Design Tool Directories: Which Ones Are Worth Using

Last updated: August 2026

There are more design tool directories than there are good ones, and most of them are the same 200 links with a different colour scheme.

This is an honest guide to which ones are worth bookmarking, which are worth submitting to, and how they differ — written by people who run one, which we'll be upfront about rather than pretend otherwise.

The three kinds of design tool directory

Curated — a few hundred hand-picked tools, strong editorial taste, updated occasionally. Good for browsing when you want to discover something. Bad when you need a specific type of tool and they only listed three.

Comprehensive — thousands of tools, broad coverage, lighter curation. Good when you need every option in a category. Requires you to do the filtering.

Niche — one category done properly. Icons only, or Figma plugins only, or inspiration galleries only. Usually the most useful of the three when you know what you're looking for.

Most people want a curated one for browsing and a comprehensive one for searching, and that's a reasonable pair to keep bookmarked.

The main general directories

TOOOLS.design — around 2,200 resources across 18 categories, updated weekly. One of the longest-running and best-known. Broad coverage across tools, inspiration, learning, podcasts and books, so it's more "design resources" than strictly tools.

Good Design Tools — roughly 400 tools across 27 categories, with a strong editorial hand. Notable for its Collections — Free Mockup Websites, Open-source Icons, Free Font Websites — which are genuinely more useful than a flat category list because they match how people actually search.

Fountn — organised around 19 categories with a weekly newsletter attached. Leans toward freebies, discounts and resources rather than pure software.

Toolfolio — broader than design, covering AI, no-code, marketing, video, e-commerce and more. Useful if your work spans past design; noisier if it doesn't.

Free Design Tools — a few hundred free tools, but split across an unusually large number of narrow categories, which makes finding a specific type of tool much faster than most.

UI Goodies, Usetools.design, Design Minis, 30tools — smaller curated collections, each with their own taste. Design Minis in particular focuses on small tools made by individual designers, which surfaces things the bigger directories miss.

DezignHunt — ours. Around 1,886 tools across 14 categories, with every listing reviewed by a person and a focus on new launches specifically — we catalogued 771 new tools in August alone. Strongest on recency and breadth; our category structure is broader than some of the others, which is a fair criticism.

Niche directories worth knowing

These beat the general directories when you know what you need:

• Figma Community — for plugins, files and UI kits, this is the primary source rather than any third-party list
• Awwwards, Godly, SiteInspire, Land-book — website design inspiration, each with a different taste. See our 30 best inspiration sites
• Mobbin — real product UI flows rather than marketing pages
• Webzooo — websites indexed by colour and hex code, which no general directory does. We wrote about how to use it
• AlternativeTo — not design-specific, but the best place to find replacements for a tool you already use

If you make tools: where to submit

Directory submissions are among the best time-to-value work available to a new product — roughly a week of effort, permanent listings, referral traffic for years.

Priority order:

1. Design-specific directories first. Better intent, less competition, and reviewers who understand what you built. DezignHunt takes submissions here.
2. Alternatives and comparison sites — AlternativeTo especially, because visitors arrive actively looking to switch.
3. Launch platforms — Product Hunt, Peerlist, Uneed, BetaList.
4. General SaaS directories — lower intent, still worth the ten minutes each.

Prepare your assets once — logo in several formats, screenshots, three description lengths, pricing — because nearly every directory asks for the same things. Our launch assets guide covers what to make, and the full directory list has sixty worth submitting to.

How to tell a good directory from a dead one

Check the newest entries. If the most recent addition is eight months old, the list is abandoned and the links are probably rotting.

Check for dead links. Click five entries. Two 404s means nobody is maintaining it.

Check whether descriptions are written or scraped. Copy-pasted vendor marketing copy means no review process, which means no quality filter.

Check the category depth. A directory with 2,000 tools in 10 categories is harder to use than one with 400 in 30, because the categories are doing the actual work.

Which should you bookmark?

• Browsing for inspiration → Good Design Tools or TOOOLS
• Finding a specific type of tool → a niche directory for that category
• Keeping up with new launches → DezignHunt's new tools page and our monthly roundup
• Replacing a tool you already use → AlternativeTo, or our alternatives guides
• Submitting your own tool → design-specific first, then the full list

Browse our own directory by AI tools, design tools, inspiration, icons or any of the 14 categories.