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Sketch

Sketch

Overview

What is Sketch?

Sketch is a visual design tool of use for application prototyping, coming with a wide variety of extensions, plugins, and an active user community.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Easy to use interface: Reviewers have consistently found Sketch's interface to be easy to understand and navigate, with similarities to …
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Review of Sketch

8 out of 10
June 14, 2022
Incentivized
Sketch allows us to create mockups of email builds before they begin. Before Sketch, we used Photoshop or Illustrator to lay out emails, …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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What is Sketch?

Sketch is a visual design tool of use for application prototyping, coming with a wide variety of extensions, plugins, and an active user community.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Figma?

Figma, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their collaborative design and prototyping application to support digital product and UI development.

What is Adobe XD?

Adobe XD is a prototyping and UX/UI option for website and mobile application design, featuring a range of UI tools and and templates, a versatile artboard and contextual layer panels, and deep integration with Adobe's creative suite of products for fast import of objects from these applications.

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Product Details

What is Sketch?

According to the vendor, Sketch is a software application exclusively available for Mac computers. Its primary objective is to serve as a platform that empowers designers in their creative endeavors by offering a wide range of features including design creation, collaboration, and prototyping capabilities. Additionally, it provides a web-based interface where individuals can conveniently review designs, provide feedback, inspect specific elements, and facilitate project handoffs through any internet browser. Although the precise industries or professions targeted by Sketch are not explicitly identified by the vendor, it claims to be an all-encompassing design tool suitable for professionals working in diverse fields with a focus on design-oriented tasks or responsibilities.

Wide Range of Tools and Features

The product is designed to offer an intuitive and user-friendly interface that facilitates the design process, catering to both inexperienced and advanced users. Sketch provides features and a platform that enables designers to effortlessly create visually impressive designs. The vendor boasts functionalities such as Libraries, compatibility with industry tools, and a plugin community, which allow for efficient creation and scalability of design systems across multiple brands and platforms. Moreover, Sketch incorporates functionality for prototyping, collaboration, and developer handoff. Its robust vector editing tool empowers users with full control over their designs throughout the entire design process. Ultimately, Sketch aims to be a comprehensive design platform addressing the needs of designers seeking efficiency, scalability, and creative flexibility in their work.

Canvas Comments

The product aims to facilitate real-time collaboration among users, enabling simultaneous work across Mac and web applications. Users can share comments and engage in conversations directly on the canvas, promoting efficient communication and feedback exchange. This collaborative feature is inclusive within the subscription at no additional cost, allowing users with subscriptions to invite others for collaborative sessions. In summary, Sketch offers robust design tools that encourage teamwork and enhance the efficiency of the design process.

Color Variables

The product is designed to enhance efficiency in the design process by allowing designers to create color tokens from color variables and synchronize them with development projects. Users can define color variables, text styles, and layer styles, which can be easily applied, reused, and updated across designs. The product offers a range of functions that enable efficient exporting, integration, and synchronization of color variables with development projects. Incorporating color variables into libraries helps ensure consistency in colors across multiple documents and facilitates collaboration among team members. Additionally, users can inspect color variables and maintain design consistency through symbols, styles, and color variables. Various functionalities are available such as finding and replacing colors or color variables and selecting preferred color models (RGB, HSB or HSL) throughout the design workflow. Convenient integration into projects is enabled through support for downloading or generating URLs for CSS or JSON formats of color tokens. These features collectively contribute to maintaining design element consistency while offering customization flexibility.

View & Mirror

The application seeks to deliver a smooth user experience for designers, enabling them to easily access and navigate their Sketch documents on mobile devices. The provider asserts that it allows designers to preview prototypes in real-time, which proves valuable for presentations or the exchange of ideas with stakeholders. Additional functionalities include offline mode, Handoff compatibility, and the ability to mirror content from Mac to iPhone or iPad devices. The product places emphasis on its capacity to swiftly transform mockups into immersive prototypes, affording designers an opportunity to evaluate designs directly through a browser or an iPhone device. Furthermore, the View & Mirror app furnishes users with a comprehensive Canvas view on iPads, facilitating exploration and browsing of their workspace from any location. Overall, this feature-rich application endeavors to heighten designers' efficiency by offering document viewing flexibility and prototype testing while ensuring synchronization across multiple devices.

Artboard Templates

The product offers the ability to convert a desired Artboard into a reusable template, whether it be a specific layout or combination of layers. The vendor recommends integrating these templates into a Library for easy accessibility in other projects, eliminating the need to start from scratch and saving designers time and effort. With flexible Artboards and Templates, organizing designs becomes smoother, enabling an efficient workflow for users. Users can select preset Artboard sizes or create custom ones as per their needs. The Components view allows convenient display and reorganization of Symbols and Artboard templates while providing options to modify Text Styles, Layer Styles, and Color Variables. This feature focuses on promoting efficiency by avoiding redundant work and offering tools such as resizing options for different screen sizes and customizable grid settings for precise design. Sketch provides an extensive range of features specifically designed to enhance productivity throughout the design process.

