[tenaciousDaniel]

I'm a developer who has to dip into design files every now and then, so maybe my opinion isn't the most reliable. But I just don't really see a huge difference between Sketch and Figma. The major difference is that you can design online (which is admittedly a very big diff). But the UI itself doesn't really seem to set itself apart that much.

Can anyone here lay out a few major differences that I might be missing?

[HugoDaniel]

sketch file is an open format[0]. figma will lock you in. there is no export project feature in figma

https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360038006274-Files-...

that is why it is so easy to migrate into figma from sketch, and impossible to migrate away from figma into anything else...

[0] https://github.com/sketch-hq/sketch-file-format

[mekster]

I hate to see another vendor lock in by file format like PSD to keep competitors out.

It better be fixed before they become big enough not to care.

[HugoDaniel]

adobe, microsoft, et al. also faked the fix and incorrectly fixed it by exporting into other formats in a broken way. locking in makes sense from a VC point of view.

from my point of view the only way to guarantee is to use software that provides open file formats and develops their features around those open formats. inkscape and sketch seem to be doing this

[mekster]

That's not going to work. People will take features over unknown future uncertainty. Users just have to realize the past mistakes of other companies and pressure the developers to open the format.

[cawlin]

"design online" is the key but not so much that the software runs in the browser, more that it allows for a different workflow.

Multiple people can be working on the same thing at the same time and anyone can view the in progress work. This changes the traditional file based workflow where designers pass a file back and forth if they want to keep the work together - often working in a separate file then "merging" the work into a master file one at a time.

Because all the files are online it's possible to see who is working on what including at the very moment. Its really easy for me to get a sense of what other designers are working on and whats been updated recently.

A huge bonus beyond designer collaboration is the way Figma breaks the previous separation of working file and final export. Non-designers can check in on an in-progress file at any time without needing a designer to export some static version of it. This allows designers to work on related things in the same file but each "thing" can be in at various stages of completion without having a negative impact on delivering final work. This is also great for transparency.

[scrollaway]

At a high level, that's about it, and it is huge. Sketch is macOS only. Hell, this page comes up when you google "sketch for <not macos>": https://www.figma.com/sketch-alternative/

[open-source-ux]

"Sketch is macOS"

I recently came across a Windows-only app called Lunacy which offers Sketch file import and editing for Windows users (I haven't tried the app).

The published Sketch file specification [1] is what allows Figma and Adobe XD (and Lunacy) to import Sketch files. Ironically, neither Figma or Adobe XD publish their file formats.

I think where Figma is pulling ahead of Sketch (in terms of usage behaviour) is that it is being used by more than just designers. In fact, Figma is beginning to encroach (possibly unintentionally) on digital whiteboard tools like Miro and Mural.

[1] https://developer.sketch.com/file-format/

[satvikpendem]

Figma approaches design from an engineer's perspective. They have features like auto layout [0], swapping elements in a list, scaling multiple elements at once while preserving each aspect ratio, and so on.

Can you imagine that if designers before this wanted to move an element in a list, they would have to move every single one instead of having some drag and drop swap functionality? That if they wanted to dynamically change a button size for the text inside it, like we can do easily on the web, they simply couldn't?

Basically, Figma is turning design more into something like front-end development, doing things in a design program that engineers could do normally with code. This is because the developers of Figma are themselves coders rather than designers, so they know what real ease of use should look like (ironically). This is the fundamental corporate culture shift that is the difference between Figma and others like Sketch.

Of course, you could go all the way and simply turn the design software into a web/mobile development framework, which is what software like Framer [1] does, which is literally a design software built on React, and it can spit out React code for you once you're done designing.

[0] https://www.figma.com/blog/announcing-auto-layout/

[1] https://www.framer.com/