I’m in the process of comparing UI design tools: Sketch vs Figma vs Invision Studio vs Adobe XD. When considering to migrate from one to another, it’s important to know how easy it is to open an existing design in the new tool.

Currently it seems like everyone is trying to get designers to migrate from Sketch and Photoshop and never return (except the makers of Sketch, of course):

• Invision Studio imports Sketch files, but ignores positioning inside components, making it largely useless.
• Adobe XD imports Sketch files, but with some errors. Outlines are turned into stretched shapes. Some components are stretched too.
• UXPin imports Sketch and Photoshop, but only as flattened images. It does preserve Photoshop layers though. The pages that it created for my Sketch screens literally like more than hundred times the size of the images, so I did not find it useful.
• Figma imports Sketch decently. It only ignores auto positioning of text layers inside components and the background visibility of components.
• Sketch can import layers from Photoshop. To be more precise: it can import EPS files created by any other application. Sketch turns all layers into bitmaps though and text layers are rendered as rectangles. I don’t see how this is useful for importing designs. But then again, who still needs to import screen designs from Photoshop?

Conclusion: it’s easy to move away from Sketch and get other tools to import your design. You won’t be able to copy any changes back to Sketch again though!

You'll receive an email every time I write a new post, with a maximum of one per month. I will also include the best of what I find on the web, so you can unfollow me on Twitter.