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Easy to use interface: Reviewers have consistently found Sketch's interface to be easy to understand and navigate, with similarities to …
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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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
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- 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.
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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 Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
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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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!
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
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
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November 28, 2023
Powerfull design tool, but still need to improve on performance with complex scenario
Sketch is a powerful design tool focus[ed] on the design user interface. Sketch is a primary design tool to create a mobile app in my organization, especially in [the] design department. Also with Sketch + 3rd party app such as Zeplin and Overflow. It's the best combination to speed up our process design and development phase. Sketch can solve the traditional problems when handing over design to Development Team, with latest Sketch feature[s], inspect feature on web version, it's really useful for our team, plus combine with Zeplin. There is no gap anymore. simple case flows our process using Sketch is.
Start Design > Design flow mapping ( 3rd party Overflow plugin ) > Zeplin handover design to dev or Sketch inspect feature = Productive
Start Design > Design flow mapping ( 3rd party Overflow plugin ) > Zeplin handover design to dev or Sketch inspect feature = Productive
- Support over 1000 plugins.
- Can handle simple and complex artboard in one file.
- Support external library.
- Support Design collaboration.
- If in one file has over 100 artboards, sketch will slow.
- Drain your memory ram, if design is complex and use external library.
- Doesn't have a feature can download plugin in one place such community feature on Figma.
- Only support MAC platform.
- Doesn't have web version.
January 11, 2022
Long-term user of Sketch. It's a pro tool, lots of features, but not bullet proof when it comes to software crashes.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use Sketch on a daily basis to mock up workflows, screens, iconography, and manage our design system. In the past and present, I have used Sketch to mockup web pages, mobile app screens (both iOS and Android), and even marketing materials such as YouTube thumbnails, email banners, social media graphics, and various other pieces of collateral.
- Auto Saving your work
- Great library of plugins to use to make the software your own
- Easy to understand interface that is very similar to other prototyping applications
- They have been around for 12 years so you know the support and legacy stands
- The software can be buggy right after a release. It appears that they do very little QA testing right after releasing a new version
- The software can crash a lot. And when it does, I continuously have issues with it reloading my plugins.
- Only available for Mac. If you have a cross platform team, it may not be the best.
- Lack of features in the software, so you will have to use plugins for those additional features (Designs system management, accessibility, repository and live collaboration without paying a premium)
May 06, 2021
Sketch is a great choice for web design
Sketch gets used at my company mostly for designing full websites or smaller web projects designing out specific modules. It's also used in our wireframing process, and we have it hooked up to InVision and are able to upload our designs straight from sketch to InVision. We sometimes but not always use the prototyping tool to show hover and/or click effects on specific elements.
- It's a very lightweight program
- It's able to hook up to InVision for easy uploading and replacing
- It has cloud-based storage
- It does not do well with complex SVGs, which can import with problems
- It is not easy to take Sketch elements and bring them into Adobe programs
- Prototyping is cool but is also a bit cumbersome to show even simple interactions
January 21, 2020
Ideal product for UI/UX/Web Designers
Sketch is used primarily by our product designs and just very recently by the marketing team when working on web projects. Sketch is a more ideal web screen design platform when collaborating with a team and working on the same projects, as opposed to our traditional approach — Adobe Photoshop. Sketch is also a more intuitive platform and it is more easily learned by most of the front end developers than the Adobe products.
- It has great plugins and integrations such as with Craft plugin and InVision.
- Sketch is fast in graphic rendering and it offers an infinite amount of space allowing an unlimited number of artboards to be created.
- When working in a team, everyone must be on the same version of the software, otherwise there are a lot of glitches happening to the files that have been saved under an older version.
- Some users are transitioning into making print-ready designs from Sketch and using it as the sole creative tool. I would like to see better print ready features integrated into Sketch.
November 22, 2019
Sketch: The Industry Leader In Design Tools
Sketch is used by all the UX designers at my company, as well as by some of our graphic designers. Sketch is our number one go-to design tool for creating interfaces and mockups. It holds our entire design system and patterns, so we can quickly create all the designs our developers need for interfaces.
