Dembrandt vs zeroheight
zeroheight documents what your design system should be. Dembrandt measures what your production site actually is.
zeroheight is a design system documentation platform: it syncs tokens and components from Figma and code into living style guides teams can browse. Dembrandt is a CLI tool that extracts live design tokens from any URL and scores how much they drift between deployments. One is the reference. The other is the audit.
Comparison
| zeroheight | Dembrandt | |
|---|---|---|
| Source of truth | Docs synced from Figma and from Storybook or code | The live production DOM. What users actually see. |
| Token extraction | Pull token values from connected Figma libraries | Automated CLI extraction from any URL in seconds |
| Drift detection | No drift scoring against the live site | A numeric drift score on every deploy, ready for CI |
| CI/CD integration | Doc publishing, not deploy pipelines | Runs in any CI. --compare exits 1 on drift. |
| Scope | Living documentation, adoption, governance | Token extraction, drift monitoring, and a brand guide PDF export |
| Baseline comparison | Version history of the documentation | Pin any snapshot. Every deploy scored against it. |
| Access model | Hosted style-guide portal for teams | CLI + API + web dashboard |
| Contrast grading | Documented, not measured on the live page | --wcag grades every palette pair AA and AAA with exact ratios |
| Multi-page runs | Pages an author wrote | --crawl and --sitemap read a whole domain in one run |
| Private pages | Behind the portal login | --cookie and --header extract behind a login |
| Agent access | Docs a person reads | An MCP server with fifteen tools, plus 43 design skills |
| Where the team sees it | A doc site someone remembers to open | Drift posted to Slack from the CI report |
| Pricing model | Per-seat SaaS | The CLI is free and open source. An account is needed only for cloud sync. |
Use zeroheight when
- You want living documentation that stays in sync with Figma and code
- You publish usage guidelines, component specs, and do/don't examples
- You need a browsable portal for designers, engineers, and stakeholders
- You track design system adoption and governance across teams
Use Dembrandt when
- You want to verify that production matches the system, not just the docs
- You need drift flagged automatically on every deploy
- You run CI/CD pipelines and want a build step that fails on brand regression
- You manage multiple client sites and need cross-domain token tracking in one place
The gap zeroheight does not cover
zeroheight works from the design side in. It pulls token values and component specs from Figma and your codebase and publishes them as documentation. The source of truth is what your team authors and connects.
One question stays open: does the live site match it? zeroheight does not read your production DOM, compute rendered token values, or score drift between releases. That blind spot is where the shipped UI quietly walks away from the documented system.
Dembrandt reads what the browser actually renders after full page load, including overrides from application CSS, third-party scripts, and dynamic theming. It measures the gap between what was documented and what shipped. Nobody has to open DevTools and guess hex codes to find it.
Run a one-off extraction on any URL with no account required:
To enforce drift in CI, get an API key, then run --compare <baseline> --key $DEMBRANDT_KEY in your deploy step. It exits 1 when the tokens move. Full setup: cloud drift CI recipe.
Other comparisons
Every tool here solves a different part of the problem. The full list says which does what.