Figma is _fine_. My team recently switched from Sketch to Figma (I was involved in the decision), but I miss the niceness of Sketch.

Sketch is a real Mac app. Figma is a web app. There are important powers I have as a Mac user that aren’t there for Figma, no matter how much they work on the UI.

For example, besides just being hideously ugly and completely out of place on a Mac, Figma’s in-window menu system doesn’t let me assign my own shortcuts through System Preferences. I had lots of those for Sketch. Also, it uses its own menu search instead of the native Help menu. And right-click menu doesn’t use Mac services, so I can’t use other parts of my system to alter things quickly.

The toolbar isn’t customizable. This is one of the best features of real Mac apps, and honestly should be a power tool basic requirement.

Copying content in Figma copies weird Figma-only content, rather than providing multiple versions of that content on the clipboard for the paste consumer to use. Try copying from Figma into Slack (another UI story of “hey it’s good enough”). Or into any Mac app.

Windows restore in weird places and spaces when restarting. Windows behave weirdly in a dozen subtle but annoying ways.

Text editing is subtly different from that of true native Mac apps.

Color display is sometimes slightly different from native Mac apps, presumably due to color profiles, though I’m not sure. Sketch just always gave me consistently right colors, including mirroring on my phone, and Figma fails, especially with oranges. This warrants more investigation and work on my part, but is annoying.

Dragging things into or out of Figma sucks. Probably related to the copy/paste story.

There are genuinely dozens of other examples I could give. This is the tool I live in day in and day out. I’m a craftsman, I care about my tools, and honestly I don’t love this one.

BUT! Figma offers compelling features that made it an obvious choice over Sketch, and not just the “collaboration” stuff. Auto layout, decent prototypes, better color and component overrides, and a bunch of others. And to a real but lesser extent, web-first documents for the broader team.

EDITED TO ADD: Also, Figma has branching and merging! Super cool, and well implemented.

I _wish_ Sketch had been the winner on features, because I have joy using it. But it wasn’t the winner, for us. But that’s a failure of Sketch, not a condemnation of native Mac apps broadly. But please know Figma drives me crazy, because it’s not a native Mac app, and that has real UX downsides.

Honestly, we had some frustrations at first switching from Sketch to Figma but those frustrations were short-lived as all the benefits far outweighed any potential limitations. We’ve been on Figma for years now and are extremely happy we switched. It’s better in too many ways to count imo.