Proto.io is a prototyping tool for creating interactive mobile apps.
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Zeplin
Score 7.6 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.
Proto.io can be more complicated than some of those tools because it gives us a lot of features in the same product. Some of those tools are better for wireframing. Still, for prototyping, my choice is Proto.io because its prototyping workflow, even if it can be a little …
Zeplin is more focused on the handoff than in the creation itself. The other alternatives can do both, but Zeplin is an awesome tool for the handoff part. It depends in how big is your team and how the workflow is organized to understand whats the best tool for your team.
Proto.io is the perfect solution for UX/UI designers that need to create and share interactive prototypes. Proto excels at the interactive part. There are so many different ways to make elements change or interact, whether you're viewing the prototype on a computer (mouse clicks) or on a phone (screen touches). We could build and prototype our entire mobile app on here if we wanted to because Proto.io has the customization that we need to make the app look and feel like ours. If you're looking for a software to create wireframes and static mockups, Proto.io is probably overkill for you.
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
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.
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.
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.
Proto.io is definitely the premier mockup and wireframe application. Lucidchart shares some of the capability but can be a bit clunky. Proto.io is interactive and smooth and helps you to see exactly how your UI will look and behave before the development stage. Additionally, it's library of native components is robust.
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.