Sketch vs Adobe XD: Two Underdogs, One Still Breathing

Let's be honest upfront: both Sketch and Adobe XD lost the UI design war to Figma. This comparison is about which one is the better choice if, for some specific reason, you're choosing between these two tools specifically.

Sketch wins. It's not close.

The fundamental difference

Sketch has an active development team at Sketch BV, a company that still ships new features, responds to community feedback, and has a clear roadmap. It lost market share to Figma, but it's a living product.

Adobe XD has not received meaningful new features since approximately 2022. Adobe announced a pause on XD development, and that pause has continued indefinitely. The product still works — you can open it, build screens, share prototypes — but it's frozen in time.

Choosing Adobe XD over Sketch is choosing a product that won't improve over one that will.

Why Sketch still has a loyal user base

Sketch runs natively on macOS. That native performance — fast scrolling, snappy boolean operations, quick artboard navigation — is a genuine advantage over browser-based tools. Designers who work in very large files with hundreds of artboards notice the difference.

The Symbols system in Sketch is mature and well-understood. Sketch's community built conventions around organizing libraries, naming symbols, and structuring component files over many years. That institutional knowledge is still useful if you're inheriting a Sketch-based design system.

The pricing is straightforward: $10/editor/month, or a $120/year perpetual license that includes free updates for a year. That perpetual license model suits some studios and freelancers who prefer owning software.

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Where Adobe XD was better

Before 2022, XD had some genuine strengths. Its component states system — where you could define hover, pressed, and disabled states on a component and they'd work in prototypes — was more intuitive than Sketch's at the time. XD's coediting (basic real-time collaboration) launched before Sketch's.

But those advantages haven't been developed since. Figma left them both behind on collaboration. And XD never got the equivalent of Figma's Variables or Sketch's more recent design token work.

The Adobe CC angle

If you're already paying for Creative Cloud — which runs $54.99/month for All Apps — XD is included at no additional cost. And if your workflow involves heavy Photoshop or Illustrator usage, the copy-paste integration between Adobe apps is convenient.

But "it's free because you're already paying for other things" isn't the same as "it's the right tool." If you're specifically doing UI design work, paying $10/month for Sketch gets you a better, actively-maintained product.

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The elephant in the room

If you're choosing between Sketch and Adobe XD, you should seriously consider whether Figma is the actual answer. Figma has a generous free tier, runs on any platform, and is where the industry has converged. The plugin ecosystem, the community resources, the job listings — all of it points to Figma.

Sketch is the right answer if you specifically need a native Mac app, prefer offline-capable design software, or are inheriting a Sketch-based workflow. Adobe XD is the right answer in essentially no scenario where you're starting fresh.