Craft

A set of super-useful plugins including prototyping, external data and library management. (Read more about Craft for Sketch in Christian Krammer’s article “Craft For Sketch plugin: Designing with real data”)

Angle

A quick way to add your designs to device layouts at different angles.

Artboard Tricks

As the leader, Sketch also has the largest list of integrations with third-party apps. Whether it’s prototyping and sharing with InVision, sharing a project with developers with Zeplin, version control with Abstract or Plant, most apps have direct integration with Sketch with the ability to import, sync or preview Sketch files.

In XD, plugins have only been around for a few months, but things are already looking pretty good. Adobe, with its marketing power, has been able to attract a lot of companies and developers to launch its plugin ecosystem. While the list of plugins for XD isn’t as big as Sketch, it’s growing pretty quickly. Here are some of the major plugins:

• Dribbble;
• Data Populator;
• Rename It;
• Content Generator;
• Airtable and Google Spreadsheets.

The Airtable plugin is an example of application integration that XD handles quickly. There’s also integration with usertesting.com, Cloudapp, Dribbble, and others.

Compared to Sketch and even XD, Figma has few plugins. It doesn’t have an API interface for plugins, but this year Figma has opened up some APIs for integration with other applications. Aside from native integration with Principle, Zeplin, Avocode, and Dribbble, the result has mostly been things you can do with your files outside of Figma

Again, Figma needs some improvements in the plugin area to attract more developers, especially when compared to the huge Sketch ecosystem or Adobe’s powerful APIs and marketing.

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That doesn’t mean you can’t create complex vector images in these applications. The images below show what each application is capable of, if you’re willing to take the time to learn all the tools and features.

Sketch has been a staple design tool for several years now, and I never felt the need to turn to Adobe Illustrator to create the icons and random illustrations I needed for my projects. You have the usual rectangle, ellipse and polygon shapes, a Bézier tool for everything else, and even an Arbitrary Shape Line tool that probably only makes sense when using a tablet/stylus.

Figma has an edge in this area due to what they call “vector grids”. If you’ve ever used Adobe Flash for drawing, this will seem very familiar. Rather than try to describe it, I’ll just show you what it does….

The shape tools also seem to be a step ahead of Sketch. Ellipses can now easily be used to create ring diagrams. Rectangle corners can be dragged to set the corner radius without paying attention to the Properties panel.

Adobe XD lags behind in this area, as it doesn’t even have a Polygon tool at this point. You also can’t align individual Bézier nodes on a curve or change the roundness of those nodes, something we use very often to create smooth line graphs on dashboards.

Once you’ve added elements to your design, all three applications allow you to group them, place them above or below each other, align and distribute selected objects evenly, etc.

An outstanding feature of XD is the Repeat grid. It allows you to create a single item and repeat it in a list or grid, with each duplicate having similar properties but unique content. Figma has Smart selection. Instead of specifying a list or grid view, Figma allows you to select a group of items that are already a list or grid and then organize them by evenly distributing and easily sorting them using drag and drop.

While neither application can match the power of Illustrator or Affinity Designer when it comes to illustration, they provide an adequate set of drawing tools for everyday interface design. Figma’s vector tools surpass Sketch and XD in terms of flexibility.

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Sketch Competitors

A while back, Adobe Fireworks was our team’s primary interface design application. Fireworks was flexible, easy to use, and with many free extensions, it fit perfectly into our design workflow. When Adobe stopped developing Fireworks, the only alternative left was Sketch. We switched to it (and it was an expensive transition considering we also had to move from Windows to Mac), but the productivity gains were huge and we’ve never regretted the choice.

Sketch was the primary application not only for our team, but also for many other UI designers. But in the last couple years, a number of competitors have started to seriously vie with Sketch for the title of #1 tool. Given how quickly these new competitor apps have been improving, our team wanted to try some of them out and even considered switching to them. In this article, I hope to give you a comprehensive comparison of the major contenders for Sketch’s place in the UI design tool realm.

While it seems like not a week goes by without the launch of a new design application, only a few of them have matured to challenge Sketch’s leading position. In my opinion the closest that has come close are Figma and Adobe XD. Both apps have fully functional free versions, which significantly lowers the barrier for new users.

XD has Mac and Windows versions, while Figma supports Mac, Windows, Linux and Chrome OS – pretty much any operating system on which you can install and run a modern browser.

Figma

Figma is a web application. You can run it in a browser and therefore on virtually any operating system. This is one aspect that completely differentiates it from Sketch, an application that only supports Macs. Contrary to my concerns, Figma runs perfectly smoothly and even surpasses the responsiveness of Sketch in a number of areas. Here’s an example:

Much has been said about comparing Figma to Sketch, but the race has only intensified with recent updates to both apps.

Figma’s success has prompted Sketch developers to rethink their own approach. The company recently raised a $20 million investment to add more features, including a web version of the Sketch app.

Adobe XD

Although an entire generation of designers grew up using Adobe Photoshop for design, it was never created with user interface designers in mind. Adobe realized this and started working on a new application called XD. While XD took a while to catch up to Sketch in terms of functionality, it looks like Adobe took it very seriously last year. New features – and some of them quite powerful – are added to the app almost every month, and at this point I can consider it a viable alternative to Sketch.

Other apps

Figma and Adobe XD are by no means the only challengers to Sketch’s leadership. While it may seem that every few weeks a new entrant joins the race, most of them, in my opinion, play in a lower league than the above mentioned applications. However, some programs deserve a special mention.

• Framer X While Framer was originally a code-based prototyping tool, it has been steadily adding design capabilities. The latest iteration of Framer X can be described as an interface design tool with the ability to code interactions and animations for more precise control, and flexibility.
• InVision Studio InVision emerged as the best way to share design mockups with coworkers and clients. Over the years, however, new features have been added to the app, and Studio has evolved into a standalone UI design, prototyping, and animation application. (Studio is probably based on Macaw, which InVision bought in early 2016).
• Gravit This is another UI design app that is slowly but steadily improving. Corel bought Gravit a few months ago, which means we could soon see it gain more features and popularity .

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