Sketch Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Sketch is a visual design tool of use for application prototyping, coming with a wide variety of extensions, plugins, and an active user community.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.1.

The most common users of Sketch are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(267)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Easy to use interface: Reviewers have consistently found Sketch's interface to be easy to understand and navigate, with similarities to other prototyping applications. This positive sentiment is shared by many users who appreciate the user-friendly design, making it accessible for both novice and experienced designers.

Versatile symbol libraries: Many reviewers have praised Sketch's ability to create custom symbol libraries or download available ones for free or purchase. This feature allows users to easily create and customize their designs, resulting in a versatile and fast tool that can be tailored according to their specific needs.

Time-saving features: A significant number of users have mentioned that Sketch eliminates the need for manual creation of form fields and UI elements before using them in wireframe layouts. This time-saving feature has been highly appreciated by reviewers, as it allows them to focus more on the creative aspects of their designs rather than repetitive tasks.

Buggy software after release: Many users have reported experiencing bugs in the software shortly after a new release, indicating a lack of thorough QA testing. Some users have encountered frequent crashes, especially when reloading plugins.

Limited features and functionalities: Users have mentioned that the software lacks certain features, necessitating the use of plugins for additional functionalities such as design system management, accessibility, repository, and live collaboration.

Clumsy user interface: The user interface can feel awkward to navigate, particularly when working with documents that have numerous pages. Users have expressed frustration over the absence of an option to organize pages into a folder hierarchy, resulting in having to scroll through a lengthy list to locate specific pages. Manipulating nested symbols can be confusing and challenging due to the interface displaying a plain list of items without clear visual separation between objects.

Users commonly recommend using Sketch for a wide range of digital design tasks, including wireframing, static prototyping, visual design for web and mobile products, vector graphics, design experimentation, and creating efficient page layouts. They suggest that Sketch is a powerful tool for UX and web design and that it saves time in designing mockups for mobile and web.

To improve efficiency in design work, users recommend taking advantage of Sketch's features such as symbols and plugins. They suggest mastering symbols and character styles in Sketch and installing plugins to enhance productivity. Users also advise reading up on tips and tricks to get started with Sketch.

In order to further improve the design workflow in Sketch, users recommend considering complementary tools like Craft manager and Zeplin. They suggest thinking about how these tools can integrate with Sketch to streamline the design process. Additionally, users recommend exploring the realistic design capabilities of Sketch.

Overall, users find Sketch to be a valuable tool in the design industry due to its ease of use, versatility, and affordability. They suggest comparing it to other illustration tools to see if it meets specific needs and recommend trying the 30-day free trial before making a purchase.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 35)
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Mike Muller | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch is a great program for UI/UX designers working in the Mac environment. It's easy to use. Has all the tools necessary to design for different devices and screen sizes. It has great plugins that allow for rapid prototyping. This tool can speed up the design process on most web projects.
D Hendrik Mulyana | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch is a revolutionary design app focus on UI and simple illustration, it helps me a lot on client and personal projects. Easy to use and support[s] many plugins, unfortunately Sketch is only supported [by] MAC platforms. It doesn't have a web version or even windows version. Sketch is suitable for solo designer, work with the team in your organization, it [will] need a 3rd party to help do it, such as plant app to handle version design changes, and you need to pay an extra cost if you need [a] version design change such as GitLab but for design. If you have a complex design and more than 100 artboards, you need to prepare for the worst-case, which means your memory RAM on your computer will drain a lot.
Sanjana Gupta | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch is very well suitable for all design requirements. I feel the learning curve is very quick for Sketch as compared to peers Adobe Illustrator, Figma, etc. For highly special graphic designing needs it can not compete with Photoshop. For normal requirements, it is better than Photoshop.
June 14, 2022

