Figma’s Dev Mode Upgrades Are Threatening Zeplin’s Remaining Clients

Figma Tightens Its Grip on the Design-to-Dev Pipeline

Zeplin built its business on a straightforward problem: designers and developers speak different languages, and someone needed to translate. For years, Zeplin sat comfortably in that gap, offering redlines, specs, and asset exports that made handoff feel organized rather than chaotic. Figma was a design tool; Zeplin was the bridge between design and engineering. That division of labor made sense until Figma decided it wanted both sides of the equation.

Figma’s Dev Mode, which moved out of beta and into general availability as part of a broader push toward developer-facing features, does almost everything Zeplin does – and does it from inside the same canvas where design work actually happens. Developers get annotated specs, code snippets in CSS, iOS, and Android formats, and direct inspection access without needing a separate license or a separate app. The workflow compression alone is a strong argument for consolidating around Figma, and product teams with tight budgets are increasingly asking why they are paying for two tools when one already handles both jobs.

Zeplin has not been standing still. But standing still and losing ground are not always different things.

What Dev Mode Actually Offers Now

The feature set that Figma has built into Dev Mode over the past two years is worth taking seriously on its own terms, not just as a competitive threat. Developers can toggle into Dev Mode and immediately see a file stripped of design-layer noise, presenting only what matters for implementation: measurements, typography tokens, color variables, and auto-generated code. Figma added support for variables and design tokens in a way that maps directly to how modern component libraries are structured, which means the output is actually usable rather than decorative. That was a long-standing criticism of early automated code generation – it looked right but required extensive cleanup before it touched production.

Figma also introduced annotations within Dev Mode that let designers mark specific elements with notes for developers – replacing a workflow that often lived in Zeplin comments, Linear tickets, or Slack threads. The tighter the integration between where design decisions are made and where they are communicated, the weaker the case for any external handoff layer. One product team that routes feedback through three separate tools is a team that will eventually consolidate when a single tool covers enough of the ground.

There is also the question of Figma’s pricing structure. Dev Mode access is priced as a seat add-on rather than a full editor license, which makes it affordable for engineering teams to have direct access without purchasing tools they will not use. That pricing logic undercuts Zeplin at the wallet level even before the feature comparison begins. Zeplin charges per project or per seat depending on the plan, and as Figma’s footprint inside product organizations grows, Zeplin’s presence starts to feel redundant on the spreadsheet before it feels redundant in practice.

Where Zeplin Still Has Ground to Stand On

Zeplin is not without advantages, and writing its obituary prematurely would be a mistake. The tool has integrations that matter to enterprise engineering workflows – Jira, Slack, GitHub, and others – and its styleguide features remain more opinionated and structured than what Figma offers out of the box. For organizations running large-scale design systems with contributors across multiple teams, Zeplin’s version control around components and its project organization model still offer real utility. Enterprise contracts are also sticky in ways that feature comparisons do not always capture.

Figma’s own expansion into adjacent tools has also shown that moving fast into new territory creates its own rough edges. Dev Mode has had complaints about inconsistent code output depending on how a file is structured, and developers who inherit messy Figma files do not get magically clean specs just because they toggle a mode. The quality of what Dev Mode surfaces depends heavily on how disciplined the design team is upstream, which means the tool rewards organized workflows and penalizes chaotic ones. Zeplin’s architecture, by contrast, imposes more structure by design, which some development teams actively prefer.

Still, the trend line is unfavorable for Zeplin. Figma is iterating on Dev Mode quickly, adding plugin support and expanding its code snippet coverage with each major release. The gap between what Figma offers natively and what Zeplin offers exclusively is narrowing. Zeplin’s remaining clients are mostly staying out of inertia, deep integration, or enterprise agreement length – not because they are discovering features that Figma cannot replicate.

The Consolidation Pressure Is Real

The design tooling market is compressing around a small number of platforms that want to own entire workflows rather than one step of them, and Zeplin is a reminder of what happens when a well-executed niche product gets absorbed into a category leader’s roadmap. When renewal conversations come up and a product manager has to explain why the team pays for Zeplin alongside a Figma organization plan, the burden of justification falls entirely on Zeplin – and that burden gets heavier with every Dev Mode update Figma ships.