Adobe XD VS Sketch VS Figma: thoughts on choosing the right UI prototyping tool for your design team
This is a long-standing debate, and plenty of other articles have written about this topic and the technical complexities of each program. However, I’ve been getting a lot of questions recently about switching UI design programs and which ones are best/easiest/most reliable to use, and wanted to throw my two cents into the ring with some developer-backed research.
Although Sketch has been long touted as the Mac-based powerhouse of UI design for years, Adobe XD and Figma have become equally viable options for designers around the world.
I have used all three (and others like Proto.io, Invision, etc.) and have found many different use cases for each of them.
Of course, it depends on every design/dev team context and situation. But, here’s my hot take: you should choose whichever program allows the easiest and most efficient responsive design system/component handoff for your developers or whoever is building your product.
So, I decided to interview some of my senior front-end developer homies friends about what were their biggest priorities when it comes to a UI design prototyping tool. Here’s a basic summary of what they said their most important features were:
1. Being able to inspect elements and have easy access to CSS values (fonts, color, padding/margin, etc.)
2. Being able to export PNGs and SVGs directly from files
3. Having easily navigable and clear screens
Picture from Figma.com helpdesk
There are plenty more reasons, but the main TLDR is that your front end (FE) team shouldn’t have to guess on any code decision since your design system should all be using standardized values.
Keeping this in mind, the devs that I talked to mentioned that Figma exposes more web elements like auto CSS and allows for more efficient real-time collaboration with designers.
We should also keep in mind the flexibility of how each program handles a responsive design system. Sketch, Figma, and XD all allow you to pin content to edges and nest symbols with pinned areas that allow a decent amount of responsiveness.
One issue I’ve found with Sketch is the treatment of wrapping text in banners/hero images if you have too many words in one text bounding box. There are auto-layout (vertical/horizontal) options in Sketch that seem to break down once there are several nested symbols at once. These auto layouts also don’t push down the rest of the content/wrap text when you utilize them.
However, I have found more success while paring my Sketch program with the Anima app to create better responsive designs. Check out this article for a more in-depth tutorial of Anima’s auto-layout features that help extend Sketch’s abilities.
Figma’s auto layout has more nuanced options involved: Fill Container, Resizing (Hug contents), and Padding Alignments that allow for slightly more customized positioning than Sketch does. Check out this article and this one for a more comprehensive breakdown of those technical layout properties in Figma. Figma also dynamically responds to larger/smaller bodies of text content, which I found much more difficult to learn in Sketch.
The developers I talked to preferred Figma for its more highly intuitive UI system and simplicity of use, version control capabilities, and easy access to an element states handler than Sketch and XD.
I still love Sketch and XD for my own personal projects, but find myself using Figma more and more for projects, especially when I’m collaborating with others.
It’s exciting to see where the world of prototyping is going, and I can’t wait to see what new features Sketch, XD, and Figma come out with this year.