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Zeplin

Zeplin

Overview

What is Zeplin?

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…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Zeplin is a versatile tool that facilitates collaboration between designers and developers, streamlining the design handoff process and …
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Handoff+, yes!

8 out of 10
April 27, 2021
Incentivized
Zeplin is used by several departments across our organization - our product, design, and engineering teams all make use of the software. …
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Awesome software

9 out of 10
March 27, 2019
Incentivized
Zeplin is being used by the Product, Design and Engineering teams to share designs between design and engineering. It solves the problem …
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Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Free

$0

Cloud
per user per month

Team

$6

Cloud
per user per month

Organization

$12

Cloud
per user per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Details

What is Zeplin?

Zeplin helps teams deliver on the promise of design. Its design delivery platform connects design to development and provides an organized workspace to publish designs where product teams can collaborate to ship beautiful products together.

Zeplin Features

Project Management Features

  • Supported: Task Management
  • Supported: Workflow Automation
  • Supported: Mobile Access
  • Supported: Tagging
  • Supported: Search
  • Supported: Integrates with other Project Management Tools

Communication Features

  • Supported: Notifications
  • Supported: Comments and feedback
  • Supported: Sharing and privacy

File Sharing & Management Features

  • Supported: Versioning
  • Supported: Document files
  • Supported: Image files
  • Supported: Video files
  • Supported: Audio files
  • Supported: Document collaboration
  • Supported: Shared folders
  • Supported: Access control
  • Supported: Advanced security features
  • Supported: Web interface

Zeplin Video

What is Zeplin?

Zeplin Competitors

Zeplin Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Abstract, InVision, and MightyText are common alternatives for Zeplin.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.5.

The most common users of Zeplin are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(63)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Zeplin is a versatile tool that facilitates collaboration between designers and developers, streamlining the design handoff process and minimizing miscommunication. With Zeplin, designers can import screens from software like Photoshop or SketchUp, attach assets, and create convenient diagrams. This enables them to set a high bar for implementing designs and saves time on back-and-forth communication. For developers, Zeplin offers the ability to better understand layouts and be more assertive by providing ways to export assets and CSS code. It captures CSS styles and optimizes their work, making it practical for prototypes and the layout of web applications. Additionally, Zeplin allows for easy sharing of design specs with clients and provides a succinct set of features for viewing, sharing, downloading, and discussing design assets. It acts as a bridge between design and development teams by reducing the communication gap and enabling feedback from stakeholders through shared boards. Its user-friendly interface makes it easy for engineers and designers to share, discuss, and question designs, ultimately saving time, headache, and mistakes due to miscommunication. Overall, Zeplin is widely used by digital product teams, UX designers, and other departments to collaborate effectively on projects.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-19 of 19)
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D Hendrik Mulyana | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Zeplin as the source of truth in the final design that I hand off to the developer team. Before utilizing Zeplin, my team used to face issues while handing over the design to the tech team. The main issue was that the tech team could not determine if the design was final or not. Even though we had marked the design as final, there were instances where our PM required some changes in the middle of development. This caused a delay in the delivery and made the dev team upset as it affected their timeline and deliverable.
  • We are able to organize the design with multi-group in every project
  • Zeplin is also able to create variants within one screen. It's a combination of screens or pages into one small group, based on the workflow or behaviour we set.
  • We can create style guide and connect it in to many projects
  • Now, zeplin is support variable from Figma latest features.
  • Flows in zeplin were actually good. but if we put many flows inside one canvas,. that make the app slow
  • I hope they can make boards based on the design group. to make loading faster. Imagine we have over 100+ screens, and we make all screens as design flow.
  • Sometimes the style guide is not connected to the project. especially for color intergation.
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
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Zeplin is primarily used as a collaboration tool for our UI designers, front-end developers, product managers, copywriters and every other stakeholder in the design and development of the product. It makes the design handoff process efficient by allowing the designer to upload their design directly from the the sketching tools and then basic code snippets are auto generated for the developer as a boilerplate code to work on.
  • Code snippets based on design are auto generated.
  • Integrates with existing collaboration tools used at the organization like Slack, MS teams and development tools like Visual Studio Code.
  • People can add comments to the designs which can be assigned as tasks to the relevant person within the design team.
  • Interface is confusing and unintuitive.
  • Steep learning curve for new users.
  • Tutorials in the self help section need a lot of improvement both in terms of depth and breadth of topics they cover.
Zeplin is more suited for teams that are looking for handoff tool that also has a built-in style guide. It is effective for both large and small project and primarily delivers most benefits when there are a large number of stakeholders. However, if someone needs a design handoff tool along with prototyping, Zeplin is not the right choice as it doesn't have prototyping capabilities.
April 27, 2021

