In-Depth Review
Sketch's story is a classic SaaS tragedy. In 2014, it emerged in an era when Adobe Photoshop monopolized the design market—lightweight, vector-native, purpose-built for UI design. By 2018, it had almost become the default tool for UI designers; "knows Sketch" was a standard requirement in designer job descriptions. Then Figma arrived, armed with instant-in-browser, real-time collaboration, and cross-platform as its three weapons, slowly carving away Sketch's market. By 2026, the people still using Sketch fall into two main camps: veteran designers who started in 2015 and face prohibitively high migration costs, and Mac-only solo designers who don't need much collaboration.
As for Sketch's remaining pros, Mac-native performance tops the list. It's not an Electron wrapper (VS Code and the Figma desktop app both are), but a genuine macOS native app. Its fluidity on Mac—zooming, dragging, rendering complex vectors—is a notch above the Figma desktop app. Vector editing capability also remains superior to Figma in certain details, especially Bezier curve manipulation and boolean operations on complex paths. If you're doing heavy vector icon design or illustration, Sketch's toolchain is still the most comfortable.
But the problem is, these advantages pale in comparison to collaboration needs. In today's design workflow, you can almost never solo-complete a project and hand it off to development—it goes through at least product manager reviews, collaboration with other designers, and developer annotations and asset export. Sketch's collaboration approach dates back to 2016: files stored locally or in the cloud, version management via Abstract or Plant, annotations via Zeplin or Avocode—each step requires an extra tool. Figma compresses this entire workflow into "send a link—done." The experience gap is so vast that no amount of vector editing polish from Sketch can make up for it.
Additionally, Sketch only supporting macOS also limits its ceiling. This means any team that includes Windows users cannot fully adopt Sketch (there's a web-based Sketch Viewer, but it can't edit). In 2026, with remote work as the norm, a macOS-only design tool is voluntarily giving up over half of its potential users.
Simply put: if you're a Mac solo designer who doesn't need to collaborate with anyone, Sketch is still a good tool. If not—practically any scenario that involves collaboration—just use Figma, don't overthink it.
Pros
- Great native Mac performance
- Strong vector editing
- Low migration cost for existing users
Cons
- Mac only
- Collaboration requires extra tools
- Massive community exodus to Figma