- Sketch allows you to quickly create mockups, especially when you have a design system in place.
- Sketch is great for wireframes because it's so fast and easy to create shapes.
- Sketch has a lot of plugins made by the community.
- Using nested symbols can sometimes be confusing and a bit difficult.
- Updating the plugins and finding missing fonts can be a pain.
November 13, 2019
The king of the mountain - for now.
We use Sketch to mock up design collateral. Mostly responsive landing pages, but we've used it for simple app screens and prototypes as well. We can send review links of the designs internally or externally or upload the screens with InVision for prototyping and feedback/approval. As a vector tool, there's a lot we can do with it for our digital collateral.
- High-fidelity mockups - web and apps.
- Simple prototyping to mimic user flows.
- Ease of use - allows for quick wireframes to hammer out ideas (even during the meeting).
- Fantastic use of symbols.
- The interface needs a complete overhaul. It's not bad, just dated and it's getting lapped by other similar tools.
- As it relies heavily on plugins, functionality can be broken with app updates or OS updates.
- The prototyping feature is basic now. Needs to add more features to keep up with the competition.
We use Sketch across a couple of different departments. At first, our design team was the only team using it. However, as a member of the marketing team, I started using it to maintain consistency between projects that our teams collaborated on. After using it for just a few minutes, I knew that it was a game-changer. It is a very easy to use program that allows a user to make designs very simple, without the same technicality of some other Adobe products. Very straightforward and user-friendly while also retaining a robust design feature set.
- Assets within a project "snap" to proportion and match with other assets, maintaining alignment and space in projects to help create well-designed projects, no matter what you are working on.
- All the tools are laid out very nicely and clearly. There are minimal questions as to how to do very basic and sometimes more complicated functions.
- Automatic saving and cloud saving is a plus.
- The design of the software is visually very intuitive. The layers panel is well organized and easy to manage.
- You have to have a canvas set up to export certain file types accurately; this isn't clear at first.
- The export process is a little strange. It takes getting used to. It seems you have to convert the file type BEFORE selecting export...I found that to be odd.
- It may be less robust than Adobe Illustrator, but I haven't used both enough to say what Sketch might be missing.
August 15, 2019
Sketch is All You Need For Layout Design. 10/10
Sketch is used y our Marketing department to quickly mock-up, organize and deliver assets for website, UI and UX products. It is specifically used to hand off assets to developers so that each item can be extracted individually, rather than creating multiple folders for the same page or site. This saves both time and resources.
- Organizes assets for delivery.
- Easy to use for anyone familiar with any design product.
- Simple and neat interface. Not too much visual clutter.
- Can't think of any.
July 20, 2019
Why Sketch is above the rest!
We currently use Sketch in our design department to design UI for desktop, tablet, and mobile websites and apps. By using Sketch, we’re able to quickly get designs out to stakeholders and incorporate feedback for quick iteration. We also use it to get input and insights from actual users to learn how they would use the design and how we can improve or build upon our design to better address their pain points in specific ways.
- There are a ton of plugins that make working with Sketch very, very easy to integrate into our new and existing processes.
- Sketch files are relatively small, so we don’t have to worry about taking up too much cloud space with Sketch files (especially when duplicating!).
- Because Sketch is vector-based, the designs look good on any screen without losing sharpness. This is particularly helpful when sharing designs with stakeholders.
- Color management can be finicky. For instance, the eyedropper tool sometimes isn’t very precise.
- It would be helpful if there was a built-in commenting system that included tagging where designers and developers could have real-time collaborative conversations about designs.
- Sketch is only available to Mac users. This is fine internally, but an issue when working with external folks.
Our product, design, and development teams use Sketch to host our design style guide and symbol library. The product and design teams use Sketch to create mockups, wireframes, etc., and then use Sketch's Marvel integration to hand designs off to the devs. The product content strategy team also uses Sketch to create internal images and visuals (e.g., annotated product screenshots, tone maps, infographics, diagrams).