Handoff+, yes!

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Zeplin is used by several departments across our organization - our product, design, and engineering teams all make use of the software. It allows the product and design teams to do their work and then have a clean handoff to engineering to build out the feature with everything that they need.
  • Collaboration tools.
  • Design notes/documentation for engineers.
  • Simple prototyping.
  • Clickable actions to navigate prototypes naturally.
  • Subscription model.
Zeplin is well suited for collaborating on product design and allowing the designer to include all the necessary notes and details required by the engineer in order to move forward and build what has been designed. It would be ideal to allow for clickable elements with the design to be able to show/experience some natural navigation and therefore be better suited for prototyping and understanding behaviors/interactions of elements.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Zeplin acts as a bridge between the design teams and developer teams to assist in the handoff of the finished design artifacts. Once the design is done, it is exported to Zeplin and Zeplin parses the screens to enable assets and delivers specifications to the developers. This relieves designers to manually deliver the assets in multiple folders or files and explain those to the dev team. Zeplin saves a ton of time in manual work and makes it easy to update the assets when the design changes.
  • Code and design specifications help developers to quickly access colors and dimensions and also code snippets like CSS if required.
  • Commenting features are great for getting feedback and answering questions.
  • User interface design could use some better treatment.
  • Better tutorials to teach how to efficiently use the software.
Zeplin helps with asset management and design artifacts delivery. It enables conversations like InVision with its commenting features. It can help maintain collections of design works in custom sections. Various inspection features support the developers to build pixel perfect interfaces. This is not useful for clickable or rapid prototyping. It is only helpful as an archive bridge between design and development.
Raphael Sanguinete | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Zeplin to help us implement mockups for Users Interfaces in our games and on our websites. It is used mainly for the first prototypes in a simple way, focused on the handoff of the design side that can be picked by programmers after. It helps us iterate quickly on those ideas and design good UI and UX.
  • Very nice design and user interface
  • Its styles components and color palettes organization is great
  • It has nice tools to iterate on web designs quickly
  • It would be better if it has a dedicated web application
  • It's not the easiest tool to learn and start working with
  • It would be awesome if it had more features turning it into an all-around tool for mockups and prototypes
Zeplin is well suited for teams that want to organize the development workflow of web apps and user interfaces in a way that the design team has more control and can pass information in a better way to the developer team. If your team is small or the web app or product being created is not so big, maybe other options that do all the mockup/wireframing/prototype in only one tool probably will be better.
Christopher Fritz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Zeplin is being used between several departments and in collaboration with clients. It's primarily a valuable piece of software for our design department who can share and create designs and style guides with our project managers. It's a great tool to work alongside Adobe and Sketch etc. The collaboration between the apartments is the key to success here. The rest of this review will be written from an IT point of view.
  • Collaboration between departments
  • Excellent user management
  • Better definition of roles within user management.
  • Better options for versioning.
Zeplin is an excellent tool for collaboration between departments. Designers, developers, and project managers. From an IT point of view, we'll find a manageable user interface where we can encourage our end users to invite clients where they work as an Alien. If they need more than viewing access, we can set it for them quite easily. I would have loved a more natural way to integrate the access with other IT systems together with a better definition of user roles.
August 02, 2019

As Pretty as it gets!

