. While it is an older tool, it can still serve as an Alva alternative for designers seeking a single application for both pixel and vector work. Although Alva provides living styleguides, Fireworks allows for rapid prototyping and optimization of web assets, available on Mac and Windows, offering a different approach to preparing design elements for development.
Gravit Designer
Gravit Designer is a cross-platform vector graphics tool available as a freemium desktop application and in-browser. As an Alva alternative, it offers a robust environment for vector drawing, SVG editing, and user interface design. While Alva focuses on integrating components into living style guides, Gravit Designer provides extensive creative capabilities, including an unlimited canvas, web fonts, and cloud sync, making it a versatile tool for designing everything from icons to full-fledged website wireframes on Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS.
Boxy SVG
Boxy SVG is a commercial vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator and Inkscape, built for the modern Web Platform. As an Alva alternative, it focuses on creating illustrations, icons, and banners with a strong emphasis on SVG editing. While Alva provides a framework for managing live components, Boxy SVG offers a specialized toolset for precise vector manipulation, drawing, and image editing, with support for keyboard shortcuts, available on Mac, Windows, Chrome OS, and Chrome.
sK1
sK1 is a free and open-source illustration program for Linux and Windows, positioned as a powerful alternative to proprietary software like CorelDRAW or Adobe Illustrator. As an Alva alternative, sK1 focuses on the creation of vector graphics, specifically offering robust SVG editing capabilities. While Alva streamlines the integration of components into a style guide, sK1 provides the essential tools for designing complex vector assets from scratch, catering to designers who prefer open-source solutions for their foundational design work.
Dotgrid
Dotgrid is a simple, free, and open-source vector drawing application available on Mac, Windows, and Linux. As an Alva alternative, it offers a clean design and focuses on minimalist vector creation through control points. While Alva integrates live components into a style guide, Dotgrid is an ideal tool for generating precise geometric shapes and patterns, supporting SVG editing and themes, making it a niche but valuable addition for designers who appreciate simplicity and precision in their vector work.
Akira
Akira is a free and open-source native Linux Design application built in Vala and GTK, specifically focusing on a modern and fast approach to UI and UX Design, primarily targeting web interfaces. As an Alva alternative, it provides a dedicated environment for UI design with features like drag-and-drop. While Alva streamlines the use of live production components, Akira aims to be a comprehensive design tool for Linux users, addressing a specific platform need for a focused UI/UX design application.
Blocs
Blocs is a fast, easy-to-use, and powerful visual web design tool for Mac that lets you create responsive websites without writing code. As a commercial Alva alternative, it focuses on visual web development rather than living style guides. Blocs supports Bootstrap and HTML5, offering WYSIWYG capabilities for building entire websites, providing a different but equally valuable approach for designers who prefer to work visually and generate production-ready code without manual coding of components.
Graphic
Graphic (formerly iDraw) is a full-featured graphic design and illustration application created for macOS and iOS. As a commercial Alva alternative, it offers robust vector drawing and illustration tools. While Alva focuses on integrating production components into a style guide, Graphic excels at the creation of detailed vector graphics and designs, supporting Apple Pencil on iOS. It serves as a strong native design application for Apple users who need comprehensive vector capabilities for their UI elements and illustrations.
Bloom
Bloom is a commercial, fast, lightweight, cross-platform procedural graphics editor for Mac, Windows, and Linux. As an Alva alternative, Bloom offers a unique approach to image and vector editing with its layer-based procedural workflow. While Alva focuses on managing living styleguides, Bloom provides advanced image processing, UI design tools, and vector drawing capabilities with the flexibility to tweak every action. It's ideal for designers looking for a highly adaptable and non-destructive graphic design environment.
Shapr3D
Shapr3D is a freemium 3D modeling software created exclusively for iPad Pro and Apple Pencil users, making it a unique Alva alternative for those needing 3D design capabilities. While Alva focuses on 2D component integration, Shapr3D excels in 3D modeling, mechanical design, and sketching with touch and pen input. It offers a truly mobile CAD experience, allowing designers to rapidly create 3D assets that can complement 2D UI designs, expanding the scope of what designers can achieve on the go.
Webchemy
Webchemy is a free and open-source cross-platform web app for creating idea-sparking sketches, based on the desktop application Alchemy. As an Alva alternative, Webchemy focuses on experimental drawing and quick conceptualization rather than formal styleguide integration. It provides unique drawing tools and a fluid web-based experience, ideal for designers seeking a minimalist and unconventional approach to sketching and generating creative ideas, accessible from any device with a browser and supporting SVG editing.
The landscape of design and development tools is vast and constantly evolving. While Alva offers a unique approach to managing living styleguides with production-ready components, the alternatives presented here provide a range of solutions that might better fit your specific workflow, budget, platform, or feature requirements. We encourage you to explore these options and find the perfect fit to enhance your design efficiency and collaboration.