TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Zeplin

Score6.9 out of 10

63 Reviews and Ratings

What is Zeplin?

Zeplin, from the company of the same name, is a platform supporting collaboration in application development by engineers and designers by providing an API with popular collaboration, development and prototyping tools and creating a space where productions can be shared and reviewed.

Top Performing Features

  • Document collaboration

    Users can edit files and attach comments to files.

    Category average: 7.7

  • Notifications

    Users can follow other users and/or join specific projects, electing to receive notifications when there are changes and updates.

    Category average: 8.2

  • Versioning

    Users can access the most up-to-date version of a document, track changes, and revert to older versions if needed.

    Category average: 7.7

Areas for Improvement

  • Search

    Users can search for related materials across files, discussions threads, schedules, etc. using project keywords or tags.

    Category average: 7.4

  • Access control

    Users can control access to (shared) files, including different levels of access such as view-only or permission to edit.

    Category average: 8

  • Advanced security features

    Includes advanced security features such as file encryption or remote data wipe.

    Category average: 8

Zeplin is best design management team to ensure consistency across whole product

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Zeplin as design tool for new UI of the web. As I tester I refers to design in Zeplin to verify with our webpage. By using this tool, Product owner, Designer, developer, tester are working aligned with product specification and requirements. Before this tool, everyone was not able to work in align.

Pros

  • Precise testing: Developers can inspect design elements CSS (spacing, fonts, colors, sizes) so that it can set as per the designer
  • Centralized components color palettes, text styles make it easier for teams to maintain consistency across whole project
  • Designers, developers, tester and product owner can add comments directly on designs.

Cons

  • Developer or QA can see static design but cannot see in animation like figma.
  • I feel like it lacks advance design management system
  • Role base control is not there

Return on Investment

  • It reduces design to developer bugs. Before it was so time consuming for tester to review design with designer and then raise issue to developer. 50% less issue than before.
  • It significiently increase our team collaration between different teams like stackholders, product owner, UI/UX, developers and testers. 40% time saves
  • Zeplin's component management and style guide help us to be consistent across whole product. 60% less inconsistency.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Figma

Other Software Used

Figma, Okta, Playwright, Notepad++, CoPilot, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, ChatGPT, GitHub, Atlassian Jira, Atlassian Confluence, Iterable, Twilio SendGrid, Twilio, Selenium

Zeplin- great handoff tool

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Zeplin to upload our final designs to be attached to jira tickets for dev handoff. I think it also accidentally gets used to organize release designs and be able to go back and find design iterations. The product managers will also use it to show and discuss designs for their tickets, as well as development using it to discuss when issues come up. Our UX architects will upload flows in the projects to be referenced as well. It also was used to hold our design system library for reference for a littler while.

Pros

  • Organization - tagging, filters, search, etc.
  • Easy to use - very little training needed
  • Integration - this is continuing to expand and help.

Cons

  • collaboration functionality
  • organization for large companies/teams
  • more admin capabilities

Return on Investment

  • Zeplin has helped keep handoffs clear and easily accessible
  • I like the cross collaboration capabilities with our partner teams
  • There is a learning curve for sure for new users

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Figma, Figma Dev Mode, Sketch and Miro

Other Software Used

Figma, Miro

Zeplin takes away the friction of design hand off to developers

Pros

  • Code and design specifications help developers to quickly access colors and dimensions and also code snippets like CSS if required.
  • Commenting features are great for getting feedback and answering questions.

Cons

  • User interface design could use some better treatment.
  • Better tutorials to teach how to efficiently use the software.

Return on Investment

  • Better design and product quality due to perfect specifications delivery.
  • Immediate feedback or questions on designs using hotspots, questions, and comments.

Alternatives Considered

InVision

Other Software Used

Sketch

Good tool if you know what you buy

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used it as a main source of truth for design requirements for our clients, BAs, QAs, and developers. Important needs are to: -share assets for new UI items; -share precise sizes of lines, gaps, etc. for the purpose of accurate UI development; -asynchronous communication between different stakeholders regarding design.

Pros

  • Asynchronous communication regarding new designs
  • Share UI items' sizes, colors, gaps, etc.
  • Share assets
  • Versioning

Cons

  • I cannot pin the table of contents in web-application, it's annoying to expand it each time and scroll from the very top.
  • It logs me out very often. Smth like once a week I have to log in again and then refresh all opened Zeplin tabs. Too much
  • We cannot draw a flow, only single screen
  • We cannot create a dynamical prototype

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Figma

Other Software Used

Slack, Survicate, Tasks for Zendesk, MySQL Workbench, Trello

An alternative option design Hand-off platform and support integration with Figma

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Zeplin as the source of truth in the final design that I hand off to the developer team. Before utilizing Zeplin, my team used to face issues while handing over the design to the tech team. The main issue was that the tech team could not determine if the design was final or not. Even though we had marked the design as final, there were instances where our PM required some changes in the middle of development. This caused a delay in the delivery and made the dev team upset as it affected their timeline and deliverable.

Pros

  • We are able to organize the design with multi-group in every project
  • Zeplin is also able to create variants within one screen. It's a combination of screens or pages into one small group, based on the workflow or behaviour we set.
  • We can create style guide and connect it in to many projects
  • Now, zeplin is support variable from Figma latest features.

Cons

  • Flows in zeplin were actually good. but if we put many flows inside one canvas,. that make the app slow
  • I hope they can make boards based on the design group. to make loading faster. Imagine we have over 100+ screens, and we make all screens as design flow.
  • Sometimes the style guide is not connected to the project. especially for color intergation.

Return on Investment

  • Make design hand off faster
  • Cut middle issue during development phase
  • Centralize design hand off

Other Software Used

Figma, Slack, Jira Software