Sketch Reviews

It is intuitive and quite easy to use. The plugins make your work so easy and seamless.
It has a fair amount of learning resources online shortening the learning time.

If you plan to use Sketch to collaborate, first make sure everyone in your team uses a mac; otherwise PC users will just be spectators in the project.

I like the use of symbols. This is crucial to being able to send out successfully to development and makes development time shorter.

I like that there are multiple pages that can be used. Really useful for building out different versions, keeping organised.

Although the symbols are one of the biggest pluses, they are also one of the core issues. They are 'clunky' and make it difficult to iterate quickly. In some ways, components in XD are better than Sketch (asides from there not being a separate page for them, and no ability to build an atomic structure) as they are more flexible. Often I will need to create 8 versions of the same card to accommodate for different instances (sold out, new, reduced, email me, description, no description, 3 lines of text, 2 lines of text etc...) which is very time consuming. XD allows you to do this well. Creating a symbol also no longer sends to symbol page as default which is annoying.

Images are one of the biggest bug bares. Images should be locked to scale with frame non locked, like in XD. This makes building responsive a lot quicker. Also just being able to drop in images rather than having to build components with different images as 5 layers down is a massive time hog.

File size is an issue. Very laggy and causes my Mac to crash often.

The advantages is that it is one of the best programs for web design, the interface is very friendly and it's very intuitive to learn and use. The license is the cheapest of the design programs when I made a comparison. This software is an excellent tool for designing templates of web portals, for me it's actually the best for web design, it is quite complete, it is easily managed with CCS and it has fast compatibility with frontpage

The software has not a very good image editor, so you have to use another program to improve the image edition in order to complement it. It also is only available for Mac and it's a under license program, there is no free version of it

Its focus is on digital designing. Thanks to its prototyping features that allow me collaborate with other masters of app development especially when I need help. I love most its content creation that do resize automatically. It's an amazing app when choosing a software for app development.

You won't love it if you want a print design as well as illustration. This software is limited to only holders of Mac machine which is not a good idea to me. There must be a flexibility in its platform.

This is by far the most intuitive user interface design software out there. It is made for screens first, whereas a program like Illustrator has a lot of features built for print first. You can still design screens in Illustrator, but Sketch is built to measure in pixels first and has a much simpler interface.

I can quickly mock up a landing page, logo, app screen and more, faster than any other program. They remove a lot from their own interface that I feel can be distracting in a program like Illustator.

I'm a Mac user, so this doesn't matter to me, but it only works on Mac's for now. Apparently they are working on a Windows version, but as of September 2020 when writing this, there is no known release date.

Does not open layered .eps files, so I either use a web based conversion tool or open it using Affinity Designer and converting to .svg to work with .eps layered in Sketch.

I find myself wanting to use this interface to create flyers and other print materials as well. I have to go Google dimensions of regular print items to set them properly. While I know that's not the intention of this software, that would be valuable to me and help this software compete with Adobe on print graphics the way they do with vector graphics.

- Sketch was directly intended for UX people and was a first in the industry for that reason. You no longer had to use tools like Adobe Photoshop which had workarounds but were clearly not intended for UX designers.
- You don't have to keep paying for your account. You can purchase it once and keep using it (you just won't be getting the updates but still). They also have student discounts which is how I got started with it a couple of years ago.

- It only works on Mac. (They are working on adapting this but their [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] has a happily Mac-only approach which is not helpful.) Sketch is the reason I bought a Mac in the first place but it makes collaboration a challenge. I can use Sketch, but not necessarily the whole team.
- Speaking of collaboration... You could not collaborate simultaneously or even in general at all. This is again something they've been working on fixing but it's not great so far and there are better alternatives for this unfortunately.

Frequent updates, affordable price, and ease of use are the biggest reasons we love this software. We tried it out on a couple of client jobs and immediately fell in love with it.

While it IS constantly updating, some things are still not very intuitive. Selecting multiple elements when not in the device views is still a huge pain, but honestly there isn't too much that we're not unhappy about. Even Adobe products have bigger gripes than Sketch does for us.

Sketch is primarily made for creating Mobile and Web Design mockups, which makes it a great software to use if you're making designs for web or mobile, which was our primary requirement. Also, Sketch contains ton of templates which helps in choosing a basic layout to start.

The thing I like the least about Sketch is it's a Mac specific app. Our design team has to strictly switch to mac in order to use Sketch. Also, Sketch has a different set of hotkeys which is quite an effort to learn.

Easy to make components and use it across. I link my files with unsplash and there is variety of plugins which makes your work easier

If you need to search already built sketch references, need to search web and go away from tool

Clear interface; super easy to create new mockup; reusable components; vector graphic support; the export is complete and it is easy to find the quality I want;

no CSS export; difficult to work in a team if people have different versions of Sketch; the price is a bit high;

I liked the focus they put on UI design, with lots of templates available in the community, with specific toolsets that were think with UI and somehow also UX in mind (prototyping). I really liked the versioning new feature that came out for Sketch cloud, although I would like to have it for free for personal uses without collaborators.