Ray Flores | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Zeplin between two departments ( content and tech ). For the tech team to show off their best work, we need to know what the desired results are to be displayed. With Zeplin, the tech team can collaborate with the content team via notes directly on the mock-up. This is ideal for questions and answers that will not get lost in the shuffle, but rather are pinned directly where the question stems from ( point on the design ). This allows for very minimal miscommunication.
  • Allows note to be dropped and pinned directly on the design where the question stems from
  • Removes questions about exact styles with the CSS box
  • Loads extremely fast with the Windows App on a PC
  • Encourages collaboration between team members and departments
  • In the UI, the menu is a bit misleading by not showing all the pages available within a single project
  • Offline notifications are missing ( a must when the app is closed )
Zeplin is well suited for web developers to understand what the marketing team is desiring. For me, Zeplin is the desired resulting display from the code that I am writing. Zeplin takes the guessing of styles, guessing of size scale, out of the equation. Zeplin would be less appropriate to use if I were a beginner web developer, as it does not include any actual code ( other than styles ) in the project.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In my UX design contract work with several organizations, Zeplin is being used by me and other designers to efficiently share designs with other teams, particularly development teams. Zeplin makes it incredibly easy to do this, as it enables us to share these designs without spending a ton of time marking up each screen with every single design specification. Developers can independently inspect elements to view these specs, avoiding the all-too-common issue of having to go back and forth over Slack or email to clarify points of confusion, solve issues around missing assets, or fix typos. Zeplin has also proven to be very helpful in eliciting feedback from other stakeholders, as it’s very easy to export designs for internal and external people to review and provide feedback on.
  • 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.
  • The tool is rather expensive given that it doesn’t have a ton of functionalities.
  • The tool is a little complex, which requires us to spend significant onboarding time on this product for new team members.
  • The tool can add more styles than necessary, adding the extra step of double-checking each line of the code to ensure that nothing new has popped up that might affect development.
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Zeplin is used by our product, UX design, and content strategy teams to hand off designs to the dev teams. Zeplin allows our dev teams to pull specs, assets, and code snippets directly from the design itself, which makes the cross-department collaboration and communication so easy. Zeplin contains our design system which keeps our UI components consistent across the product.
  • Beautiful, clean, easy to use, easy to navigate interface. Zeplin looks great and feels intuitive from the start.
  • Zeplin is especially fantastic as a collaboration tool. You can easily annotate designs with unobtrusive comments, allowing teams to ask questions and make suggestions easily.
  • Zeplin keeps our designs very consistent. For example, it remembers colors and font styles and makes it easy to build a style guide.
  • Our design team uses Sketch to make mockups, which must then be imported to Zeplin. Basically, it adds another tool to the chain and more accounts to keep track of.
  • The plans are a bit expensive. The product ultimately feels worth it, but I think it could be priced more cheaply.
  • Internal navigation is sometimes difficult to figure out (e.g., the order of different screens and overall user flow).
Zeplin is really a wonderful tool for handing off designs to more technical teams. It makes it super easy to share specs and collaborate on designs at a high level. Zeplin's integrations make it especially great for teams that already use Sketch, Slack, etc. While Zeplin feels clean and easy to use, it might be too lightweight for very large / complex teams.
Prashant Mahajan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Zeplin to share design assets with developers. It is used across the organization. We use this to reduce the communication gap between the teams, specially design and developers. This also lets you get feedback from other stakeholders by sharing the board with them and they can comment there. Before Zeplin, designers had to create PDFs with design specs and then share the design assets separately in a drive or email. If any asset was missing or if any clarification was needed, there was a long chain of emails, now it is very smooth and quick, happens on Zeplin and both the design and dev teams are happy. As a product manager, this has immensely helped me to get feedback, improve the process and make people accountable.
  • Its integration with Sketch is great, it just completes everything. You create the design and in one click it is there on the Zeplin board.
  • The notes and comments help to be more precise with questions and clarify on the Zeplin board itself.
  • One of the best things I liked about Zeplin was its simplicity, anyone who doesn't even come from a design, tech or product background can understand the product in just a couple of minutes.
  • Zeplin still is not on par with other tools like Figma, which help to transfer the code from design. It is the next step in machine learning.
  • Zeplin doesn't have a prototyping feature, which will be great for developers to understand the motions and animations.
  • Zeplin currently doesn't have version history, which would be good to have, since if a design is updated by the designer the developer could see what was updated.
It is a great tool if your design and development teams are separate. It is also great for freelancing or remote scenarios. The tool can be taken up by a company of any size, we have used it for 1000+ size companies with ease. I think, if you are using Sketch, then this is good to go. If you are using Figma, you can skip it.
March 27, 2019

