Figma vs Sketch vs Adobe XD : Chasing the best Design Software?
Figma, Sketch or Adobe XD?
Here is the question which recently arose among UX and UI designers: what is the best design tool out there?
Professionals and experts working in the fascinating world of web design noticed a significant increase in UI/UX design tools in recent years.
Sketch has been the number #1 application for many UX and UI designers for quite a long time. But recently many new players are becoming increasingly more popular.
These new competitor apps have evolved very quickly and in a very sophisticated way and the issue that designers are now facing is to understand which one of these apps are worth paying attention to.
Two apps seem to stand out from the rest: FIGMA and ADOBE XD.
The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive overview of each app along with a detailed comparison. This should help you to understand the core features of each tool and how they differentiate between one another.
Back in the days, Adobe Fireworks was “the one and only” tool: it was extremely popular and the preferred UI design tool for many professionals and experts.
SKETCH made its way into the UI design world when Adobe discontinued Firework. At that time Sketch was the only alternative available and designers adopted the tool quickly. Professionals immediately registered a huge gain in productivity when using it and were all very happy with the new tool.
Sketch was first released in September 2010 for macOS. Just two years after its release, it was awarded the Apple Design Award. An amazing result for being such a young product.
Sketch is a vector graphics editor, developed by a company based in Amsterdam.
Here’s a quick recap of its core features:
• Vector image editing;
• Responsive designs via Smart Layouts;
• Support for variable fonts;
• Easily add text and image-based data to the demo;
• Sketch Cloud service for sharing designs;
• Libraries for sharing resources (symbols, images, text, styles) — even across documents;
• Ability to create and use templates;
• A massive number of available plugins;
A key issue with Sketch is that it is only available on macOS. This means that Windows and Linux users always felt left out.
While this aspect can be easily (but only partially) solved using a third party hand-off tool, FIGMA solved the entire problem but moving everything into the browser.
FIGMA, in fact, is a web app: it can be run in any browser and therefore on any system. You can easily access it on the go, regardless of the operating system or device.
Figma appeared on stage in 2016 and quickly became a valid competitor to similar solutions in the field. Its performance was jaw-dropping for many users, especially considering you can run it solely out a browser. Figma achieved this by building their entire app using WebGL and WebAssembly. The initial goal of the founders to build the Google Docs of Graphic Design tools was clearly achieved!
Below a list of its features:
• Ability to create consistent styles and apply them across projects;
• Copy CSS directly from design files;
• A library of searchable assets;
• Live Collaboration (trust me… it’s stunning)
• Built-in Linear Version Control
• User permissions;
• Create animated, interactive prototypes;
• Auto Layout feature for responsive designs;
• A plugin library, and the ability to create your own plugins;
• A powerful API to access all data
Let’s now move to the last and youngest player, ADOBE XD.
XD was released in 2017, it’s a vector-based user experience design tool for web apps, mobile apps, and voice apps available for macOS and Windows. It’s targeted towards designers who want to create websites, mobile apps or even games.
XD also supports website wireframing and creating simple interactive clickable prototypes. With the character and layout tools of Adobe XD, elements can be easily created and the individual objects can be exported.
Perhaps the biggest plus with Adobe XD is that it plays along nicely with other Adobe apps. Here’s an example: Adobe XD allows you to open and edit images in Photoshop directly from XD. Any changes which are made to the image will be automatically reflected in XD as well.
Core features of Adobe XD:
• Adobe Fonts integration;
• Create interactions and triggers for prototypes;
• Preview mobile apps on real devices via a companion app;
• Document history allows you to roll back to previous versions;
• Developer-friendly assets like CSS, colours, downloadable assets;
• Extensions that bolster functionality and tie in with third-party services;
• Live Collaboration (still in Beta — trust me it’s buggy 😅)
So here we are — and now? How do you pick your next design tool of choice?
All the above descriptions clearly show that each tool has its own unique features. It is pretty difficult to say which one is the best, in particular for you!
So, can we make a wrong or right choice here?
Look at your priorities!
The only way to narrow down the options is to start from your personal work environment to understand which one of these tools fits your needs best.
For example, Windows users will not be able to use Sketch — full stop. That leaves us with Adobe Xd and Figma. If you don’t mind working fully browser-based and don’t need to work offline at times (in my opinion quite useful), then Figma might be the right choice for you.
If you’re a Mac user looking for a lot of templates and plugins then your choice will probably be Sketch.
And after all — Hardcore fans of Adobe will love the interoperability of XD.
