This is where Sketch reveals itself as the most popular UI design application. With a huge plugin library and new plugins coming out every few days, Sketch is unrivaled when it comes to the ecosystem of plugins and integrations. From plugins for animation, prototyping and version control, text and style management assistants to connectors with popular apps. There are plugins for everything you can think of. Here are some of my favorites:
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.