Awesome software

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Zeplin is being used by the Product, Design and Engineering teams to share designs between design and engineering. It solves the problem of easily sharing screen designs, as well as allowing engineers to "inspect" the screens so designers don't need to mark up every measurement on every screen. It also allows for easy share links to other departments.
  • Sharing screen designs.
  • Allowing engineers to inspect the elements on the designs.
  • Runs as a web app or as a standalone desktop app.
  • Requires each user to have a login.
Zeplin is well suited to Product Design teams that need to share designs with engineering and product partners. It is well suited to designs for any sort of screen — desktop, mobile, apps, TV. Zeplin is probably suited mainly for print or physical design and is only relevant for product design organizations.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Zeplin to manage the handoff between product, design, and marketing. We used to struggle with unruly file systems and competing copies, missing assets, and disorganized product launches. Now, our designers can establish projects and guidelines for asset use, passing off product shots, and more.
  • Zeplin makes it super simple to share locked design assets across the organization, whether you're on the product, marketing, or support team.
  • Zeplin's integration with Sketch streamlines design.
  • Project organization is a breeze.
  • The user interface isn't as intuitive for those just beginning to learn the system—something simple, like leaving a comment, isn't always clear as it could be.
  • We do wish Zeplin integrated with more of our other tools.
  • Prototyping is pretty limited.
If you need a system for simpler handoff between design and product, or product to marketing, Zeplin's a great solution. On the development side of things, being able to see properties is extremely useful. And for those who simply need to grab colors or logos, using Zeplin as a style guide is incredibly useful.
Ronald Melendez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Zeplin is a very practical tool for prototypes and layout of web applications. It is very interesting for frontend development because it allows you to capture the CSS styles of the screens. This is a very comfortable job since you can optimize the work of frontend In terms of interface design. You can also import screens from Photoshop or SketchUp. Facilitating this task for the designer, you can also attach assets so that it is convenient for the developer to have all the references when it comes to diagramming.
  • You can get the CSS style code
  • You can import files from Photoshop and SketchUp
  • You can not define internal navigation by linking the screens
Zeplin is very well at developing prototypes of applications. Also, you can base the development of frontend and layout, on the screens that are uploaded to the project. Besides the very good function of being able to upload assets separately so that the developer can have both the images and the assets in the project, I like that it is a pretty light tool. I like that it is much cheaper than other tools such as Marvel.
Carlos Eduardo de Souza | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We've been using Zeplin for a few years and it has proven to be one of the best tools for User Experience and User Interface Design. Furthermore it helps us, while working as developer partners for agencies, to better understand layouts provided and be more assertive since it offers ways to export assets and even CSS code to better specify little details like colors, font size, margins and much more.
  • Has both a web app and desktop app
  • Great integration with Sketch
  • If you're developing the front-end, it really helps providing assets and layout specs
  • The web application doesn't offer ways to create new projects like InVision or Marvel
  • It could have a prototyping tool to navigate between screens
  • The mobile website doesn't work as well as it should
It's great if you need to work with interfaces created by partners or agencies, since it offers a great way to inspect and understand the specifications. Also, it's a great way to create style guides to create a really solid user interface. On the other hand, it doesn't offer a fluid way to navigate between screens like other prototyping applications like InVision and Marvel.
Hernán Silva | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Zeplin to share design specs with our clients and discuss UI changes. Zeplin provides us with a succinct but great set of features that lets us see, share, download and discuss design assets.
  • Share design screens: being the core of the service, uploading design screens from design software is as easy as it gets
  • Share and see design specs: Zeplin offers a really handy way to share design specs such as colors, fonts, CSS directives and rules
  • Prototype navigation: Zeplin offers navigation between screen using prototype navigation where you can link a screen and draw on top of the screen's elements. However, this is a very basic feature compared to similar apps and services. For instance, you can not assign transition effects or timeouts for transitions.
For UI and UX designers, Zeplin is a great tool that allows them to share design screens and specs with other members of their team. For project owners, developers and stakeholders, Zeplin comes in handy when in need of a fast, reliable tool to preview and review design assets and screens.
December 18, 2018

