Adobe Express vs Zeplin

Adobe Express is Adobe's online and mobile design app for quick, template-based content. It launched under that name in December 2021, replacing Adobe Spark, and has since been rebuilt with Firefly generative AI built in. Its core job is letting non-designers make social posts, flyers, presentations and short videos without learning Photoshop.

Express offers a large template library, drag-and-drop editing, one-click quick actions such as background removal and resizing, Firefly text-to-image and generative fill, video editing with captions and animations, brand kits, PDF quick actions, a content scheduler for social channels and real-time collaboration. The free plan includes core tools, 5 GB of storage and limited AI generations. Premium adds premium templates and fonts, 250 generative credits a month, brand kits, one-click resize and video background removal; Firefly Pro bundles Premium with 4,000 credits and Photoshop on web and mobile; Teams adds pooled storage and an admin console.

Express fits teams already paying for Creative Cloud, since it opens Photoshop and Illustrator assets through Creative Cloud Libraries. Canva has a larger template and stock library, a more mature whiteboard and docs suite and stronger team workflows; Figma is a professional interface design tool rather than a template editor. Express can feel less polished than Canva for multi-page documents.

Buying tip: Premium comes with a 30-day free trial, and Express Premium is also included in Creative Cloud Pro, so check whether your team already has access before buying separate seats.

Zeplin is a design delivery platform founded in Istanbul by a Turkish team and now headquartered in San Francisco. It pioneered design hand-off: designers publish finalized screens from Figma, Sketch or Adobe XD, and developers get a stable, organized source of truth that is separate from the messy working files where designs keep changing.

Published screens come with measurements, colors, typography, exportable assets, code snippets and design tokens, and they can be grouped into sections, connected into user flows and annotated with notes. Version history shows what changed between iterations, and workflow statuses mark screens as ready for development. Styleguides document colors, text styles, spacing and components, and integrations with Storybook, Jira, Slack and Connected Components link design elements to real code. Pricing starts with a free plan for one project, a Basic plan priced per project with unlimited users, an Advanced plan priced per seat with 50 projects, and Enterprise for security and support needs.

Zeplin fits product teams that want a curated, approved layer between design and engineering, agencies handing designs to client developers, and organizations using several design tools. Figma's Dev Mode now covers much of the same ground inside Figma, so teams fully on Figma often do not need a separate tool. Supernova and zeroheight are stronger for full design system documentation, while Storybook remains the reference for coded components.