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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 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

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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.
  • Simple wireframing
  • Working with other tools
  • Easy to share files
  • Saves our time
  • Saves frustration
  • Makes collaboration easier
I would say that it's different enough from the others that it has its place right alongside them. Nothing beats Sketch in terms of its ability to quickly wireframe.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
  • The ability to make shared libraries truly saves time and ensures both accuracy and consistency across designs. Sketch makes design system creation and organization very easy, and this streamlines every part of the product design process.
  • Sketch saves our company money. Beyond saving time (which saves money), Sketch is more affordable than other software and fits our needs just as well.
  • Because Sketch offers so many plugins, usage is VERY flexible. This allows us to change the other tools we're using while still being able to integrate Sketch and use our design system and symbol libraries. This makes platform switches much less of a hassle.
Although there's a lot of overlap, we use these different platforms for different purposes. InVision allows us to create more robust prototypes, Zeplin is a better tool for design/dev handoffs, and Marvel is great for basic wireframes. None of these tools beat Sketch when it comes to our design system and shared symbol libraries, however, which is why Sketch continues to have a place here. Additionally, Sketch is so lightweight and easy to use, it's my go-to for creating simple visuals for the UX team's internal use.
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