Sketch users, why not Figma?

Hey there sketch users. why have you stuck with sketch and not moved to figma?

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I joined my company in 2020 and they were using Sketch, in my previous job we used Sketch - but they shortly changed to Figma a few months after.

I work in a big corporation and a lot of the brands agencies use Sketch - to convince them all to switch to Figma would take a lot of effort.

In addition, finding time to recreate our design system in Figma is tough. It would be a mammoth task as well. Not only would we be recreating the system, but there would be a huge learning curve with all of their new features.

We are considering the switch because apparently, Figma allows for a single centralised design system which can be used for multiple brands. Since this isn’t possible with Sketch, we have to duplicate the system at the start of every project meaning a project 2 years ago won’t contain the latest system updates. Very annoying!

I personally can’t bring myself to use it based on it’s UI. It actually makes me feel sad looking at it. It’s not a tool I want to look at for 8 hours a day. It looks like Microsoft and Material Design had a baby!

I find it ironic that screen designers use a tool that is itself void of any UI design. I feel like I can’t get past that. I could go deep on this!! It is a common opinion that the UI/UX of Figma is bad but designers continue to use it, therefore does that not invalidate you as a designer? Why bother creating beautiful user interfaces, if they are not important to you why would they be important to the average user?

I am also old enough and fortunate enough to have choice. I have considered “what if the day comes where I may have no choice but to use it?”. I would stop being a screen designer and go back to Architecture, I feel that strong about it.

*I also have strong feelings on Snapchat, Google workspace, Teams, everything Facebook have ever did and Slack’s logo!!

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I agree. even as a newcomer i noticed that the UX is way better in Sketch and that’s why I’m leaning towards it in my evaluation.

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I haven’t stuck with Sketch, I actually moved over from Figma. I enjoy using Sketch interface waaay more and I feel like the nice UI makes me more creative :sweat_smile:

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It seems like Figma was designed to appease engineers and product managers. Sketch is focused on one thing: being a great drawing tool. It’s far more capable when trying to create beautiful things, whereas that’s priority #27 of Figma’s interface.

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I have been at companies where we have switched to Figma and it was the right decision for those situations.

At our current company, our team uses Sketch primarily because of SSO. SSO with Sketch is free. Figma requires the Enterprise plan for SSO, which costs three times as much per seat. I cannot justify Figma costing three times as much.

Personally, I much prefer the Sketch UI to Figma, prefer having a native app, and really take advantage of the raster editor tools in Sketch which are inexplicably not available in Figma without plugins. What makes my blood boil is that Sketch refuses to even consider Windows, as I much prefer Windows over macOS.

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I can ship a website or app much faster in Sketch, it is the better suited tool for my work

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Hello! :wave:

I’m actually new to Sketch, coming to it after years of using Figma and a bit of XD.

Before getting Sketch, I was using XD for about 6 months. Because XD will be going away I had to make a choice: do I want to get a sub with Figma, or do I want to try Sketch.

I felt drawn to Sketch and I’m happy I gave in, because it feels very much like home. Not gonna lie, it’s not entirely about not having a learning curve as advertised. There are things other tools do better. If I’m to compare whether I liked Figma or XD before, I would say XD, despite years of using Figma and just 6 months of XD, and I’ll elaborate why.

XD had features like the repeating grid, which made things very easy. Same for smart distribute, which was implemented way better than Autolayout in Figma, in my opinion. But Sketch has the best implementation that I’ve seen so far.

The reasons behind me being drawn more and more to Sketch is that I think it feels like it’s the best of all three, having most [of the essentials] of what the others do, but the implementation just feels better. It wasn’t so at first, due to the learning curve, but as I kept using it, it started to feel right. Like with a lot of Apple software, it doesn’t feel right until it starts to feel natural.

In the words of the Mandalorian: “This is the way.”

Sketch is the way. It may not have everything the competition does, like simple hover states and at least basic animation configuration, but I can create prototypes with it for handover to convey the main message and that is enough, at least for now. I hope adding all the industry standard features others have introduced is on the roadmap and will be added soon so Sketch can be king once more.

For me, Sketch being a good choice is about a feeling - you can’t explain it, but you know it :heart:

PS: If I could have one big ask - make a full-fledged iPad app that can do the same as the Mac app. This would be a major win! Reason is iPads are strong competitors to laptops with their touch screens, Apple Pencils, gestures, multitasking, etc. In my opinion, I’d do all the work on an iPad if I could. I have a Mac only because I have to, not because I want to.

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I learned Sketch several moons ago as part of my UX/UI training. Since then I stepped back more and more from hands-on design and moved more towards running the team that uses the tools and growing my company.

A few years ago I hired UI designers and they insisted on Figma so we went there. Then it turns out that as the company owner, I don’t own the designs of the people that I pay licenses for on Figma, even if it says so in their contract that all designs belong to the company if they carry out work on behalf of the company. I had to go a little crazy about it in their support to even get heard. So for ownership reasons and prohibitive pricing, I am happy to return to familiar territory.

Exporting the work and moving it here also didn’t go very well, I am still fixing older work.
I also find the workflow, sharing, and controlling who sees what sooooooo much better here. As an agency, we have to be mindful of that for our clients because they will throw a fit if they can’t own their designs.

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Hello @AnGN and welcome back to Sketch!

We’d love to help with those fixes in older work if possible. If you run into any issues, please feel free to share them here in the Forum (we have a category for issues) or drop us a line at productsupport@sketch.com and we’ll be more than happy to help! :raised_hands:

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