Balsamiq vs Zeplin

• Balsamiq makes wireframing and prototyping very fast and easy. You have a lot of pre-defined assets such as buttons, icons, titles, text, labels, placeholder items etc. that you can drag and drop, letting you finish an idea for a landing page or app quite quickly.
• I use Balsamiq not only for wireframing, but also sketching processes or business models. The visualization is sketchy enough to keep discussions in the idea-phase, instead of wasting time on detailed discussion.

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• Provides dimensions across iOS, Android and Web which saves developers from a lot of guess and check when implementing designs
• Allows for easy download of digital design assets for developers to easily organize and implement
• Great user experience in terms of the product itself and a great value for your money
• Automatically generates CSS for web designs which is AMAZING!

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• Transition to design: In recent years, we have started to move away from Balsamiq to do wireframes in Sketch. By using Sketch for wireframes, we can establish our design patterns and symbol library early. When it's time to add colors, graphics, fonts, and more, our designer simply layers on top of the wireframes. This saves the design team a lot of time. We still use Balsamiq for quick mock-ups, but when building from scratch, we typically use Sketch. If there were some kind of easy way to transfer the Balsamiq symbols library to a design platform like Sketch, we might use it more often. Sadly, I think Sketch makes Balsamiq a bit irrelevant for experienced designers.
• Rulers: The lack of rulers in Balsamiq is very frustrating. The design does have a "snap to grid" as well as arrangement features like horizontal and vertical distribution, but this is NOT enough for my perfectionists out there.
• Icons: The icon library in Balsamiq is pretty limited. We typically use font-awesome to source icons for design projects. It would be great if Balsamiq tied in directly with font-awesome to offer a more complete set.
• Opening projects: Balsamiq changed it's software significantly a few years ago. Previously, each page of a project was saved as a .bmml. Now, each PROJECT is saved as a .bmpr, and can have as many pages as you want. This means in the past, you might have 10 separate files for a single project, and now you only have one. This is definitely a change for the better; however, I find that it's way too easy to accidentally save pages to the incorrect project. Why? Because when you open Balsamiq, it loads the last screens that you were working on rather than a blank new project. To me, this is confusing.

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• It would be better if it has a dedicated web application
• It's not the easiest tool to learn and start working with
• It would be awesome if it had more features turning it into an all-around tool for mockups and prototypes

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• It has definitely saved time when negotiating interface changes with a large variety of stakeholders
• Building a new layout is very quick and saves a lot of time when prototyping any clean basic interface
• All of this eventually leads to better functionality for less money, which while hard to quantify is very useful
• The only potential negative impact is that the design features are limited so may discourage the use of custom features which would have been particularly useful.

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• Much smoother hand offs between UX design / content strategy / product and the devs, putting all necessary design info in the same place as specs and code snippets.
• The Slack integration is really handy and makes it faster and easy to see updates / comments in real time.
• Zeplin improves communication between the design and development teams, allowing them to more easily "speak the same language" when working on a new feature.

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