Announcing Version Diff: A game-changer for design version management

Berk Çebi

Jun 2023@berk

We’re excited to announce Version Diff is now live. 🎉 Thanks to valuable feedback from our Zeplin community and more than 600 beta testers, all users on our Team plan or above now have access to our newest Git-inspired feature for design version management — Version Diff. 👁

With Version Diff, you don’t have to spend hours describing the design changes you make between versions. Version Diff visually captures even the most minor design adjustments, and allows developers to see exactly what those are at a pixel level. Try it in one of your projects now.

Before, your team had a few options for sharing what has changed between versions:

looping everyone into design review meetings to walk through every update

maintaining a never-ending change log in your design file

sending an email or Slack message to your team listing each change for every update, and double checking to make sure they've read them

But even with all of these options, developers have to re-confirm changes and pixel values during build, and many changes still go undetected.

Now with Version Diff, developers can see every change and spot them instantly — even those that are impossible to detect with the naked eye. 🕵 That includes minor adjustments that are constantly made to font size, color, image, spacing, button radius, and countless more.

Here’s a quick video on how it works:

How Version Diff changes versioning for the better

Add up all of the time you’ll save in meetings and messaging about version changes and you can easily see how Version Diff improves team collaboration and efficiency. But on top of that, Version Diff brings major benefits to product quality and security, too.

It reduces unintended human errors by highlighting every change on a version before it’s built, and giving designers a record of what has been communicated to developers

It creates a complete audit trail of design changes on every screen that’s easy to access and understand, which is crucial for compliance

It lowers the need for rework: Since changes are impossible to miss and easy to track, that’s fewer discrepancies between build and the design found during QA

We’re pumped about how valuable Version Diff is for design version control, and we’re especially proud about its unique backstory at Zeplin. As Josh mentioned in his video, Version Diff was his team’s winning concept at Zeplin’s hackathon event last year — a team of five Zepliners from different teams and locations around the world, coming up with what we believe is one of our most impactful new features this year. 🙌

We hope you’re as excited as we are about Version Diff and how it’ll improve your team’s versioning workflow. Start comparing versions in your workspace now, and ping us if you have any feedback.

Cheers! 👋