Sketch is a Mac design app for building user interfaces, icons and prototypes. For years it was the default tool for app and website design, prized for being fast, focused and built around the vector shapes that screen design relies on.
Think of it as a digital drawing board made specifically for screens. Instead of general art tools, it gives designers artboards sized like real devices, reusable symbols for buttons and headers, and grids that line everything up. A designer might lay out every screen of an app in Sketch, wire them together into a clickable prototype, and hand that to developers as the visual blueprint. That overlaps heavily with what Figma and Adobe XD do today.
The main shift in recent years is collaboration. Sketch stays on a Mac with local files, while browser-based tools let a whole team open the same design at once and comment live. That is the main reason many studios moved away from it, though plenty of solo and Mac-only designers still prefer its speed.
One practical strength worth knowing: Sketch leans on a large library of community plugins, so teams have automated handoff, exported assets, and synced design tokens through it for years. The reach is real, but it is the trade-off. Those plugins run on one machine, which is exactly where a cloud tool pulls ahead once more than one person needs to touch a file. So picking Sketch is less about the canvas and more about how your team works.
At TopDevs we work mostly in Figma, but we read Sketch files happily when a client arrives with an existing design, so nothing made in it goes to waste.
