If you came here looking for a Zeplin vs InVision vs Figma comparison, the honest answer is that this stopped being a three-way race. InVision discontinued its design collaboration services and shut the platform down at the end of 2024. InVision Inspect, Prototypes, and Design System Manager are not products you can evaluate, buy, or use in 2026 — the services are closed and the hosted content was deleted. Any guide still scoring "InVision Inspect" against its rivals is describing software that no longer exists.
What remains is a real two-tool decision: Figma's built-in Dev Mode, or Zeplin as a dedicated handoff layer sitting downstream of your design file. They tackle overlapping problems with very different assumptions about where handoff should live and how you should pay for it.
What actually happened to InVision
InVision was founded in 2011 and became the default way design teams shared clickable prototypes. According to Fast Company's reporting on the shutdown, the company raised $1.5 million in its first year, took $45 million four years later, then raised $100 million in 2017 at a $1 billion valuation — roughly doubling to nearly $2 billion the following year.
The unwinding came fast. Freehand, InVision's visual collaboration product, was acquired by Miro in fall 2023. The remaining design collaboration services were discontinued at the end of 2024, with December 31, 2024 as the hard cutoff. Users were told to export anything they wanted to keep before that date.
The structural reason is worth understanding, because it predicts which tools survive. InVision's core pitch — turn static screens into shareable, commentable prototypes — became a built-in feature of the design tool itself rather than a product you buy separately. Once Figma shipped prototyping, live collaboration, and shareable links natively, the standalone layer had to justify a second subscription and a second place for engineers to look. That is exactly the test Zeplin still has to pass in 2026.
Figma Dev Mode: handoff inside the design file
Dev Mode is Figma's engineering-facing view of a design file. Per Figma's Dev Mode page, it surfaces code snippets, component properties, and structured layer data directly from the canvas, plus a set of workflow features aimed at the specific ways handoff breaks:
- Mark ready for dev — status tracking with notifications when a design changes after being handed over
- Compare changes — side-by-side diffing to see what moved between versions
- Annotations — designer notes carrying accessibility information and variable details
- Focus view and component playground — isolating a frame, or exploring component properties interactively
- Code Connect — mapping Figma components to the real components in your repository, so generated code references your actual design system
The most significant recent addition is the Dev Mode MCP server, which feeds design context to AI coding agents. This matters for accuracy: rather than an agent guessing structure from rendered pixels, it receives the file's real component and layer data. Note the status before you build a workflow on it — Figma's developer documentation states the MCP server is in beta and "will eventually be a usage-based paid feature, but is currently available for free during the beta period." Budget for it to cost money later.
Zeplin: a separate, versioned handoff layer
Zeplin is not a design tool and is not trying to replace Figma. Designers publish selected frames from Figma into a Zeplin project via plugin, and Zeplin becomes the stable, organized surface engineers work from. Zeplin automatically extracts colors, text styles, spacing, and components into a styleguide that stays in sync as designs change.
Zeplin's own positioning against Dev Mode centers on a handful of claims: Git-like versions that sync across all shared links, grid-structured screen organization rather than each designer's personal canvas layout, annotations and flows visible to everyone, and task assignment with approvals so "is this ready?" has an answer. The versioning argument is the sharpest one. Figma auto-saves continuously, which is excellent for designers and awkward for engineers who need to know precisely what changed since they last looked. Discrete published versions are a genuinely different model, not a cosmetic difference.
Pricing: two genuinely different models
This is where the comparison gets concrete, and where most published comparisons get the numbers wrong. Figma restructured its pricing into four seat types effective March 11, 2025. Per Figma's official pricing documentation:
- Dev seat (Dev Mode, FigJam, Slides, plus view/comment in Design): $12/month annual or $15 monthly on Professional, $25 on Organization, $35 on Enterprise
- Full seat: $12 annual / $15 monthly on Professional, $55 on Organization, $90 on Enterprise
- Collab seat: $3 annual / $5 monthly on Professional, $5 on Organization and Enterprise
- View seat: free on every tier — but View seats do not include Dev Mode access
That last point drives the real cost. Every engineer who needs to inspect designs requires a paid Dev seat. A 30-engineer team on Enterprise is $1,050/month for inspection alone.
Zeplin's pricing splits into two shapes. Free and Basic are per-project with uniform access: Free covers 1 project and 100 screens with unlimited members, while Basic runs $13.75/month per project billed annually ($35.75 monthly) for 1,000 screens per project, in bundles of 1, 3, 6, 9, or 12 projects — with unlimited members per project. Advanced switches to per-seat at $12/month billed annually for 50 projects and unlimited screens, with role-based permissions where reviewers are free and unlimited. Enterprise is a custom quote.
The headline seat price matches Figma Professional at $12. The divergence shows up at scale: Zeplin's per-project tiers let a large engineering group read designs without buying a seat per head, which is the specific budget problem Dev seats create on Organization and Enterprise plans.
Which one should you pick?
Stay with Figma Dev Mode if
Your team already lives in Figma, you're on Professional where Dev seats are $12, and you want AI-assisted code generation wired to your design system through Code Connect and the MCP server. One tool, one subscription, no sync step, no second source of truth to drift out of date. For most small and mid-sized product teams this is the correct default in 2026.
Add Zeplin if
You have many more engineers than designers and Dev seat math on Organization or Enterprise has become painful; you need discrete versioned handoffs with an audit trail rather than a continuously mutating canvas; or you need a tidy, permanent, well-organized spec surface that non-designers can navigate without learning Figma's canvas conventions. Regulated and agency environments — where "what exactly was approved on what date" is a contractual question — get the most from the versioning model.
The migration lesson
Teams that lost work in the InVision shutdown mostly lost it because prototypes and specs lived only in the vendor's cloud. Whichever tool you pick, keep design source files under your control, use Code Connect or an equivalent to bind design system components to code in your own repository, and export critical specs at release milestones. Handoff tooling should be replaceable. The InVision closure is the clearest possible argument for building it that way.