Sketch Review 2025: The Mac Design Tool Fighting to Stay Relevant

I Remember When Every Design Job Listing Said "Proficiency in Sketch Required"

There was a moment -- maybe 2016 -- where I genuinely believed Sketch had won. Not just the design tool market. The whole concept of what a design tool should be. I'd spent years fighting Photoshop, trying to make a photo editing application work for interface design. Exporting assets was a multi-step ritual. Artboards were an afterthought. Vector editing was possible but felt like a second-class citizen. Then Sketch showed up and said: "What if a design tool was actually built for people who design interfaces?" Revolutionary concept, apparently.

The $99 one-time license was a revelation after years of Adobe's subscription creep. The .sketch file became the lingua franca of product design. Plugin developers built an entire ecosystem around it. Symbols changed how we thought about design components. For maybe four years, Sketch was the center of the design tools universe.

Then Figma happened. And slowly, then all at once, the migration began. Teams switched. Plugin developers followed. Job listings changed. By 2022, asking "do you use Sketch or Figma?" had become like asking "do you use Yahoo or Google?" -- technically a question, but everyone knew the answer.

So why am I reviewing Sketch in 2025? Because I think the narrative of "Sketch is dead" is too simple. The tool I opened this week is genuinely good software. It's fast, focused, and pleasant to use. The question isn't whether Sketch is good. It's whether good is enough when the industry has moved on.

What Sketch Still Does Better Than Anyone

Let's start with the thing Sketch people always bring up, because they're right about it: native performance. Sketch runs as a proper macOS application using Metal and Apple Silicon natively. On my M3 MacBook Pro, I opened a design system file with 400+ artboards and thousands of layers. The scroll was buttery. Zooming was instant. Symbol overrides applied without any visible redraw.

I then opened a comparably complex file in Figma in Chrome. It was fine. It was usable. But it wasn't the same. Figma stuttered slightly on rapid zoom. Symbol (component) updates had a tiny but perceptible delay. The fan kicked on after about twenty minutes of heavy editing. None of this is a dealbreaker, but if you work on large-scale design systems day in and day out, the accumulated friction of a browser-based tool versus a native app is noticeable over an eight-hour session.

Sketch also remains the lightest design tool you can run. It opens in about a second. Memory usage stays reasonable even with big files. It doesn't phone home constantly. It works offline with full functionality. For designers who travel, who work in cafes with spotty wifi, who just want their tools to work without an internet connection -- Sketch is the only professional option that delivers this.

The Symbols system is mature and well-organized. Yes, Figma's components with Auto Layout are more powerful for responsive design. But Sketch's Smart Layout handles the common cases (buttons that resize with text, list items that grow with content, card components that adjust to their contents) and the override system for customizing individual instances is actually more intuitive than Figma's in some respects. If you've built a design system in Sketch, you know the system works. It's predictable. It doesn't surprise you.

What Sketch Has Added (And Whether It's Enough)

To Sketch's credit, the team hasn't been idle. The web workspace launched and has improved steadily. Non-Mac team members can now view designs, leave comments, inspect specs, and download assets through a browser. Real-time collaboration lets multiple editors work on the same file simultaneously. Design tokens support bridges the gap between design and development. Variable fonts are supported. The export and handoff workflow is solid.

But here's the thing about playing catch-up: by the time you ship a feature your competitor has had for two years, users have already built their workflows around the competitor's version. Sketch's real-time collaboration works, but it feels like an addition to a single-player tool rather than a ground-up multiplayer experience. Cursors appear, changes sync, but the collaboration doesn't have Figma's effortless quality where you can literally watch someone design in real time and it just feels natural. There's a subtle latency, occasional conflicts when two people edit the same element, and the web viewer -- while functional -- lacks the fluidity of Figma's browser-native approach.

The biggest missing piece is AI. Figma has been integrating AI features: auto-naming layers, generating design suggestions, AI-powered prototyping. Sketch has none of this. In a market where every tool is racing to add AI-powered assistance, Sketch's silence on the topic is conspicuous. It might be a principled stance -- not every product needs AI bolted on -- or it might be a resource constraint. Either way, it's a gap that will widen.

The Handoff and Developer Experience

One area where Sketch has quietly improved is the developer handoff workflow. The web inspector lets developers view a design, click on any element, and get CSS properties, spacing values, color codes, and asset export options. It is not as polished as Figma's Dev Mode, which includes more framework-specific code snippets and variable references, but it covers the basics well. Developers on our team who used the web inspector reported that the measurements were accurate and the experience was quick enough for daily use.