It's hard to make illustrations when coming from other softwares that I used to use from Adobe, and for project that are not related to Mobile or Web doesn't look that easy for me to use or achieve my design projects.

After using Illustrator for the most part of the last 10 years, designing for the web, I felt something was missing. That's when I learnt about Sketch. This is a tool for the modern web designer, it speaks the same language as the people who will convert your drawing to code. It's super simple and makes changes through out your layouts a breeze. I love the recent smart layouts addition. It hard to explain in words, but, if you try it, you'll understand. I also love the ability to integrate with InVision, making prototype sharing very fast and efficient. It's also very light weight app with constant updates and it's fairly cheap to own.

I don't really like the way you select the tools to draw. I also find it difficult to make complex shapes and object. But I guess it's because of being used to work with Adobe's tools for so long.

I love the powerful simplicity of Sketch, the large number of useful plugins available, and the vast availability of symbol libraries to help you design prototypes quicker.

There is no Windows version available. Sketch will only run on Mac OS. The sketch.cloud upload feature still doesn't quick have all of the features of some competitors. I also wish you could export interactive prototypes to HTML to host on your own server instead of sketch.cloud.

Symbols and libraries - these are the core of Sketch's power. Dynamically updated components that allow individual customisations/overrides mean we don't have to have a million different variants of a given component. Colour tinting on symbol instances is a huge timesaver too, compared to the hacks and workarounds we used to have with layer styles and nested swatch symbols.
Export presets make asset export simple - I especially love the use of layer names to create folder structures for export. The SVG export gives better results than Adobe Illustrator for example (more decimal places means higher accuracy).
Pressing Enter or double-clicking to drill down within groups of elements is super useful - it'd be even better if there were keyboard shortcuts to cycle back and forth between the layers of a group (i.e. next/previous layer).
Plugins - there's a very active ecosystem of 3rd party developers, with tons of useful plugins to extend Sketch's functionality and make up for some of its limitations.

The vector editing tools feel very limited. For icon design I often find I have to jump to Adobe Illustrator to get the exact shapes I want. Illustrator's vector manipulation tools are both quicker and offer more granular control over various operations.
Since layer and symbol names are such a key aspect of asset export, I'd love to have built-in rule-based batch renaming features. The popular plugin RenameIt is great, but why not build this in?
The new team accounts are confusing and don't work well. The difference between signing in to an individual account vs a shared workspace isn't clear enough - do I need a serial number or a username and password? Myself and my teammates have had multiple issues with being signed out and getting lost in authentication hell, which immediately cuts us off from our files.

Here's the short list of why I'll never go back to adobe & always use Sketch
1)Command Keys - I LOVE that I don't have to remember crazy key commands to create simple things like textboxes and shapes. In sketch T creates a textbox, O a circle, R Rectangle! So easy to remember!
2) File Size - I can have HUNDREDS of designed screens in a single file and it doesn't take forever to load! The only time I've ever had a problem was with multiple massive photos in a file and still, that was nothing in compared to other programs
3) Symbols - I love not recreating the same button over and over. And that it's easy to create symbols and also change small things with text override. Helps a ton with consistency!
4) Saving! I love auto-save and if I accidentally deleted something I decided I like the revert ability is awesome! I can't tell you the nightmares I had in college because I forgot to save!
5) Plugins - There is an awesome community around this product and they create great tools to make my life even easier!

It's great they are always trying to stay up-to-date on the latest and best but as they find better ways to do things it sometimes messes up things like symbols and UI Kits which means rework to match the new functionality.

I am writing this review from the perspective of a Product Manager who uses Sketch to view designs for myself and my team. In that capacity it has been a great tool! The UI is very intuitive and easy to navigate around. I find myself making small updates to designs frequently, and Sketch makes this easy even for a novice such as myself. Their Sketch cloud tool is constantly improving. Every time I login I find a new feature that wasn't there before. The cloud functionality makes it a breeze to share designs to some team members who do not have a Sketch license. We have been using Sketch for 3 years at my company and I don't foresee that changing any time soon.

It can be a bit expensive getting each team member a Sketch license. This used to be a big problem at my company, but since Sketch improved upon their Sketch cloud tool we found the need for developers to have Sketch licenses to have dropped dramatically. So if your team can use the free cloud tool to view designs, it could save you a lot of money on licenses for non designers.

Sketch is easy to get up and running with - even without previous prototyping experience (such as with Adobe Illustrator to build components or using Adobe XD for building interactions), a few hours with Sketch is enough to get familiarized with the software.

