MURAL (formerly Mural.ly) from Tactivos (DBA MURAL) in San Francisco is described by the vendor as a digital workspace and visual collaboration tool, designed for creative teams to make the process of design more efficient for distributed teams, working remotely.
$12
per month
Zeplin
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Zeplin, from the company of the same name, is a platform supporting collaboration in application development by engineers and designers by providing an API with popular collaboration, development and prototyping tools and creating a space where productions can be shared and reviewed.
I've recommended MURAL to a lot of people in a lot of fields. This is a great tool for any group of people that might stand around a white board if they were in person. Even if they are in person, I still recommend it pretty often because, unlike a white board, MURAL is virtual, so it can go offline with you. I've recommended it to other Software Teams, individual software developers, engineering teams, Sales Managers, Office Staff, Manufacturing teams, and more.
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
enables easy for all collaboration especially in the hybrid environment
makes brainstorming better as users can create digital sticky notes, draw diagrams, and add images to visually represent concepts and ideas
it helps to visualize data effectively - users can create charts, graphs, and diagrams to present data-driven insights to team members and stakeholders
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.
Overall, MURAL is really easy to use, but there are a couple downsides. It's really easy to make areas of the board consistent because double clicking adds stickies that match those around the current one. It's really easy to connect the elements. And it's really easy to organize elements. Inconsistent controls, Panning, Line Connections, and latency are the only issues I had. My biggest issue is that the MURAL mouse buttons are very different from most similar software. This always causes me problems switching to a graphics software or 3D modelling software. Because MURAL uses the same button to pan and move elements, it's really easy to move things when panning around. The lines can also be a (sometimes huge) problem because thew will occasionally disappear or connect to things incorrectly. I think this is tied to latency issues which, in addition to causing phantom lines, can sometimes cause confusion to your team.
Zeplin is not a fully functional prototyping software system, but having the ability to add notes to help explain what actions are expected allows me to rate it high.
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.
Mural was easier to use and share compared with Whiteboard. Whiteboard's functionality is limited. It is also integrated into Teams in an odd way that makes it difficult for team members to refer to old whiteboards. Mural as a stand alone web app is better.
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.
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.
