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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, …
Continue reading
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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

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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 Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 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

(1-9 of 9)
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Mike Muller | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch is used by our design and development team as one of the tools used during our UI/UX process as we design and build websites and other digital assets. We use this to create low fidelity wireframes, full designs of websites, app layouts, user journey documents, prototypes and digital advertising assets.
  • Strong design tools
  • The app is optimized for screen designs
  • Easy to use
  • Other tools handle collaboration better than Sketch
  • File sizes can get rather large
  • Can't work with PC users on projects.
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.
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I put together wireframes that I then hand off to my UX counterparts. They then take those and turn them into high fidelity designs that we use to test with customers. Sketch works great for this.
  • It's easy to use
  • It is fast
  • It works with a lot of other tools we use
  • Sometimes it is frustrating that the keyboard shortcuts are not the same as photoshop
  • image editing capabilities
  • more templates
It works great for simple UX prototyping. It doesn't do as well at more complex prototyping that includes animation.
June 14, 2022

Review of Sketch

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch allows us to create mockups of email builds before they begin. Before Sketch, we used Photoshop or Illustrator to lay out emails, but it wasn't as quick or accurate until we started using Sketch. We use Sketch weekly to create email mockups and it has become a staple tool in our design arsenal.
  • Helps use create wireframes and mockups.
  • Syncs with Craft and InVision.
  • Allows us to create symbols and therefore design efficiencies.
  • Sometimes it can be hard to collaborate.
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 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch allows our company to make highly professional landing pages, illustrations, slides, pitch decks, diagrams, etc. With some plugins or extensions, our designers can export presets and code, which is wonderful to create websites after, using that code.
  • Amazing app for UI/UX design. This is prototyping as its best.
  • Being able to use a lot of plugins for more advanced features and designs gives you a lot of useful features when utilizing Sketch.
  • The only aspect we dislike about Sketch is the high price, but when compared to other similar applications, it is one of the more inexpensive options available.
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.

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Andrew Richardson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Sketch as our primary design software. While Adobe products are still in use, we rely heavily on Sketch for product designs and marketing collateral of every variety. We love the integrations Sketch offers, especially to Zeplin, as well as plugins like Magic Mirror. Sketch has become a staple in our tech stack.
  • Plugins are extensive and robust.
  • High fidelity wireframes are a breeze.
  • The interface makes it easy for advanced designers, as well as less experienced ones, to thrive.
  • Collaborative design.
  • Prototyping is pretty basic.
  • Large file handling.
Sketch is a must-have for product teams, as well as a really useful tool for marketing teams. We use it to do everything from product design to social graphics. It's a simple, yet robust platform and it's only $99 a year for the license. At that cost, it's one of the very best investments we've made for our team.
Fábio Zuppone Chavasco | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
It's good for designers who work alone on that specific design. The way you can create components design is incredible. The community is huge, so you can find any kind of resources or plugins for Sketch.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Sketch is well-suited for any user experience situation. Whether you're creating a robust, high-fidelity application or a minimal, low-fidelity concept, Sketch has you covered. For instance, say that you have an idea of how a user should interact with an application. Quickly design that experience and the steps it takes to finish the process.
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