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Comment by NullPrefix | Hacker News Reader

What's figma?

An online design tool. Think of it as sketch/photoshop/illustrator in the browser.

Thanks. For a single-person or maybe two-person team working in the same office, would you recommend Figma or Sketch?

I have used Sketch a lot and can recommend it quite highly. I'm not a big fan of in-browser tools so it's not a knock on Figma at all, I haven't used it beyond a very short demo.

edit: I've used sketch from a design and a front end devs perspective and it was nice to use from both.

Both would work well assuming you are using them for UI design. Note that Sketch is Mac only though. Although Figma runs in the browser, they also have Electron-based desktop apps for Mac and Windows.

Purchasing Sketch gives you one year of updates. If you decide not to renew the subscription, the app is still yours to keep and run - but you won't get any new updates. Figma follows the SaaS model of subscription, but they do have a free tier.

Sketch also has a lot more tutorials and plugins than Figma at the moment, in case that is important.

Our designers use Figma, and I've had to interact with it a fair bit as a developer. It's great. :) I can't speak to feature parity with sketch (I've used both though), but I really like the cross-platform nature of Figma, and its performance has been great for the projects I've worked with.

I don’t have a huge amount of experience, but Figma is a real pleasure to use. Performance -wise it was great compared with sketch when I tried it. Ymmv

As a Linux user Figma is the only good tool I've found that lets me design UIs.

It is a vastly superior alternative to Sketch or Illustrator.

Used to work in an ad office making ads with Freehand and Illustrator and Photoshop. Figma is a wet dream compared to tools of that day. Could not have even dreamed of something like it back then.

I would not call it vastly superior to Sketch. I still find sketch to fit my workflow better.

This is hyperbole for sure - there are some amazing things that Figma does and I love using it, but it's still missing a lot of things that Sketch and Illustrator have. On the plugin side which is what this article was about, Sketch is leagues ahead of Figma. File system access and native app functionality mean that plugins can go beyond just the constraints of a browser. Even in the web constraints though, Sketch is still leading in the support it has. An example of this is an events API - Figma doesn't have any way to listen to insertions of components and react accordingly to it. This vastly limits the scope of what Figma plugins can do - they can only be proactive, not reactive. Often we want plugins that just work seamlessly, and right now Figma doens't support that.

Illustrator on the other hand is still vastly better at what it's named after - illustration. Figma has great basic vector functionality that will cover 99% of your design needs, but little around illustration needs.

I'm really excited for Figma and what comes out of it, but it still has a long way to go to catch up. I think it has a better foundation though.

I was only really sold on Figma because it could actually read Sketch files. That was an absolute blessing when I worked on a Windows machine. It’s improved loads since then but ultimately I’d still take a native app over a browser-based one.

With Figma’s deep use of webassembly and canvas, it’s much closer to a native app than a web app. Certainly it’s much less webappy than most.

The tool described in depth on the same domain as this blog post.

I thought it was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figma

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