Zeplin Review

Tariq Virani | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used by our digital product team. Our design team delivers specs for new website and App features to the developers using Zeplin.
  • Zeplin provides detailed specifications, allowing for the guesswork to be taken out of developer's work.
  • Zeplin allows for files to easily be shared via links.
  • Zeplin's allows for tagging of files which makes organizing very easy.
  • Slack integration is very helpful!
  • There is no way to make comments on files within Zeplin (or at least no clearly visible way).
  • The UI is not the most intuitive.
Zeplin is well suited for lean teams in which developers and designers may not be working in the same location.
Brad Henderson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Zeplin for collaboration between our designer and developers. Both of my companies have built very design/user experience centric products and we set a high bar for the implementation of the designs we create. However, developers are generally poor implementers of design and don't have a very good eye for design. Zeplin solves this problem and since we've started using it we've saved a lot of back and forth between developers and designers.
  • Provides dimensions across iOS, Android and Web which saves developers from a lot of guess and check when implementing designs
  • Allows for easy download of digital design assets for developers to easily organize and implement
  • Great user experience in terms of the product itself and a great value for your money
  • Automatically generates CSS for web designs which is AMAZING!
  • 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
Adobe XD is more seamless across products but it's still being built out and lacks a lot of functionality. So for right now, what Zeplin does for the whole process of implementing designs between designer and developer it's the best product on the market. It has literally saved us hundreds of hours of back and forth between developer and designer and it's seriously been a gamechanger for that process. Can't say enough good things about Zeplin!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Zeplin is used by our designers and developers, as well as by product managers. It's a great tool to share design mock-ups or final UI designs and easily communicate with comments and notes on each of the files. It's pretty nice that you can directly import files from Sketch to Zeplin. Developers also love Zeplin, as it gives them the ability to see the measurements of pixels between components, select and see properties for each of the components, CSS code, etc.
  • Great way to import files directly from Sketch to Zeplin
  • Shows properties for all the components and elements and makes the lives of developers much easier
  • Allows developers to comment and write notes on the files
  • Has nice design and overall UX
  • Sometimes updates from Sketch don't work as fast as expected, but overall we are very satisfied
It's a great tool to share design mock-ups with the team. Developers love it, as it allows them to see properties for each of the elements in the design and makes their lives much better.
Matthew Gardner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Zeplin solves the problem of product/design teams interfacing with engineering. It provides a clear and easy way for engineers and designers to share, discuss, and question designs in a very user-friendly and easy-to-manage way. Both teams heavily enjoy using Zeplin versus a million PDF files being sent around the org. Zeplin saves us time, headache, and mistakes due to miscommunication.
  • Sharing
  • Collaboration
  • Discussion/Commenting
  • Relies on artboards
  • Photoshop plugin issues sometimes
  • Updates too frequently
  • Designers sharing things to build with developers
  • Discussions around designs
  • Questions from developers about designs
  • Iterating on designs based on feedback
  • Integration with Sketch and Photoshop
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