Sketch has been around for a while now. It came out at a time when there were really no alternatives for UI design. Sketch quickly became a de facto standard for UI design, and for a good reason. It is simple to use. It is fast. It is powerful. I transitioned to Sketch from Adobe Fireworks in 2015, and never looked back, nor looked around to see what Sketch alternatives are out there.
Not until recently. And it is not that Sketch changed for worse. On the contrary, it is actively changing, and seems to be getting better.
What made me look for alternatives where couple things. First, Sketch licensing. My license expired long time ago and I was getting behind in updates, but I didn’t really feel like paying $69 USD to renew for another year. Sure, it is not much, but still… Second, as far as I know Sketch doesn’t have much for animating the designs. And although my line of work doesn’t necessarily call for animated mocks, it is kind of fun to add some live to the presentation. Thirdly, a number of strong competitors popped up and I was curious to see what they had to offer that was different, and see if I could get a better value for the money.
Popular Sketch Alternatives
There is a number of Sketch alternatives that you will hear about over and over again. Most prominent ones are Adobe XD, Figma, and InVision Studio.
Top 3 Sketch alternatives are Adobe XD, Figma, and InVision Studio
They all look very similar on the surface. One key differentiator is that these Sketch alternatives are available for Mac and PC, while Sketch itself is Mac only. One other differentiator that might be important for personal use is the fact that Adobe XD, Figma, and InVision Studio all offer a free version for limited number of projects for unlimited time, while Sketch trial is 30 days only.
I am not going to do an in-depth review of Sketch nor it’s alternatives here. You can find reviews online, or better yet just download the apps and try them out yourself. They are all great, and simple enough to learn and use to get the job done. They are all acceptable industry standards, so if you are looking to become a UX designer you can’t go wrong with blindly picking one and learning it well.
What I do want to talk about is why after checking out the alternatives I am not switching away from Sketch.
Why I am not switching away from Sketch
I am not staying with Sketch because there is something inherently wrong with it’s alternatives. They are all solid apps, that in some cases offer more than Sketch. For example, Adobe XD has a neat auto-animate feature that is very simple yet powerful way to animate the designs. Figma actually works in the browser, which means I can access it from any computer. All those apps are active developed and have an active community around them.
My decision comes down to workflow.
My workflow in Sketch
It might be just a bad habit, it could be the nature of my work. I find that many projects I am working on require a redesign of existing apps. And often not a complete overhaul, but tweaking the UX, updating the UI to be simpler, cleaner, more robust.
What I typically do is take a screenshot of the existing page and paste it into Sketch. From there I can slice and dice the page in any way I want. I can move a piece to make it align better with other elements, or remove something altogether. Of course, I can add elements too.
Sound like a basic thing, right? But guess what, none of the Sketch alternatives provide a way to work with images like that!… Yeah, I was surprised too!
Just to be clear, Adobe XD, Figma, and InVision Studio do allow to paste in an image, but that is about it. There is not much else you can do with it. You can mask it or crop it, but that’s really it!
Top Sketch alternatives are not robust enough to work with raster and vector images as well as Sketch. And it’s a shame, because it is a deal breaker for me. For me to do what I do in those other apps, I’d have to redraw the UI completely.
Top Sketch alternatives are not robust enough to work with raster and vector images as well as Sketch.
Of course, if you consider a workflow of building out a UI from scratch, that one missing feature is not a big deal. In that case it wouldn’t make sense to use raster images in the way that I use them.
It might be that I haven’t looked into those apps deep enough. There might be some plugins that would enable me to do what I need to do. But do I really have to look? Isn’t it a basic feature that should be there?
So there you have it. If not for this one thing, I’d switch in a heartbeat. But for now, I am still using Sketch.
I am curious to know what your workflow is like. Do you also use and edit raster images? Let me know in the comments!
Sketch user here! I had to use XD for a specific project and seemed fun at the beginning, it has some interesting features but there a few things that made me regret it: all the filtering options for colors, masks you have in Sketch (more Photoshop like) that XD doesn’t have. The way you can work with symbols and library in Sketch makes things a lot easier in the long run and also the Revert to older versions that is so powerful! I love Sketch too and it’s also my first choice.