If you want to streamline the process of handing over Figma designs to developers, you’re probably thinking about getting Zeplin and the Figma Zeplin plugin.

The thing is, getting Zeplin to bridge the gap between design and development can be like building a whole new bridge when you already have one: Jira and Confluence.

You don’t need a new bridge, you just need a little help crossing your Atlassian one.

Enter Figma for Confluence and Jira Pro from CollabSoft.

Here’s why Zeplin may no longer be necessary for your team, and why CollabSoft’s Figma integrations would do just fine.

Design handoff without context-switching

Many product, dev, and content teams already rely heavily on Jira and Confluence. So why add another layer to your workflow?

That’s what Zeplin is. It’s switching to an entirely different platform with its own interface, terminology, processes, and permissions to manage the handover of a Figma design. When in fact you could stay right where you are and do your Figma handoff in Jira and Confluence, with the help of a small plugin.

That small plugin is Figma for Confluence or Figma for Jira by CollabSoft. These apps bring designs directly into your Jira tickets and Confluence documents. Designers paste a link from Figma, then developers and other stakeholders are able to view, inspect, and download designs without logging in to Figma or leaving their Atlassian tool.

This eliminates context-switching and offers greater confidence that everyone’s working from the same version of the truth.

Learning curve vs no learning curve

Zeplin introduces a whole new set of concepts that exist outside of your workflows in Jira and Confluence. They include “projects”, “project types”, “project density”, “screens”, “sections”, “tags”, “flows”, “members”, and loads more.

To use Zeplin and the Zeplin Figma integration effectively, you have to learn what all these things are and how to use them. You also have to manage new user permissions and train stakeholders on how to navigate the tool. The learning curve is steep and the amount of onboarding effort is high.

By contrast, CollabSoft’s Figma integrations let you hand over designs in an already familiar environment just by pasting a link.

Zeplin is great, but is it overkill?

Zeplin has some fantastic features that allow developers to inspect designs in an inordinate level of detail and get information on colors, margins, paddings, borders, components used, etc. You can also map an entire user journey with its flows feature. This involves arranging screens on a canvas, connecting them with arrows, labels, shapes, and annotations, and clustering screens and flows into flow groups and boards.

The question is, do most teams need all this?

Well… no, they don’t. In a lot of cases, they just need to:

• view the final design
• know it’s the right version
• download it in the required format

You can provide all these things with Figma for Jira and Confluence. You can freeze the version of the design that appears in Jira and Confluence so that it doesn’t change unexpectedly while a dev is coding. And a dev can view it in full screen or its original size, zoom in on specific elements, download it in various formats, and open an information panel listing additional details.

For simple user interface (UI) tweaks, this is all that’s needed. For bigger changes and brand-new features, designers will need to provide design intent, context, and things like acceptance criteria. But all this information can be provided in Jira and Confluence too: on the page or in the issue description.

Design handoffs don’t need to be complicated or drawn-out. But tools like Zeplin can make them harder than they need to be. It’s like using a Swiss Army knife to cut a slice of bread.

Keep your stack simple

Zeplin is a standalone platform that’s completely separate from Figma and your Atlassian tools. It means introducing a new procurement process and user management flow. They’ll be new security reviews, compliance checks, and license renewal schedules. You’ll have to set up accounts and logins, manage access, and administer the platform.

However, Figma for Confluence and Figma for Jira are Atlassian Marketplace apps that plug in to your existing tools. Procurement and user management is easy because everything goes through your Atlassian account. And there’s no new UI to learn or navigate.

Also, Zeplin isn’t a work management tool, which means you’ll still be using Jira to manage tasks relating to coding, testing, and deploying a design. There’s a free Zeplin for Jira app that lets you attach Zeplin designs to Jira issues. But of course, they’re not Zeplin designs, are they? They’re Figma designs, which are synced to Zeplin, which are synced to Jira.

So, between Figma and Jira, Zeplin is the middleman, complicating your stack with three entry points to the same design. Why not cut out the middleman and just have your Figma designs in Jira?

With Figma for Jira and Confluence, designs stay linked to the original source of truth—no need for a Zeplin go-between.

If you get a powerful tool, you pay for it

Sure, Zeplin is powerful and does its job well, but you have to pay for that power. There’s no sense in overpaying for complexity you won’t use. Not when a leaner solution meets your needs perfectly.

At the time of writing, CollabSoft’s Figma for Confluence and Jira apps cost less than $1 per user per month. Zeplin costs $12 per user per month—more than 12x the amount for a tool that many teams don’t fully need.

Zeplin vs Figma for Confluence and Jira: a summary table

Let’s boil all this down to some key takeaways:

Figma for Confluence and Figma for Jira cover 90%+ of real-world design handoff needs: embedded interactive designs, version control, downloadable assets, and no need for extra accounts. If your workflow already lives in Jira and Confluence, why move it elsewhere?

Zeplin has its place for teams with highly advanced workflows, but for the majority of us, you just don’t need all that power.

For seamless and simple design handovers, try Figma for Jira or Figma for Confluence free for 1 month on the Atlassian Marketplace.