Balsamiq vs Zeplin

• Low-fidelity wireframing—Balsamiq offers tools to create lo-fi wireframes without the messiness and confusion that often comes along with other types of lo-fi wireframing (e.g. hand-drawn wireframes). This helps us avoid the need to heavily “translate” our designs to the people we’re showing them to.
• Easy-to-use interface—We have never had to spend time training anyone on how to use Balsamiq. Drag, drop, arrange—that’s it! This is helpful in getting non-designers and less experienced designers to communicate their ideas of what the finished design should sort-of look like without asking them to spend a lot of time learning a new tool.
• Ability to convert a design to a PDF—This is definitely a plus! Whereas other design tools require stakeholders to log into a design tool account or view designs on a web page, Balsamiq makes it really easy to just download a design as a PDF and hand/email it to a stakeholder. Lots of our stakeholders don’t want to deal with visiting a website or logging into something. However, they’re typically happy to receive a PDF and not have to ask questions such as, “How do I access that?” and “What’s the password again?"

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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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• Although it's not meant for sketching processes, it could be improved a bit for doing this (a bit more support for some more arrows or diagrams).
• Sometimes it's possible to get a bit lost in different propositions. It's interesting that it's only propositions, but the offline desktop version works faster for me (lot of coping attributes and screenshots into my sketches).
• It's using flash or something like that in their offline version, it keeps asking for updates.

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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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• 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.

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