Builder.ai (discontinued) vs. Zeplin

TLDR: 28 months into a 6 month project. They stopped developing it without a working MVP, fired all the developers, and do not respond to my requests that involve figuring out what’s happening and when I will be getting a refund.First, please feel free to reach out before removing this review. Builder.ai has taken down our bad reviews in the past saying they couldn’t verify them. I’ll be happy to point you in the direction of the people I’ve worked with including Jason.Second, when I say this is a fraud from the top down, I’m not exaggerating. Please take a look at the news articles that have come out within the last two years regarding their CEO, CFO, and official auditor.If you are still reading, that means you’re still considering it, so let me tell you about my experience.I started this process by meeting with the sales team at the Silicon Slopes Conference in late 2022. I told them about what I wanted to build and they said that would be very easy and doable. We spent the rest of 2022 meeting with developers who reconfirmed how simple this would be and that even with a relaxed timeframe, we could expect a product in about six months. January 2, 2023, I signed the contract.We had a number of problems from the very beginning, including them giving me the wrong documents to sign and mixing my product up with another. We kept meeting, moving forward, struggled constantly with getting the money flow correct. Weeks turned into months and eventually all of the deadlines were past due with no communication on when they would get updated. Near the end of 2023, we escalated and very clearly said that if they cannot develop this, it’s OK to just say as much and give us our money back. They repeated that they could, added additional developers to the team, and said they would be pushing forward with an MVP shortly.When they released the MVP, the flow of money still didn’t work. Whenever I would bring that up or that I wanted to do end to end testing, they would say that they will be able to do that when it’s ready for full release. Again, months passed of this and I stayed patient. I have to say my patience has been the biggest mistake of this entire process.In November 2024, 23 months in on a six month project, they marked it complete. It wasn’t. The money was still wrong, features I had previously approved had vanished, and when I asked why features I paid for weren’t on there, they said they had questions but decided not to ask them and just mark it complete instead. I was furious, but once again I was trying to make it work. I worked with my project manager, and we spent December creating an entire list of every acceptance criteria. I required photo or video evidence for each piece that it was complete or I wasn’t going to mark it done. I also told them they had until the end of March.As we moved through January and February 2025, they started slipping in comments about how they didn’t think we would make the deadline. I continued escalating, people tried to work with me on it, and I decided to once again, find my patience. It did me no good.On March 26, my project manager told me that they were no longer working on developing my project. They had fired everyone who would’ve been part of developing it and had no plans on what to do going forward. They were supposed to tell me the week before when it happened and he expected that I should get an email about it that week. When I tried reaching out to the legal team that same week about canceling any sort of ongoing contract and getting my money back, they told me they were going to refer me to another group. It is April 18, 2025 and still I have received no communication. My patience now means that I have signed myself up for a painful legal battle. I’m leaving this review to let others know that if they already have a contract, chances are no development work has happened for the last month and they need to demand answers. This is also here for people considering this company. Do not fall for it.

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

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

Great tool

Incentivized

See previous review

Zeplin's component management and style guide help us to be consistent across whole product and it so easy to use for non-technical person. It is now easy to collaboration for designes between different teams like stackholders, product owner, UI/UX, developers and testers. Now there is only one point of reference is Zeplin so it is so easy to get details without asking designer or developer again and again.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized