Figma is a solid design tool to craft the UX design concepts/solutions for digital products. For printed marketing materials such as brochures, marketing flyers, press releases, etc, other design tools such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, or InDesign might make more sense to use for those use case scenarios.
Omnigraffle is great for documentation, mapping, flowcharting, and other technical diagramming scenarios. It's simple enough to bang out a quick illustration and powerful enough to build complex blueprints for complicated technical systems. If you need cross-platform compatibility, though, you're probably better off looking elsewhere. If you want complex integration with data sources (ala Visio's SQL Server integration for shape metadata), OmniGraffle also falls short — but those scenarios are few and far between in my experience.
OmniGraffle is fairly simple to use, but the one thing I think it does best is working with curved lines, particularly if you are using some of the available arc templates. Drop an arc onto your page, then tell it the dimensions it needs to be, and viola! Done. Manipulating the arcs is as simple as clicking and dragging offset points.
OmniGraffle has also done an excellent job in stirring up the creative minds of many people who create templates and tools to work with OmniGraffle (not that Microsoft hasn't done so either), and managed to get the bulk of those into well organized repositories.
What it all boils down to for me is: it just works. One doesn't need to have a computer science degree to work with it either. It is as simple or complex as you want it to be.
Prototyping in Figma is pretty much nothing more than a glorified slide show. Sure, variables, etc are available but it takes way to long to set them up and even more time when there are revisions needed.
It would be helpful if there were a contextual help system for various functionality. For example, advanced autolayout (like space between) can become very tricky to implement sometimes. I often wish there were an AI assistant to ask for help. I often use ChatGTP to help me through these times.
Searching layers needs to be much easier and more intuitive.
I would like to be able to make groups like the layers palette in Photoshop. That would help with organization and speed a lot.
I'd love to be able to keep more than one of the different tool tabs open at a time.
The stencils are amazing. Would be great if a whole lot more of the free ones came standard as opposed to having to download them from Graffletopia or other sites.
Figma is a pretty cool tool in many areas. My team almost uses it on daily basis, such as, brainstorming on product/design topics, discussing prototypes created by designers. We even use it for retrospectives, which is super convenient and naturally keeps records of what the team discusses every month. Furthermore, I do see the potential of the product - currently we mainly use it for design topics, but it seems it is also a good fit for tech diagrams, which we probably will explore further in the future.
It's easy to use for designers who are familiar with design terms and functions from Photoshop and Illustrator. However, non-tech and non-designer collaborators have a hard time figuring out how to leave comments and apply changes, compared to other online design tools like Canva and Squarespace. Even simple drag-and-drops and rearrangement of certain blocks become too complicated due to uncommon functions like Hug and Lock.
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.
In-person training has its own benefits - 1. It helps in resolving queries then and there during the training. 2. I find classroom or in-person training more interactive. 3. Classroom or in-person training could be more practical in nature where participants can have an hands on experience with tools and clarify their doubts with the trainer.
Online training has its own merits and demerits - 1. Sometimes we may face issues with connectivity or the training content 2. The way training is being delivered becomes very important because not everyone is comfortable taking online training and learning by themselves. 3. With the advancement of technology online training has become popular but there is a segment of people who still prefer class-room training over online one.
Figma compared to other tools has user friendly UI which is very easy for all levels of designers. Compared to Adobe XD and Sketch Figma is stable, while in other tools I have faced software crashing in the middle of the work which resulted in loss of data/design. Compared to other tools it's fast and shows less lag. Collaboration in Figma is very easy as it is cloud based but in XD it's not that smooth working with other designers.
While these other tools are great for what they are, OmniGraffle’s solid focus on and support for diagramming makes it our tool of choice for communicating workflows and concept relationships, creating documentation, and creating other diagrams. Its libraries allow us to create designs quickly, and its ease of use enables us to use the tool widely across the company without much time or effort spent on onboarding.
Omnigraffle isn't an expensive software tool, so there isn't really any negative from the perspective of raw cost. Thinking in terms of time spent using it on a project - what you create in omnigraffle will inevitably lead to a dead end. It's useful only as documentation. There are other tools like Sketch that integrate into prototyping software and can create useable visual assets for applications in addition to being able to create wireframes.