The inclusion of symbols in Sketch is a huge pro - coming from Illustrator, I was already aware of their application and advantages. That knowledge crossed over easily for Sketch and allowed our team to prototype web and mobile designs quickly and efficiently.

Another huge plus is the community surrounding Sketch - their own documentation and a strong community means it's easy to get answers to questions you may have about tooling.

In building out vector graphics, I still prefer Illustrator. Sketch is limited in the number of features that it has, and I've found that many people turn to third party plugins to make Sketch work for them. That can lead to headaches (additional documentation to learn, maintenance of that third party plugin, getting help quickly for those plugins, etc).

Another issue is that Sketch doesn't have support for collaboration. They have a beta version of "Sketch Teams" that will likely be moving into production in the near-future. As it stands, the closest we can get to making Sketch work for teams is Symbols, Libraries and Shared-Styles.

It's pretty intuitive in terms of how the features work. It does a great job of organizing your work and helping you keep track of your design work. Plus, the ability to push work to other services, such as InVision, make it a great tool for creating apps and needing to work with developers to slice up images and incorporate elements into the final product.

I wish written content could be handled better within the app. There are some add-ons out there that will pull content into Sketch via a spreadsheet or JSON file but I just wish there was more consideration given to how content works within design.

Sketch is incredibly easy to use and runs perfectly on your Mac. It allows you to knock out UI designs in seconds and can even be used for print design. I've been running our digital signage business and my own tiny digital agency on Sketch for several years now. I've found a couple of bugs over time but they were quickly squashed by the Bohemian team.

I would like the ability to import more types of vector files. At the moment PDF and EPS work great but native AI and SVG files usually do not.

Where Adobe towered over the creative software world with established workflows and complicated interfaces, Sketch reimagined the world of UI design in a brand new, simpler way. It paved the way for many of its competitors (Figma, Adobe XD, InVision Studio) by helping the industry see what UI design should really be like.

Though some of those competitors have introduced new and exciting features, I've still stuck with Sketch because of how quickly I can work in it is not to mention the low price point. I threw away my Adobe Creative Cloud license and replaced it with a simple Sketch license.

Because of its popularity, Sketch also easily integrates into many other ecosystems (like Zeplin and Framer). This makes it an easy choice for a team to begin supporting design within their organization.

They've been a little slow to react to industry changes (increased prototyping capabilities, increasing importance of design systems) and are setting themselves up to get disrupted just like they did to Illustrator.

Sketch is built exclusively for building UI. So extra feature you don't need and almost everything you do. The tools are intuitive and feature the functions you need. Some recent updates that improve symbols and shared libraries make it even better.

Integration with some plug ins is inconsistent. Craft has many problems. And the divide between design and prototyping, or whether to keep everything in Sketch or sync with Invision is a tough one. What makes Sketch good is it's singular focus on design - adding animations and prototyping could take it down the same road others have and been a disappointment.

Sketch's ease of use is by far its best quality. With a low learning curve, a user can go from firing up the software for the first time to completing a high quality mockup in a really short time. It has none of the intimidation you feel when starting to use an Adobe product whether its Illustrator or Photoshop. In that regard, it's a lot more similar to Apple's Keynote, which had become my mockup tool of choice until I discovered Sketch, which can accomplish much more in a shorter period of time.

The latest 52.0 release that introduced Dark Mode, also brought slowdowns for large documents. Speed was supposed to be one of the hallmarks of the release, but I've experienced the opposite, with one of my larger documents taking quite a while before it opens on my Macbook Pro.

This software allows to the users create and add plugins for specific needs. This means the the Designers can collaborate with other designers and you can solve your design needs with this plugins.

I consider that this tool have two great advantages of many:

- For responsive designs and big proyects you will have the “override”, “symbols”, “resizing” and “data” that will help you to have a rapid prototyping your designs. Is fast and easy compared to other design Tools.
- Libraries: this help you to collaborate between your different views in your website designs, oh!! The most important , you can collaborate and share your symbols between your design team members! Is fantastic!

The price for what you receive is good but I don’t linke to pay annually. I prefer the lifetime license.

There's not a huge learning curve to the software, and once you learn it, you can create designs very quickly.

The collaboration tools (for larger teams) are a bit cumbersome compared to some of Sketch's competitors.

After all of the needed plug-ins are installed, the software is decent at creating interactive prototypes and illustrations for designing software. It is incredibly simple to install, as are all Mac products, and offers modest import functionality for other non-native file formats.

Sketch is still very reliant upon third-party plug-ins to handle (what should be native) tasks well. The fact that Sketch is Mac only makes it very limited in usage in corporations with mixed Mac/PC environments. Since macOS cannot be virtualized on a PC, and there is no PC version, more adoption of Sketch requires capital expenditure requests for Macs. Compared to almost any other tool in this space, which is either web based or multiplatform, I don't understand why Sketch is so trendy.