Frontify vs. Nuclino vs. Zeplin

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.

For game design - Perfect for personal notes, recipes, snippets - Perfect for storing some organized data (for example, links to resources) - Perfect for a content playground powered by AI - Very good for diagrams - Very good. Don't know any bad examples. Tool really great. Rich functionality. Especially love different views (table, graph).

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

• 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

• The system is extremely fast. The application loads and displays data in milliseconds. This makes the system easy to work with.
• It's also easy to edit documentation and information, as information can be editing directly without the use of an "edit" button.
• Pricing: Loading speed, ease of use and quick editing are its main advantage that makes it stand out from competitors. Having said that, the pricing is very good as well.

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

• 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

• switching overe workspaces is bit tedious at the moment
• more granular control over what users can edit inside workspace -> specific items or any item under a specific collection
• currently its not clear who edited an item last -> footer that updates each time item has been edited and by whom
• support for smartsheets. only because we use them ;)
• on prem version? (easier to sell this to my boss)

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

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

Great tool

Incentivized

It has a very clean UI for me, the multiple views are so so useful, we can collaborate freely, and fast. This app helped us to grow because now we are giving our time more on generating ideas and of course getting more projects and clients giving real ROI instead of focusing on organizing files. But just like all apps out there, it has some room for improvement

Incentivized

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

My team has an individual dedicated to content management and Nuclino is one of her job descriptions. It's nice knowing she is able to handle any issues that arise before we even realize they exist. We haven't had any technical issues since implementation so that's been a very pleasant experience.

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

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.

Nuclino is the clear winner when it comes to ease of use for both the administrator and user. Less setup time and less "training" time. The streamlined interface is quick and intuitive to learn and is not cluttered as compared to Confluence. Every tool you need to use to create a page or administer the workspace is available immediately on screen or by right-clicking. In contrast, Confluence buries many tools in administrative interfaces and only allows use of some features once you make several clicks to include a "macro" or "plug-in". We use both tools and I get complaints constantly from my team about how complicated Confluence can get just to author a quick page.

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

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

• We're able to more quickly develop processes and try things out
• Our internal how-to guides are a real time saver, especially when paired with AI search
• It's easier to collaborate on lightweight documents
• Software architectures are easier to find and document

• 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