What are the pros and cons of Principle vs ProtoPie

Question

I’d like to elevate the fidelity of the prototypes I create for my clients, to a level where interaction is as natural as possible. To showcase that, I’ve decided to explore the world of micro-interactions, and overall animation of the UI screens I design.

Principle seems to be the industry standard, but ProtoPie is quickly gaining popularity with it’s way simpler and structured approach to animation. I’ve played around briefly with both, and my personal fave is ProtoPie - though my biggest concern is that when talking about skill development, it’s not as popular yet, so I’m not sure if it’s right to perceive it a ‘waste of time’ in that sense.

A little context about me and my situation - I’m a UX/UI designer, working in a design studio. I just got the green light on purchasing such software, and I’d love to hear constructive feedback/pro’s and con’s/general advice on which software to choose, based on your professional experience with it. Mainly a Sketch user, but XD is more and more feeling like the better/cleaner/faster choice recently. My work consists mainly and heavily on creating interactive prototypes of app/web flows, redesigns, etc. Therefore providing the client with a product of high-fidelity is from utter importance for me. (I mean to whom isn’t it? :) )

Answer 1

I currently use Sketch, and have been using the basic interactivity tools there; I've just been looking at both of these apps in fact.

Looks like one obvious difference is that Principle is Mac OS only, whereas ProtoPie is Mac and Windows.

The major functional difference I see is in the sharing of a prototype - Principle sends a proprietary filetype, via dropbox, and requires the receiver to have the mobile Principle app - at that point the prototype runs locally on that device. If you want to locally prototype to your own mobile, that's via USB. Also, Principle lets you import Sketch documents directly; ProtoPie does not.

ProtoPie uses wifi and the desktop station on which the design is being done, and shares the prototype live via wifi, but not local to the mobile device. The advantage to that is that you can prototype inter-device interactivity quickly, the trade off is that the devices in question must be on the same wi-fi network; you can also directly connect via USB, as you can with Principle.