- Zeplin Sketch Plugin
- Zeplin Sketch Export
- Zeplin For Sketching
- Zeplin Sketch Prototype
- Zeplin Sketch Integration
An organized workspace to publish designs, where the entire team can collaborate to ship beautiful products together.
- Zeplin's CLI tool analyzes your component's source code entirely locally and only stores a summary on our database, to be displayed to your team. In addition, all the tooling including the CLI and the official plugins are completely open source. Contact us for any questions → Help your team get familiar with your design system.
- Zeplin has native apps for Mac and Windows. They also have a web app that can be used for your teammates. The web app is view only.To export from Sketch or F.
- Get started with Zeplin+ Download the Zeplin desktop app for Mac or Windows. You can use the app.
Stay in your design flow using your favorite design tool including Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch and Photoshop CC.
I absolutely love how everyone is on the same page for layout, sizing, and colors—it saves me so much time, it's crazy.
Select the platform you're designing for and let Zeplin—pun intended—take care of the rest, generating accurate tailored specs, assets and code snippets.
Zeplin provides capabilities much needed by developers including clarity on 'finalized' designs, an accessible design workspace friendly to non-designers, added structure to design screens and of course tailored technical specs built by developers for developers. As a designer, do I have to pay for developers? Zeplin works with a plugin in Sketch, Figma, Adobe XD and Photoshop. When you download the Mac or Windows app, it automatically installs these plugins for you. If you're a designer, you can export your designs using these plugins through the desktop app.
H2
With Zeplin there is no need to manually write out sizes or margins, type the copy, export icons. It's simply f***ing awesome and saves lots of time.
Everyone in the team can access the latest design resources, get notified of changes without you having to ping them.
Learn more about the integrations:
Zeplin is a perfect place to have an up-to-date repository for pixel-perfect comps which anyone can see and comment on. Everybody is loving to work with Zeplin :)
Designers, nowadays, have an arsenal of tools which help them compete in the industry with a ton of features packed in a single application, offering everything from screen design to prototyping to design handoff. This article could have a dozen different pieces of software in it but remembering how to use each one of them would be a real headache – let's get to the top three UI design tools and find out which one is the best one for your needs.
1. Sketch
Sketch was a real phenomenon in the industry back in 2015, absorbing a great deal of users from the former king, Photoshop. This wind of change created a new standard for UI design tools with features such as artboards, symbols and exporting. Vector design and symbol systems are among many selling points of this design giant, not to mention the clean and intuitive UI. Regarding prototyping, Sketch does offer interactive prototyping by using Sketch Cloud, but since tools like InVision and Marvel have been on the market for a long while, it could take time for users to consider shifting to a new one. Besides, Sketch has a plethora of plugins making up in what the original app lacks, making this software nearly the perfect choice.
However, there is always room for improvement. The symbol system, which was innovative at the time, does require some learning so that newbies would get familiar with it. Furthermore, the macOS exclusiveness surely upsets the fragile egos of Windows users and rules the app out in the eyes of a huge amount of potential customers. Also, Sketch is $99/year, while most of its competitors are free for lightweight use.
Pros
- Vector design
- Reusable components (symbols)
- A plenty of plugins
Cons
Zeplin Sketch Plugin
- No Windows version
For downloading Sketch for yourself, see https://www.sketch.com/get/.
Figma
It's not a big surprise that UI design tools these days share a lot of common features. Regarding this, it's fair to say Figma is 70% similar to Sketch, but one of the highlights of the competitor is that it supports multi-platform as it is entirely web-based, ranging from macOS to web to Windows and even Linux. Additionally, Figma uses a revolutionary system called vector network, which will blow your mind when you see just how smart it is the first time you use it. Because words can't entirely explain it, just see the video below.
And the cool stuff doesn't stop there, oh no. Figma provides multiplayer design functionality, which means that the designers now can collaborate in real time. It also has a good deal of helpful plugins just like Sketch, but this time, we have a free plan for a starter pack with up to three projects. The professional plan sets you back $144/year (or $12/month) but it's free for students and educators. The downside here is that due to it being a web-based tool, you can't use Figma without an active internet connection. And if Chrome hasn't squeezed your system RAM out yet, Figma will certainly put your memory availability to the test.
