As demand for UX/UI designers continue to grow, there is a healthy debate as to which design tool is best. What is best may be a personal choice at this point. Leading the choices of design tools are Sketch and Adobe XD. Which is best?

Sketch began in 2010, an early bird in prototyping tools while Adobe had shown little interest in this area until they decided to jump in in 2016 with XD. Although behind Sketch at the time, XD began making big improvements and either became close or surpassed Sketch. Here, we will look into areas for comparison.

User Interface

Interfaces are similar in features at this point. Sketch currently has more features with their toolbar, but XD is adding more after each upgrade. 

Symbols 

Symbols are very helpful if not imperative for prototyping as images such as icons are repeated across screens and consistency is important. Sketch makes good use of this feature, but XD now combines symbols, fonts and colors in one location. Symbols can now be altered without affecting the current symbol. Sketch offers this as well, but plug ins are required.

Plugins

This is an area many designers agree Sketch as a big edge. Being on the market longer, Sketch has built a great support from contributors over the years, but XD should eventually catch up as its popularity increase.

Sharing/Collaboration

Sketch requires a third party program such as InVision to share and collaborate with your team. XD has built in functionality to share and also you can share for comments on the cloud for those without XD.

Other intangibles

Adobe XD has added great features such as auto animate and responsive design tools. Sketch requires plugins to achieve responsiveness. Responsive design tools are helpful when resizing screen sizes with the ability to control how the elements flow somewhat. Auto animate is a great feature that helps dazzle clients and show the animation in prototype form. Swiping photos and rotating banners are a few examples of what you can do in XD.

Another great feature in XD is the repeat grid. For areas that repeat such as products with description and prices, you can set this up once and repeat this down and or across and then edit the images and text individually. For Sketch, a plugin is needed.

I also heard Sketch users say XD is impressively fast and lightweight when they tried XD. If not for the plug ins, some say they would switch now.

Final Thoughts

I’m a believer in using whatever tool you are most comfortable as it is a tool, not the designer. If you are starting out,  it will probably be best to learn both tools as well as the other popular tools to be more marketable. But for comparison, I would favor XD for the speed, built in functionality, and association with Adobe being in the space of a company with many leading products that can further help in XD’s development.