After all, Adobe XD, Figma and even Sketch are extremely similar:
They all create vector graphics and enable you to create design systems or asset libraries. But a major factor to be taken into serious consideration, which often isn’t mentioned, is the team you work with. It’s extremely important that you choose a tool which is compatible with the other design tools that your coworkers use. Oftentimes this simply means that you should all be using the same design tool. That being said, tools like XD2Sketch are trying to bridge exactly that gap by enabling you to do pixel-perfect conversions of your design files between XD, Figma and Sketch and thus easily move between tools.
To provide a comprehensive and detailed overview of all apps, we are also going to compare some additional key factors, which may be particularly relevant when deciding what’s best for your use-case:
1) PRICING
Budget can be a big factor, especially if designers work as freelancers out of their own pocket.
Some licenses have promotional offers (often 50% off) for freelancers and other individuals. For example, Figma is free for individuals.
Let’s see each of them in details:
- Figma: As said above, it gives access for free to the independent designer. The Starter plan allows three projects and unlimited storage. For teams, the Professional plan starts at $12 per month, with unlimited access to everything and additional features. Also, they have the Organization plan which will be for 45$ per editor/month but you have to pay annually only and will get all above plus special features for team working.
- Sketch will set you back $99 annually for the first-time purchase. Afterwards, it’s possible to use their Existing Customer program to renew at $69 per year. Such a license includes a one-year’s worth of updates and access to Sketch Cloud for a year. Students and education institutions can benefit from a 50% discount. Sketch for Teams: $9 per contributor, monthly with the following benefits: Access to Mac app for all Contributors, shared Cloud workspace for collaboration, free Cloud access for unlimited Viewers
- Adobe XD comes with a free Starter plan. As such, the tool can be used with no associated costs for individuals. Design teams can get the full Adobe XD experience for $23 per month per user. Adobe XD for Businesses: 20+ Creative Cloud apps, including XD, Photoshop and Illustrator starts at $69,99 per month/per user.
2) PLATFORM SUPPORT
As previously mentioned, the three tools have their peculiarities as far as platform support goes:
- Sketch: Available only for Mac users.
- Figma: Browser-based. Desktop apps are available for Mac and Windows (without offline support). Figma can also easily be used on Linux machines in the browser.
- Adobe XD: Supports Mac and Windows systems (Fun fact: Linux support was dropped a few months ago 🐧)
3) COLLABORATION
Live Collaboration is becoming more and more important: Users can help each other, leave comments or easily discuss new features without even having to use screen sharing.
Let’s look at the tools:
• Figma: Being a browser-based app, Figma offers the best features for team collaborations. Since anyone with a laptop and a browser can use the app, it makes things very easy to collaborate with others on different platforms. It even supports Live-Collaboration, which means you can literally see the mouse cursor of others moving around in the same design file.
• Adobe XD also offers lots of useful options for teamwork. The CoEditing feature of the app allows cooperating on projects while allowing others to make changes in real-time
• Sketch falls behind in the team collaboration aspect. The App requests to opt-in for a monthly subscription to share files with a team and with limited tools and capabilities.
4) SYMBOLS & DESIGN SYSTEM
As we know, symbols make the work easier and have changed the design process in a huge way.
• Figma. Good to go. Symbols now have states, constraints, and overrides.
• Sketch. The symbol functionality in Sketch is very impressive and continues to improve.
• Adobe XD offers components that can be used throughout a document as well as linked across documents. It also allows designers to create variations of a component for different interactions, known as component states. At times the way Adobe XD overwrites components can become very messy since there is no overview of where which component has been overwritten.
5) ONLINE/OFFLINE
Which tool allows you to work offline, in case you’re travelling or in case the WiFi acts up?
• Figma: According to an announcement they don’t have any current plans to add offline compatibility.
• Sketch: yes
• Adobe XD: yes
Conclusion: which one is the right one?
Overall, when talking about the best design software, these three tools are extremely well-suited for modern designers.
Each of these tools has its own compelling set of features. In that way, it’s very difficult (almost impossible!) to decide which one is the leading app and best for you.
Every single designer knows what’s best for him and for his needs and each of these tools can definitely meet those needs, in one way or the other. Each of them will have pros and cons.
Can we all work together in harmony?
In a perfect world, we will be able to use different tools together in the same team. But for now, the most important factor is still going to be what tools your team already uses. At XD2Sketch.com we are trying to solve exactly that problem, in order to give designers more freedom to pick whatever tool they want to use. Our convert is able to convert design files between Adobe XD, Sketch and Figma.
