Figma, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their collaborative design and prototyping application to support digital product and UI development.
$15
per month per editor
Inkscape
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Inkscape is a free and open source vector drawing app for Windows, MacOS & Linux, available for download free under the GPLv3+ license. The tools aims to support illustrators, designers, web designers or anyone wanting to create vector graphics.
A solo developer or small team that wants to integrate development, feature planning and ui design in a single app can find a lot of value in using Figma, since the FigJam whiteboard and UI editor are in the same app. Business plans and software features can be mapped out on FigJam and then implemented in the UI editor, that way there is reduced context switching and teams can operate smoothly without having to toggle between multiple apps.
I would 100% recommend Inkscape to anyone starting out with graphic design or illustration, as it isn't that difficult to get the hang of on the first day of using it. I am not recommending Inkscape for beginners alone, even experts in the field can use Inkscape professionally as it cuts of the expense of needing to buy a paid graphic design software which provides almost the same features. Inkscape is also great for beginners because it can be treated like a stepping stone to move onto a paid graphic designing software like Adobe Illustrator, so Inkscape can be used to test the waters before making the leap. Inkscape and Illustrator are almost the same so there wont be any difficulty in switching later on.
As a visual designer, I spend 90% of my working time in Figma. So, as a design tool, Figma is mature and feature-rich. It covers all the basic needs and provides extras, such as simple prototyping and the ability to use external plugins.
Collaboration: It’s very easy to work together on the same file in Figma. You can easily brainstorm together or use Figma as a shared screen.
Smartness of components: Figma provides many adaptability options for components that allow building very flexible and scalable layouts.
Access control - it wasn't apparent to me at first that a project was shared with everyone in the company vs just people i choose to share it with. I think the inverse should be the default.
Sometimes it struggles to import old sketch files - no clue how to make this better, but its frustrating
It's so simple to use! I have no background in UI design but basic designing and I was able to learn this software Figma within 3-5 days. There are tons of tutorials available on Youtube from so many popular YouTubers in the space, you can just go through them and start designing.
I haven't used their support lately but in the past, they had a chat that I used often. They often responded in a few hours and were able to give a satisfactory solution. I would imagine it's less personal now but the community has expanded drastically so there are more resources out there to self serve with a bit of Google magic.
Much more intuitive, Adobe XD fails to keep up with the newest market changes thus it did not let us stay on top of the technology. The big plus of Figma is that the majority of our clients worked with it, whereas it was not the case with Adobe XD. You can get similar results working with both, but the process will be different in Figmas favour
Adobe Illustrator is also used in our company sometimes however, Inkscape is used most considering the fact that it is completely free while Adobe Illustrator has to be bought through monthly/annual subscriptions that are expensive. For that reason we always opt for Inkscape. Not only is it a free software, but it includes almost all the features and tools that Adobe Illustrator offers, even though there might be some tools missing here and there, for businesses whose main focus isn't graphic design, Inkscape is the way to go. However if Graphic design or illustration is the only or the main factor of your business, I would suggest going for the investment and getting Adobe Illustrator.
