For me, the first time I began to think about Figma was when my former design director mentioned switching our design team to it. We were a team of 10 designers and our workflow at the time was firmly rooted in Sketch. We discussed Figma for maybe a day or two before the idea fell away, broken against the thought of the organization obstacles that we'd have to overcome to make the switch feasible. I know I personally viewed the decision as a matter of preference. Some designers preferred Sketch, while others preferred Figma. Figma didn't seem to offer anything remarkably better – just different. The reasons for switching weren't all that compelling, at least from what I'd heard and read about Figma up to that point. So I continued to be a designer who preferred Sketch. That is, I continued to be a designer who preferred Sketch up until four months ago, when two things happened.

Design tool ecosystems

I originally learnt about Figma a few years prior. Back then, Figma competed with Sketch’s design tool features directly. Figma was trying to do what Sketch did, but Figma was web-based while Sketch was locally installed. The playing field has changed since then, and Figma no longer solely competes with Sketch's design tool features. It competes with Sketch's ecosystem.

This became more obvious when I read about how large team's like Spotify use Figma for their end to end workflow¹. Files and version control are managed directly in Figma, there is no need for a third party file management system. Design specs are parsed and saved to a separate workspace in Figma for hand-off to engineering. Prototyping and user testing takes place in Figma. When I used Sketch, we needed three additional tools – Zeplin, Abstract and Invision – for that same workflow.

The case for Figma

Sketch still captures 36% of the UI tool market share, whereas Figma has increased its share from 12% in 2018 up to 23% in 2019 [2]. But, I've noticed that the chorus of voices touting Figma; on twitter, on medium, wherever you want to look, has grown louder over the past few years.

Meng To wrote that Figma's in-file commenting system, real time collaboration, version history and performance were enough for him to switch to Figma³. He described Sketch's advantages as, "its platform maturity, true native experience, and it's excellent plugins and resources," and speculated that both tools will eventually support collaboration, commenting and version history. Meng wrote this on Sept. 30, 2016, and Sketch still does not support these features.

A recent piece from MDS called "2019 – A state of design tools"⁴ chronicles his experience with Figma. Instead of taking a high level, this is what's wrong with Sketch feature by feature approach, he dives right into Figma's nerdy designer details that wowed him: "Things like not needing to reselect a different text layer to edit that text, or the tidy up feature, or finding and replacing multiple layer names. Just lots and lots of delightfully available shortcuts and more."

Thoughts after the pilot

I work on a cross-functional team where we regularly meet to talk about features as we're building them. We recently had an estimation meeting and I'd completed the design for a feature, prepared it for hand-off, and now it was time to demo it for the engineering team. I started with a walk-through of the feature using a clickable prototype. After the team saw how it flowed, I invited them into the design file so that they could inspect each of the screens, highlight and comment on any missing edge cases, and estimate. By the end of the meeting, estimates were in, Jira stories were written, and the team was ready to start coding. The presentation, the inspection, and the commenting all took place in Figma.

Besides the gains in efficiency and collaboration, there's the cost savings I've noticed that resulted from switching. Figma's subscription costs $12/mo. For the same workflow using Sketch, Abstract, Zeplin and Invision, we'd pay $49.75/mo. That's $37.75 per month that Figma could save my company, per designer.