Likelihood to Recommend Balsamiq is a great tool for quickly getting ideas into visual form. At first it seems like there are not that many UI assets, but this constraint actually adds to the speed. There are less things for you to fuss over, you can focus on getting your ideas down. This is a tool for lofi rough drawings not a tool for building beautiful prototypes for developers to code to. It is fantastic for ideation because you mostly just drag and drop components onto the canvas and move things around. It's great in a live workshop setting for that reason.
Read full review I still have some issues, especially with color integration between the style guide and also project. When we update the colors, it's not automatically sync to every project. Aside from that, zeplin solves my problem for hand-off design from design to developer. I set zeplin is source of truth design file
Read full review Pros Easy to use Produces good quality mock ups and prototypes Mock ups are obviously only just mock ups (this is important as if users see mock-ups in HTML, for example, they tend to think the system is ready to use or not far off) Has a good selection of standard shapes that mock real world fields / controls Allows not for profit organisations use it for free Read full review Ease in automatically building design style guides, saving time that might be spent on building style guides in another tool (such as InDesign). Users can use Mac, PC, or web versions of this app to collaborate on a single project, enabling us to work with a wider pool of contractors. Accelerates the design-to-development workflow, as it’s very easy to import Sketch or Photoshop files through plug-ins, and HTML/CSS codes are automatically created based on designs. Provides cross-platform specifications for web, iOS, and Android, which can save developers time in figuring out specifications beyond the “main platform" on their own. Read full review Cons The sketch-like style can be off-putting to some stakeholders, and it’s not initially very clear that there is the option to turn this “off.” While I do think there is benefit to the default style, knowing from the start that this flexibility existed would have helped us be able to use this tool more often in the past and in different situations. There are very limited collaborative functionalities. When it’s early in the design process, it’s often really helpful to have a number of people in the design to offer in-app feedback so the designer doesn’t have the burden of collecting feedback from many disparate sources in order to incorporate the feedback. There are limited UI elements. As design evolves, there are more and more UI elements to consider, and many to stop using. Our Balsamiq wireframes would be a lot more effective in communicating design ideas to stakeholders if there was a wider range of UI elements to choose from. Read full review The uploading and syncing of assets is great for sketch and photoshop but we use illustrator and that can be cumbersome/tedious at times. There are certain elements that have been a bit confusing to navigate at times, but for the most part, it's pretty user-friendly More integrations Read full review Likelihood to Renew I'm not sure how else we would be able to complete our work without Balsamiq or another similar tool. All of my experience with Balsamiq has been positive and they continue to develop new features so that my job gets easier. I would be very surprised if we didn't renew Balsamiq
Read full review Great tool
Read full review Usability Very intuitive and easy to understand. It only takes minutes to get the hang of it and get back to work. For new analysts (like, brand new, fresh out of school) it's not difficult and they need minimal to no hand-holding. The training content that is embedded is easy to find and use.
Read full review Zeplin is not a fully functional prototyping software system, but having the ability to add notes to help explain what actions are expected allows me to rate it high.
Read full review Support Rating We haven't had to use the support feature yet
Read full review Zeplin has classic support with a chat from the website. It's working fine, and we're also getting the support needed when needed. However, Zeplin is very good at closing the incidents and moving on. It was a while ago we had a case with their support so that it might have improved since then.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Creating digital wireframes in Photoshop is a nightmare. Photoshop was not really designed for this purpose. It doesn't have good collaboration options and it doesn't allow pattern libraries, which are essential for consistency and efficiency. We use
UXPin and Axure for some time, but found that these platforms were a bit bloated. Balsamiq is much simpler than any of these options. It's a perfect wireframing platform for non-designers or for designers that want to focus on content and element-placement prior to design
Read full review Zeplin is great to inspect and share user interfaces, specifications and assets, perfect for developers. Tools like
InVision and Marvel are much better to create prototypes for both developers, coworkers and even stakeholders, but they don't have this kind of feature (inspection) as Zeplin does. So each of them can be used for different purposes, offering different approaches to share and interact with layouts for apps and websites.
Read full review Return on Investment The product works very well for showing product owners and developers design ideas for purposes of discussion, debate and refinement. The products also works very well for specifying new designs for developers. This is best done in a series of screens that show various screen states and user interactions. I also use the products to document bugs in software products and websites we have developed. This includes outlining and documenting bugs and changes to user interactions and refinements to the usability of completed interfaces and user experiences. Read full review Development time has reduced as the design updates are communicated in real time to developers and they don't have to write the boilerplate code as it's already generated. Employee engagement has improved as every stakeholder is aware about the design changes from the beginning and can give their inputs. Designers save a lot of time as they don't to explicitly communicate when the update or publish their designs and also it just takes a couple of clicks to publish their designs. Also, lot of rework is saved as every stakeholder is involved right from the beginning. Read full review ScreenShots