Abstract vs. Frontify

• Large teams with dedicated design operations support
• UX managers that want a facilitated workflow for their teams
• Disciplined teams of individual contributors that want to adopt a process in their UI workflow
• Cross-discipline teams that want a central collaboration space for reviewing and critiquing UI artifacts
• If your files are named "FOR-REALS_FINAL_FINAL_FINAL_Super-Important-Project (copy).sketch"
• If you're managing multiple pattern libraries

Incentivized

Well suited to organization starting their journey of design system creation. It provides a ready to go foundation that requires minimum effort to set up and get going. It may be limited if scaling into thousands of design elements and multiple users - we have not tried at scale of more that 10's of users.

• Versioning for desginers
• Collaboration between team members

Incentivized

• It manages the visual aspects of a brand very well.
• It is easy to use and update.
• It converts the colors from hex to rgb and cmyk seamlessly.
• It has a nice user interface.

Incentivized

• Asset exports are not as great as Zeplin and others.
• Filtering within files.

Incentivized

• I believe having an agency option would be great so that one could manage and build multiple brands for multiple clients.
• Having sections for voice and personality would be great.
• The ability to export a brand document to a .PDF to share with partners.

Incentivized

as already explained this software only does branching... the rest is really poor and basic

Incentivized

Frontify is very easy to use and makes updating information a breeze. Frontify acts a central location to house assets and information for easy sharing. You can plug and play information and even white label the guide if desired

Incentivized

Abstract has a difficult learning curve. If a feature-branch workflow is new to you, then it will take some getting used to. They make a lot of updates to the interface and these feature releases get ahead of their documentation. They rely heavily on an excellent customer support team and are present on various Slack channels to help design professionals with issues.

Incentivized

Abstract by nature is complex and has to respond to whatever changes in Sketch. So there are frequent issues. Support can be slow to respond and are not always helpful, but they are quick to find and patch the bugs. Overall, it's not the best support, but it hasn't been detrimental.

Incentivized

I purchased and administer Abstract. It was requested by our design department who evaluated it.

Incentivized

We've invested time building our own hosted interface, and recently begun exploring Figma for design system management too. The benefit of Frontify is it's easy public access. The downfall is integration with other systems required in the UX, Design, Product Management, and Development processes - something Figma supports well.

• Single source of truth for the team.
• Could quickly get expensive with corporate accounts.

Incentivized

• Solid cost benefit - the cost is not prohibitive for the value it brings
• Overall value depends on internal federation of usage