- It's extremely easy to create symbols in Sketch. This makes it very, very fast to re-use components across designs. Not only does this save time, but it keeps our work consistent across users and designs.
- Sketch always loads incredibly quickly, no matter how large the file size or how many images/artboards the file contains. It's like magic, especially compared to some of the clunkier software I've used.
- Sketch offers a fantastic spread of third-party plugins. The Marvel plugin makes it incredibly easy to upload/sync designs before dev handoffs.
- As with similar software, Sketch does have a learning curve. Sketch is incredibly easy to use once you're comfortable with the navigation, know the keyboard shortcuts, etc. Before you're at that point, however, it can be difficult. I already had experience with programs like Illustrator, Photoshop, and InVision, and took to Sketch very quickly. But one of my colleagues who has less experience with these types of tools is unable to use Sketch efficiently, even after several months.
- Sketch is only available for OS. This wasn't a huge problem for our company, where the design and product teams all use MacBooks, but it means it's harder to share with other teams (like the devs, who use PCs).
- The basic image editing Sketch offers is pretty limited. Although that's not the main reason anyone at our company uses Sketch, it would be nice to be able to erase parts of an image or do some basic masking.
March 27, 2019
Sketch was great. Until Figma came along.
Sketch solves prototyping interactive products. This is either to get buy-in from stakeholders, or to show the intent of what a product will be for developers. Sketch helps us quickly visualize a design and rapidly iterate. It's being utilized by our UX and UI designers primarily, but the deliverables of Sketch are utilized by a wider range of the organization for communication purposes.
- High fidelity interactive mockups.
- Very user-friendly interface for a design program.
- Incredibly competitive price point, especially when compared to Adobe.
- Sketch hasn't innovated in a while. They used to be a leader here, but have slowed down and are now playing catch-up to other design programs.
- Being made for Mac only is extremely limiting.
- Working on their design system is a pretty poor experience compared to alternatives.
March 14, 2019
Sketch is an excellent tool for creating wireframes with custom symbols you can share quickly across your organization
Sketch is used by the UX department only, which consists of 2 of us. We use it extensively for fast comps to illustrate possible UI ideas and layouts for our company's web-based software products. It serves as a tool for us to visualize ideas we can share in larger groups, making it much easier for stakeholders to provide useful feedback and additional requirements. "A picture is worth a thousand words" right? In this case, Sketch lets us make those pictures to gather intel and then create final wireframes of every aspect of our systems. The flexibility of its symbols allows us to quickly create visual ideas without a lot of manual object creation. And the ability to sync our sketch pages to a project on InVision is invaluable to us in collecting feedback and keeping a living version of our products online for constant improvement.
- The ability to create a custom symbol library and/or download available libraries for free or purchase make Sketch incredibly versatile and fast. Sketch eliminates the need for creating form fields and other UI elements by hand before using them in wireframe layouts. This saves so much time! The flexibility of symbols in Sketch allows for easily creating multiple width views of pages for responsive design.
- Nesting symbols in sketch provide the ultimate flexibility in creating product UIs that have variations throughout a system. Nesting allows you to change aspects of a symbol on a per-instance need as opposed to forcing the creation of a unique symbol every time you need to display something a little different.
- Multiple canvases on a page allow for creating multiple views of the same page based on conditional variables. Or for responsive design. There's no need to flip between pages in Sketch to do this. You can see multiple views as canvases in the same Sketch page. This helps greatly in keeping your Sketch files organized when you are dealing with a large system.
- One of the key benefits to my work is Sketch's ability to work with 3rd party plug-ins and extensions. This allows me to immediately sync a single canvas or collection of canvases on a page with InVision, a tool my company uses to house all our UX documentation for feedback from stakeholders.
