Frontify vs. OpenText Hightail 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.

Hightail is my go-to source when I need to send large files that would never fit as regular attachments. That being said, sometimes there are files that would perfectly fit as attachments but I want the security that Hightail provides when sending sensitive or private material. It's very comforting knowing that the content I'm sending is only being received and viewed by the intended parties. It's also comforting for my clients when it's THEIR content that I'm sending for review.

Incentivized

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

• Management of content, communication, spaces, and projects in general.
• Control of processes, tasks and activities between the different members of teams.
• Collaborative work through different media and channels.

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

• Some of our recipients are not very tech-savvy and can get confused with how to download a file. There is some room for improvement by making it clearer where the user should click to download the file.

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

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

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.

Honestly, once we started using Google Drive more efficiently and saw what improvements OpenText Hightail had made, it was hard to choose. But now that we more consistently use Google Drive, I use it probably 75% more than I use OpenText Hightail for the same tasks. I'm not sure how much longer I'll be a customer at OpenText but it's great to have both options.

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

• Hightail simply saves time. We no longer struggle with trying to meet the requirements of OutLook. When we have a file that is too large to send via OutLook we just "hightail it".

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