Pros
- Great vector network mechanism
- Real-time collaboration
- Has free plan
- Many plugins
- Multi-platform supported
Cons
- Can't be used without Internet connect
- Require a decent amount of RAM and graphics cards
For using Figma, see https://www.figma.com/.
Zeplin
Zeplin is a tool that helps your team collaborate and organize a project seamlessly. Unlike the two aforementioned, Zeplin is not an independent UI design tool, which means you have to create and edit the design in other standalone tools like Sketch and Figma and then import the draft into Zeplin to use its features. The application focuses on collaboration but instead of real-time cooperative design work, the tool enables an array of organizing functionalities, including sorting screens by tags, which is really handy in large projects or projects with multiple screen sizes. Also, Zeplin grants the users the ability of managing project global styles and color palette in a separate and intuitive tab. Neat and semantic exporting feature for code snippets is another plus point, where the styling class names are as same as the layer names.
Figma
It's not a big surprise that UI design tools these days share a lot of common features. Regarding this, it's fair to say Figma is 70% similar to Sketch, but one of the highlights of the competitor is that it supports multi-platform as it is entirely web-based, ranging from macOS to web to Windows and even Linux. Additionally, Figma uses a revolutionary system called vector network, which will blow your mind when you see just how smart it is the first time you use it. Because words can't entirely explain it, just see the video below.
And the cool stuff doesn't stop there, oh no. Figma provides multiplayer design functionality, which means that the designers now can collaborate in real time. It also has a good deal of helpful plugins just like Sketch, but this time, we have a free plan for a starter pack with up to three projects. The professional plan sets you back $144/year (or $12/month) but it's free for students and educators. The downside here is that due to it being a web-based tool, you can't use Figma without an active internet connection. And if Chrome hasn't squeezed your system RAM out yet, Figma will certainly put your memory availability to the test.
Pros
- Great vector network mechanism
- Real-time collaboration
- Has free plan
- Many plugins
- Multi-platform supported
Cons
- Can't be used without Internet connect
- Require a decent amount of RAM and graphics cards
For using Figma, see https://www.figma.com/.
Zeplin
Zeplin is a tool that helps your team collaborate and organize a project seamlessly. Unlike the two aforementioned, Zeplin is not an independent UI design tool, which means you have to create and edit the design in other standalone tools like Sketch and Figma and then import the draft into Zeplin to use its features. The application focuses on collaboration but instead of real-time cooperative design work, the tool enables an array of organizing functionalities, including sorting screens by tags, which is really handy in large projects or projects with multiple screen sizes. Also, Zeplin grants the users the ability of managing project global styles and color palette in a separate and intuitive tab. Neat and semantic exporting feature for code snippets is another plus point, where the styling class names are as same as the layer names.
Zeplin Sketch Export
Though not being a web tool, at least Zeplin runs on both Windows and macOS as a full-fledged application, while the web version offers limited features specifically for developers. Just like Sketch and Figma, Zeplin is also geared up for the design game with a multitude of convenient plugins. And ultimately, it does offer a free plan for those who want to get accustomed to Zeplin's ecosystem or to do small projects.
And despite not being equipped with a built-in prototyping app, it's generally believed to be a good thing concentrating only on what the app is good at while leaving the building a prototype job for another complete app. However, this may vary up to your project and workflow.
Pros
- Neat organizing features
- Nice styling exporting
- Has a free plan
- Many plugins
- Available for both Windows and macOS
Cons
Zeplin For Sketching
- No built-in prototyping tool.
For using Zeplin, you may check it out at https://app.zeplin.io/welcome.
Zeplin Sketch Prototype
Conclusion
If you have a team all using macOS and you know what you're doing, then Sketch is good to go with the lowest cost and nice features.
Zeplin Sketch Integration
If you want to try things out a little without any commitment, or you appreciate multi-platform support and real-time collaboration, indeed the choice here is Figma.
The advantages of Zeplin is design handoff and project organizing, so in case you have a big project that requires those standards, Zeplin is an indispensable selection to use together with other standalone UI design tools.