Export options are solid. Multiple formats, multiple resolutions, batch export, and the ability to mark layers as exportable from the design side so developers do not have to hunt for assets. The naming convention system for exported files is more flexible than most tools offer -- you can set up prefixes, suffixes, and folder structures that match your project's asset organization without post-export renaming.

For teams that use design tokens, Sketch now supports token integration through plugins and its own emerging token system. You can define colors, spacing, and typography as reusable tokens that map to variables in your codebase. The gap here is that Figma's native variables system, introduced in 2023, is more tightly integrated and more powerful. But for teams that have existing token workflows through tools like Style Dictionary or Tokens Studio, Sketch's approach works adequately and the plugin ecosystem still supports the major token management tools.

The Plugin Situation

Sketch's plugin ecosystem used to be one of its best features. Craft by InVision. Abstract for version control. Sketch Runner for quick actions. Content Generator for realistic mockup data. The community was vibrant and the JavaScript-based plugin API was accessible enough that new plugins appeared regularly.

That ecosystem has contracted noticeably. InVision shut down Craft. Abstract pivoted. Many plugin developers have moved their attention to Figma. The plugins that remain are generally still functional, but updates come slower and some popular ones haven't been touched in over a year. When I looked for a specific accessibility checking plugin I used to use, it was gone from the listing -- the developer had moved exclusively to Figma.

This is the network effects problem in action. Users follow tools. Tool developers follow users. As users migrate to Figma, plugin developers follow, which removes a reason for remaining Sketch users to stay, which accelerates the migration. It's a flywheel, and it's spinning in the wrong direction for Sketch.

That said, the plugins that remain active tend to be the ones that matter most for production work. Anima still supports Sketch for converting designs to code. Stark for accessibility checking still maintains a Sketch version. And Sketch's built-in assistants -- automated design linting rules that check for consistent spacing, naming conventions, and color usage -- partially fill the gap left by departed plugins. The assistant system is actually a clever feature: it catches common design inconsistencies before handoff, reducing the back-and-forth between designers and developers. But it is a feature that exists because the ecosystem can no longer rely on third-party plugins to fill every niche.

Twelve Bucks a Month: The Price Argument

Sketch costs $12 per editor per month. Figma Professional costs $15 per editor per month. That three-dollar difference looks small on paper but adds up for larger teams. A 20-person design team saves $720/year by choosing Sketch. The free viewer access for unlimited stakeholders is another win -- Figma's free viewers can inspect designs too, but the "unlimited viewers" messaging is a good sales pitch for Sketch when you're dealing with organizations that have lots of developers and PMs who need to access designs.

The Mac-only license at $12/month (without web collaboration) exists for solo designers who don't need the team features. And there's a genuinely nice touch: if you cancel your subscription, you keep the version of the Mac app you had. You lose updates and web features, but you can still open and edit your files. Most SaaS products cut you off completely when you stop paying. Sketch doesn't.

The business plan at $20/editor/month adds SSO and admin controls for organizations that need them. It's competitive. But pricing rarely wins a tools war when the product you're competing with has stronger features and larger network effects.

Who Sketch Is Still Right For

I don't want to pretend Sketch has no audience. It does, and within that audience it's a genuinely excellent choice.

If your entire design team is on Macs and you don't need real-time collaboration as a core workflow -- if you're mostly working solo and sharing files for review -- Sketch is fast, clean, and affordable. The performance advantage on large files is real and meaningful for design systems work.

If you work offline frequently. If you're a freelancer who doesn't need multiplayer editing. If you have years of Sketch libraries and workflows that would take months to migrate. If you're budget-constrained and the $3/editor/month savings matter at scale. These are all legitimate reasons to stay on Sketch or even start with it.

But for cross-platform teams, for organizations building their design practice from scratch in 2025, for anyone who values collaboration as a first-class feature rather than an add-on -- Figma is the answer, and suggesting otherwise would be dishonest.

A Note on the Community

Something worth mentioning: the Sketch community, while smaller than it used to be, is genuinely one of the more thoughtful design communities online. The forums are active without being noisy. People share resources and templates freely. There's less of the hustle-culture, personal-brand energy you find in Figma circles and more of a quiet, craft-focused vibe. Whether that's a sign of a healthy niche or a dwindling user base depends on your perspective. Probably a bit of both. The Sketch team themselves are responsive there too -- not in a corporate-PR way, but in a "developers who actually use their own product" way. It's refreshing even if the feature requests sometimes go unanswered for longer than you'd like.

Where This Leaves Us