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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 34)
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Mike Muller | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch works in a similar way to programs like Figma and InVision. Sketch is a mac only program so it works well in a mac environment. Tools like Figma and InVision have better collaboration tools and are both cross-platform. Sketch is easier to use and more intuitive for most designers as compared to Figma and InVision.
D Hendrik Mulyana | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If we compared to popular design tools right now (Figma and Adobe XD ).
Sketch app is still no 1, in terms of popularity, compatibility, and cost.

Even though on main feature Sketch is one step behind from Figma, I believe sketch will re-shine soon, if they can catch up and build a new feature, especially on multi-platform and web-based support.

I believe Sketch can improve and better perform, and also I hope they build a new feature such as Figma has, (community future), it will be the best design tool in the world.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch's approachable UI allowed those using outdated technologies to transition efficiently. Among its peers, Sketch performs comparably with most prototyping tools. It falls behind compared to those that can better handle movement, like InVision Studio, which combines animation and prototyping into a single platform. However, these types of programs have a steep learning curve, whereas Sketch is approachable immediately.
Monika Jaeger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
The interfaces of Adobe and Figma are very similar, but I would say that Figma's collaboration tool is great with onboard live collaboration. For Sketch, that is a separate payment. XD is great for free usage and for Windows collaboration, but some parts of the collaboration tools are confusing. I would say that Figma is the most reliable (when it comes to crashes) Sketch crashes a lot more than either of these programs.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We went from designing websites in Photoshop to designing in Sketch, and it is certainly much quicker and easier to design in Sketch, and you're more easily able to make sure that our designs are exact in Sketch, as far as spacing exact pixels. I have never used AdobeXD and have only dipped my toe in the water of Figma, but Figma does seem like it could be a very viable alternative.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch is great for creating digital assets quickly and easily. It is simple to figure out and easy to use. It has a very clean user interface and isn't a resource hog like Adobe products tend to be. Its export feature is fantastic, generating multiple asset sizes/resolutions in one shot. For anything other than print design, Sketch is my go-to.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
At the time of evaluation, Sketch provided a full feature design tool at the cost we needed. We also had required integration with Abstract, Zeplin, and InVision. Our design team already had familiarity with the Sketch interface. these considerations made it an easy decision to renew our subscription and related contracts.
Flavio Bagioli | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch works perfectly well with Adobe Illustrator, you can seamlessly copy and paste vector artworks and open PDF files. It also [works] very well with prototyping tools such as proto.io and Bravo App. At ExMachina we also selected Sketch for its handover capabilities and compatibility with Zepplin, making it easy for front end developers to implement our designs
Andrea Hester | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch is much better for web design than Adobe products. It's easier to learn and use, and it's a much more efficient way to hand off design files to developers. However, given a choice between Figma and Sketch, I'd choose Figma because of its cloud file storage and collaboration features.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • We use Sketch for its clarity. While Figma and InVision Studio have some "google-doc-escrow" collaboration tools, I've found them hard to make pixel-perfect designs, which is necessary while working with IT and clients.
  • Illustrator may have been the first of these vector-based design tools, and it's better for arts than it is for product designs.
  • Sketch merely is more robust in terms of its design tools, so we chose it, and manage collaboration differently.
Muhamed (Muha) Causevic | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch eliminates all the complexity of Photoshop and it simplifies the screen design process for web, UI, UX designers. It is also much faster software with capabilities to make responsive design quickly.
Nate Dillon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I was a big Fireworks user when it was discontinued by Adobe. At the time most people used Photoshop, but I've never liked Photoshop for web designs because it was built for photo editing, not vector graphics. I've heard Illustrator might be a pretty good alternative now, but it's also more geared toward print design. I've heard a lot of great things about Figma, but I have yet to give it a good try. Adobe XD is one that might also be worth checking out.
Mitchell Clements | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch is the industry leader when it comes to visual design for mobile apps and websites. However, its competitors are catching up very quickly and starting to offer features that Sketch doesn't have. While I think Sketch is still the best visual design software out there for UX designers, I am concerned that it's not keeping up with the speed of its competitors.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
At the time of purchase, Sketch was the industry standard. It's affordable and we liked it wasn't tied to a subscription model. We're on Macs so it being an OSX exclusive wasn't a deterrent. Sketch has set the bar high, but there is a massive amount of competition in this space. I think it will be a while before Sketch is no longer the standard but it may be sooner than I think with so many competitors gaining traction.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Again, I would say that Sketch stacks up very well against similar Adobe products in the field. I get the sense, just from the little bit I've used it, that It may not be as robust as some of the Adobe products. However, for my needs (fundamental to the middle of the road use), it has been more than adequate in its feature set.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I think they are both similar and different. I can generally choose an Adobe product when I'm looking for a specific end result. I use Sketch a lot for layout, UI and UX design cause it just takes all the frills out of the equation while giving me an equal end product. They are similar in what they can do and different in their usability. Sketch takes the cake in usability for a novice or beginner.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Figma is great in a team setting, but Sketch seems to have far more tools that are aligned to the fast-iteration work we do. It also lacks a number of the plugins that make our work with Sketch so ideal. If we decided on Figma, we would definitely have to create more workarounds to incorporate it into our team workflows.

Illustrator is a fine tool as well, however there tended to be a much greater time spent on building designs in Illustrator than there was spent on building designs in Sketch, which reduced team capacity and costs us time (and money). We’ve been able to be more productive with Sketch than Illustrator because of this point.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Prashant Mahajan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sketch had been great and improved a lot in the past, but so has Adobe. If you are going to start new, it's better to plan long term and based on needs see what suits more. Figma is relying a lot on new technologies which are not bug-free, but that may be the future of design.
Andrew Richardson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Ultimately I did not select Sketch, but for a while, it was the software of choice over Photoshop or Illustrator. Photoshop was never a good fit for prototyping, as it's made for intense photo editing and has a lot of UI debt that's built up. It also facilitated a particular workflow that idealized pixel perfect design in a way that was unproductive. Figma has caught up with Sketch for features and has the competitive advantage of being built on a collaborative platform, so it wins out in my mind.
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