[jastuk]

I've used Sketch since its early days and then after (who knows how many) years, reluctantly and angrily moved from Sketch to Figma. Sketch was the pioneer and Figma took a very long time to catch up with what I've considered important features, and of course Figma had the advantage of being cross-platform but that was a non-issue for me as Sketch introduced web-based previews for clients.

The reason why I ditched Sketch (even though I loved it) was because Sketch had quality control issues over time and they started messing with my work, even losing some of it (cloud saves). The frustration grew over a longer period of time until I lost all hope and just had to admit that it was a lost cause. I peeked at Sketch's changelogs for a year and saw only bugfixes and no features. I assumed it was dead; either way the chapter was closed, the entire company shifted to Figma.

P.S. which is not to say that Figma is in a good state now, or that I don't feel history repeating itself.

[_fat_santa]

Sketch's biggest drawback was they only build a Mac app. The "mac app" space will get you consistent business but you will never grow your company to the scale of Figma or Adobe.

It's funny how the successes and failures of these two companies ultimately comes down to a single architectural decision that both took different paths on. Sketch's biggest drawback (even back in the 2010's when they were on top) was always that they didn't support Web, Windows or Linux and focused only on Mac's. Honestly it paved the way for Figma to just come up and eat their lunch.

The biggest mistake that Sketch made was not realizing there was a sea change sooner and shifting their focus to a web based app or even releasing Windows and Linux clients. Even now I went to their website and they only offer basic viewing tools on the web, if you want to create with Sketch you need a Mac and there's no way around that.

[jastuk]

And yet, I cannot stop myself of thinking about that native architecture decision whenever my beefed up Mac Studio takes a minute to load a mediocre-sized Figma project and struggles to keep up as I try to navigate it, just so that I can leave a couple of comments somewhere.

I will say that some outsourcing phases/efforts would definitely not be possible with Sketch though. It's one thing when we as a company all have company-provided Macs, but another when remote hiring/collaborating.