It’s light, fast, cheap, easy to use and has excellent support for reusable components, making working with design systems a breeze. Adobe have been working on XD for years and are still nowhere close.

Sketch also can’t do much more design-wise than you can with HTML and CSS, a good thing as it’s too easy to put things into a design with photoshop or illustrator that are a pain to implement.

The file format is basically zipped json files, so there’s a robust plugin ecosystem and you can do things like git integration pretty easily. And it’s a native Mac app, unlike Figma, its closest competitor, which is Electron.

It’s an example of simpler is better, especially when compared to Adobe software which doesn’t just include the kitchen sink, but the kitchen, the house and a large part of the street.

Worth noting though that Figma is developed in C++ and compiled for the web, and they've stated that they're using Electron for the native apps for now, but it would certainly be thinkable and straightforward to switch to properly native apps.

Why waste time for little gain by going native than try to compete on features?

Think about iOS?

Cordova has you covered.

> Sketch also can’t do much more design-wise than you can with HTML and CSS, a good thing as it’s too easy to put things into a design with photoshop or illustrator that are a pain to implement.

On the other hand, it's a poor replacement for actual HTML and CSS as a flexible prototyping medium, and limits the visual possibilities for the parts that are not tied to CSS's constraints (e.g. icons, illustrations, backgrounds).

(From my admittedly short experience, Figma limits them even further, to the point that the only visual language you can accomplish with it is similar to Figma's own branding guidelines.)

Sketch has been widely adopted for UI design e.g. website and mobile app design. It's simpler than Adobe Illustrator, lighter in resources and subjectively feels far less clunky in use compared to Illustrator's UI.

Both are vector apps, but Illustrator skews more for, well, illustration and icon design, although you can use it for UI design. (You can also use Sketch for icon design too.)

Additionally, Sketch has a massive collection of plugins that forms a large part of it's appeal.

Adobe XD is Adobe's direct competitor to Sketch for UI design and for once, they are playing catch-up in terms of "mindshare" among designers. Making Adobe XD free in May 2018 was clearly an attempt by Adobe to accelerate the growth of their user base.

There are other competitors, notably Figma which is gaining a lot accolades and more users. Unlike Sketch, Figma runs in the browser which means you can use it on Windows and Mac (they have Electron-based desktop apps too). Sketch is Mac-only.

There is also Affinity Designer (Windows and Mac) - a vector drawing app which has a mixture of illustration tools (e.g. brushes) and more UI-focused features (symbols, constraints). However, Affinity Designer users seem to skew more towards illustration rather than UX design, so I would say they are probably not in the same race as Adobe XD/Sketch/Figma. Affinity Designer is a native app with no subscription model.

Overall, the more choice and competition in the design space is a good thing, particularly given Adobe's dominance. It's also nice to see apps adopt different UI approaches to tools - rather than copy the clunky way Adobe apps perform tasks.

> Unlike Sketch, Figma runs in the browser which means you can use it on Windows and Mac

And Linux. And BSDs. And Plan9? And Haiku? Probably ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Arch user here and so appreciative that Figma exists.

Sketch is great as a design system manager. It's not all that great as a sketching tool (in spite of the name) and is a terrible photo editor. It shines when you embrace Sketch symbols, which allow you to build DRY, component-based designs, and Sketch libraries, which allow you to reference other Sketch files (local or remote) as dependencies.

This is the critical distinction. I think a lot of people see Sketch and think "so, a cheaper Adobe Illustrator?" But it's how Sketch utilizes nested symbols and libraries that makes it a qualitatively different kind of application from other vector apps.

I love that you used the term DRY to describe the design process Sketch enables - it never occurred to me, but it's exactly the same principle. Going back to Illustrator or Photoshop after Sketch is the UI design equivalent of copying and pasting the same code block over and over instead of writing a function or a class.

> It's not all that great as a sketching tool (in spite of the name) and is a terrible photo editor.

The app’s name notwithstanding—it was likely a poor choice—I don’t think Sketch was ever designed to do these things.

I agree on both points.

It's just simpler and cheaper.

It's kind of a simpler Illustrator but you run into limitations quickly.

It's great for UI mockups, quick things etc..

80% of design work I think is 'sketching' 'conceptual' - you don't need a full suite for that.

It's accessible to the long tail of folks who don't need to go for a bigger solution.

For one it runs on about every mac you can buy, you dint really need a big expensive computer to use it. Unlike photoshop or illustrator. This together with a simple UI, features especially for interface design (so you dont have to fight to get the program out of print color mode)

What's the utility of an app is over other apps in its niche?

It's all about how it operates, feels, etc., not that it does something profoundly different.