Nextcloud offers their open source,
self-hosted Content Collaboration Platform, combining what they describe as an easy user
interface for consumer-grade cloud solutions with the security and
compliance measures enterprises need. Nextcloud brings together
universal access to data through mobile, desktop and web interfaces with
next-generation, on-premise secure communication and collaboration
features like real-time document editing, chat and video calls, putting
them under…
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Zeplin
Score 8.3 out of 10
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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.
For a SOHO business, this solution is ideal. You don't need to administrative overhead of other products like GSuite, and it saves licensing costs. The maintenance effort is minimal as long as you use their default applications. Migrations to newer versions can be done with a few commands and run automatically. If you're planning on using Nextcloud in large deployments with many users, you'll start to see higher costs on your resources and maintenance. There will be a point at which Gsuite becomes easier to manage.
Zeplin is, overall, really great for what it’s known for: design handoffs to development teams. Thus, it’s an excellent tool for scenarios in which the design and development teams do not work very closely. Because it allows users to use the tool on various platforms, it’s also great for teams in which there are in-house and remote (or contract) staff working on a single project. The tool is pretty lightweight once users are on-boarded, so it’s also great for larger teams. However, it can take significant time to onboard people to it, so it might not be great for more rushed projects. It also doesn’t have a ton of functionality beyond supporting design handoffs, so one might choose a more inclusive tool, such as Figma, to support more steps in the design process. Finally, Zeplin is costly and its rates are pretty inflexible, so this might not be the most ideal tool for more cash-strapped teams who want to use Zeplin for more than one project at a time.
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.
I never needed support as everything always worked fine. The documentation on Nextcloud website is extensive and clear. The community is very active on the forum and should support you if you don't already find what you are looking for.
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.
Nextcloud stacks up pretty well against Mattermost and ownCloud. I really appreciate the fact that Nextcloud seems to integrate with other products pretty seamlessly and allows for extensibility that our product team can extend and improve functionality without a tremendous ramp-up time. We once used ownCloud in previous years, but they went the wrong way, and have found Nextcloud to be the right direction over time.
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.
