To me it's less about "real-time" collaboration and more a solution to the pain of version control, accessibility and a single source of truth for projects. There's one link for a project. No more V2, V3, V4 at the end of files and sending out new PDFs to every stakeholder whenever the smallest iterations are made it is just updated.
A single source of truth becomes incredibly valuable when you are dealing with systems of scale, like UI Kits or Libraries, which is something that Sketch does very poorly. If you want to iterate on a design system you got to deal with the overhead of ensuring everyone is using the same Sketch file as their starting point, with Figma that's completely trivial as the next time they start all their symbols are updated if they where changed.
The value of Figma grows the more remote or your team is as well.
Lastly you can download the native app which runs quite well and makes CMD + TAB a thing again :).
To me it's less about "real-time" collaboration and more a solution to the pain of version control, accessibility and a single source of truth for projects. There's one link for a project. No more V2, V3, V4 at the end of files and sending out new PDFs to every stakeholder whenever the smallest iterations are made it is just updated.
A single source of truth becomes incredibly valuable when you are dealing with systems of scale, like UI Kits or Libraries, which is something that Sketch does very poorly. If you want to iterate on a design system you got to deal with the overhead of ensuring everyone is using the same Sketch file as their starting point, with Figma that's completely trivial as the next time they start all their symbols are updated if they where changed.
The value of Figma grows the more remote or your team is as well.
Lastly you can download the native app which runs quite well and makes CMD + TAB a thing again :).