Review of Sketch

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch is useful when creating UX/UI mockups and wireframes. It's a very detailed and technical tool, which is helpful for designers that like pinpoint accuracy in their work. That being said, it can be difficult to collaborate with Sketch. Unlike competitors like Figma, it doesn't allow live collaboration. Instead we have to send our files back and forth to one another.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is very simple to master and has a variety of built-in tools that allows one to begin prototyping quickly, and can be powered using a variety of plugins for presentations. However, Sketch struggles with more complex designs, particularly those where animations or transitions are desired. It also isn't a good fit for agencies that use a variety of prototyping tools, as results from importing are not predictable.
Monika Jaeger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I love Sketch, but I know it has it's downfalls. It's a very robust tool, but I would not recommend it for teams that have windows users, since it's a native Mac app, as well as for users that may pass it off to a Windows user in the future.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch works well for web design. It doesn't have all of the bells and whistles that Photoshop and Illustrator have so while that does make it more limited, it's a very quick and snappy program. I don't think you're able to design at print resolution, so doing any print work is probably still best suited for InDesign.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch is great for creating web graphics, it's intuitive and helpful while editing vectors for that application. I'd recommend it to anyone creating web assets. It's lightweight and doesn't seem to slow down your computer like Adobe's tools sometimes do. That being said, It's not a tool designed for print. It's missing bleeds, crop marks, etc. that are required for that type of work. However, it's a great tool for what it does.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch is well suited for solo designers, cost conscious teams, or teams that want to integrate with an Abstract and/or InVision workflow. Sketch has a low barrier for writing custom JavaScript plug-ins so teams can extend Sketch to cater to their custom workflows. However, plug-ins can be difficult to manage and maintain. The Sketch platform is stable, but plug-in dependencies can turn it into a fragile application.
Flavio Bagioli | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch is well suited to create mock-ups which could then be easily turned into real designs, it's also perfectly suited to create final screen designs of websites, apps, mobile websites, Apple Watch apps, anything interactive. It might be not very well suited to create more animation intensive interactive experiences which can required third party plugins. It's also very difficult to work on Sketch with anything which involves video and motion graphics.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Sketch is great for product teams for creating pixel-perfect materials for the associated IT teams. It's partnerships with InVision and Abstract mean that there are two great options for web-based hand-offs (look those up in conjunction). If you are building a website and not an ongoing product, there may be some cheaper tools. However, if you or your team are continually turning out screens for products, it's a needed tool.
  • The other thing to consider, since there is no built-in prototyping or collaboration, if you have a large team working together, it's best to partner with other tools, that'll drive your cost up. But, for us, it's completely worth it.
Muhamed (Muha) Causevic | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I think Sketch is well suited for most design professionals working on any digital designs, especially those working with teams on design collaboration. Sketch is also very good for managing design systems and guidelines. Its integrations make it a great collaboration software with other teams, such as development and other stakeholders and reviewers of the project.
Nate Dillon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch is great for pretty much any vector-based graphics. My primary use for Sketch is for designing websites, but it could probably also be used for print. I also use Sketch to export any graphics I need for the web. It can be set to export a graphic in multiple formats at the same time. They have been adding more collaboration features to Sketch recently, although I have not yet tried those features.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It helps our Design Team create awesome landing pages in just a couple of days. Also, it's greatly improved our design workflow. We can have all of the pages of a site, and the different screen sizes, in one document, and then if we need to change a header or symbol, we can edit it in one place, and it affects all of the pages.
There is a feature for responsive design, but it's quite basic and does not link to different breakpoints when one element of the screen might go to a different place according to the user's device resolution.

Mitchell Clements | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch is a great tool for wireframes and mockups. However, it's lacking a lot in terms of prototyping and user testing. So if your goal is to do visual design, then Sketch is one of the best tools out there. However, if you're wanting an "all in one" type of tool, then you're going to find that Sketch is lacking unless you're utilizing the plugins.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you need high fidelity prototypes or mockups with an easy learning curve, Sketch is hard to beat. It's the industry standard. It has integration with almost everything and a vast sea of plugins to provide things the software doesn't do out of the box. This product isn't as well suited for many members of a team all working on a single project. Figma will be the one to beat in that regard.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have used Sketch to design adverts for events, YouTube still, and to modified an email template that one of our designers had initially created. It's straightforward to pick up new skills and doesn't have the intimidating friction to enter in as a user, as some Adobe products do.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Definitely suited for marketing or other creative fields. It is just as usable as Illustrator or Photoshop but is much more simple in its design. This doesn't mean you can do less, rather, you can do more because all of the extra stuff is not cluttering the screen as you work.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch has worked really well for us in projects where our team is internal (so we all have Mac machines), where there is a no need for distance real-time collaboration, and for making designs very fast and intuitively (which is helpful when you’re working with a product that involves lots of feedback incorporation).

Sketch has been a little difficult for us in scenarios where we’re working with contractors who do not have Sketch, and when we need to be able to collaborate with project team members remotely. In these cases, we tend to find workarounds.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I think Sketch is a wonderful tool for just about any product or design team (unless you use PCs). Sketch is lightweight, fast, easy to use, and gets the job done. Even if you use another tool for major prototyping, wireframing, etc., Sketch is a great option for hosting a design/symbol library and style guide. Its plugins make it very easy to use in conjunction with another tool.
Prashant Mahajan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch is suitable for startups who have fewer designers, for bigger companies Adobe Cloud might be more helpful since it is more powerful in collaboration. Sketch is also very good when used along with tools like Zeplin and InVision. I think the company has improved a lot and in the future, if they have a direct to code feature, it will be great.
Andrew Richardson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I would recommend Sketch to solo freelance interactive designers who are working on Mac. All other situations I'd probably recommend Figma, it's better all around, or if you love messing with plugins all the time. Sketch can be very powerful combined with third-party plugins, but you get to a point where it's barely the same program at a certain point.
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