- The Sketch interface can feel a bit clumsy when you're working with a document that has many pages. As an example, I regularly work in a document that captures 10 different aspects of a product. Sketch doesn't allow me to organize all those pages into any type of folder hierarchy. I have to scroll through the complete list of pages to try and find the page I want. You can drag pages into a different order in Sketch, but that doesn't remove the lengthy list or provide visual demarcation between groups of related pages.
- Nested symbols are extremely useful, but the interface available on the right panel of the screen to manipulate a nested symbol in a canvas is not clearly organized to find what you're looking for quickly. It displays as a list of items in your nested symbol with no visual delineation between objects, so it can be a bit of guesswork to make sure you're making changes to the correct element.
- It would be nice if Sketch offered the ability to create a workflow with automatic connection of objects via lines and arrows, like a sitemap or process flow. I use Sketch to create all my screens, but still need to leave the app to create my visual diagrams in a separate app.
- A fresh take on the UI to better delineate things visually would be a great help. As mentioned, pages can't be organized, nested symbols are cumbersome to read through, etc. Separating the main central area of the app where canvases are displayed visually from the tools on the left and right would make for a cleaner work environment.
December 19, 2018
Pixel perfect made easy with Sketch
As a member of our product definition and user experience team, we have many tools to design the user interface of our product and Sketch is typically used for nearly all of our design and layout. The product is primarily used by our team to mock up pixel-perfect ideas, click-throughs and communicating workflow to our development team. Sketch is also coupled with a few other tools/plugins that allow us to make click-through user tests and some content control, allowing us to share ideas in a native way with our developers. Although this is used exclusively in our UX team, we try to include many of our teams in the process of UX and design so we have developers and quality engineers that are also using templates and asset sheets so they can simply layout and share ideas quickly.
- Sketch has a nice plugin and partner set of applications so you can extend the use through partnerships they have built. These plugins can also speed up layouts as well as templates that can be reused quickly.
- Sketch has a great layout, support of an eye friendly dark mode and has great organization of assets. You can quickly create pages, groups and control all aspects of the visual effects of each and every level.
- Drawing tools are wonderful and they have all the expected graphics based drawing and boolean options necessary for building layouts, icons and effects.
- Although they have gotten much better, the stability of large sketch files was a bit flaky.
- I would like to see some online services provided natively to Sketch for things like version control (instead of using Abstract)
December 13, 2018
Sketch is one of the best design tools in the market
Sketch was being used only by the design team. We were using it to iterate on existing products, defining flows and creating new ideas, concepts and wireframes.
- Creation of wireframes
- High fidelity prototypes (not including animation)
- User interface design
- Doesn't have a collaborative way of working
- Slow on updates
- Bad interaction with the community
December 11, 2018
Reliable and trustworthy
We use Sketch for basically all of our web and product design needs. The main users are the design team, with some stakeholders also opening Sketch when need be. It solves our UI design needs as the leader in the industry.
- Libraries — able to manage design system components comprehensively
- Prototyping — having native prototyping built right in is so much more convenient than looping in another tool
- Shareable — sharing Sketch designs with coworkers is easy, either via Abstract or Zeplin or with the easy-to-use built-in export options
- Color library management is still a bit wonky
- Not super speedy
- Can crash sometimes
December 03, 2018
Best application for UX Professionals
As a designer in a company of Windows users, Sketch unfortunately isn't used as wide-spread as it could be because it's a Mac-only application. However for me it handles a number of uses in doing user interface design and user experience. To name a few uses:
- Symbol Library allows for reuse of UI elements
- Prototyping brings ideas to life
- Clean interface brings efficiency to the design process
- Prototyping. Create interactive designs, publish and share for feedback
- Design Library. Create a library of commonly used design elements from type to icons
- Continually Updated. There's always something new happening with Sketch, it's updated frequently with new and better tools
- Tools. Sketch allows for third-party app development so that the community can make tools that work with Sketch
- Photo-editing is minimal
- Work flow symbols would be nice for building flow charts
- Prebuilt templates would be cool