Like Adobe Illustrator — it will take several versions before Sketch can come in swinging with the big stick. But by then, Adobe will either acquire them or have released updates that steal their thunder.

Why don't you compare it to Adobe Fireworks instead? It's not an app that is designed to do what Illustrator does.

Maybe try drawing complex iPhone UI in Adobe Illustrator and we'll talk.

*Turn off show pixels in Sketch?

I use Illustrator when I need to create art. I use Sketch when I have to create apps or software.

Why not just stop arguing over what is better. I have my set of tools, just like any other designer.

Its getting boring seeing all these Adobe vs Sketch posts now. Do people really give a crap what other people use?

This. Thank you for posting this. It's exactly why I can't get into Sketch (though all the love makes me want to).

I love a lot of the features and workflows, but I can't build anything serious in it. I hope I'm doing something wrong, and when I have a bunch of spare time I'll start digging into tutorials and best practices, if there are any such things yet.

Hm, I was working with our new IA kit yesterday and it has well over 500 elements (including more complex shapes) and didn't experience any slowdown or performance issues on my i5 macbook air..

interesting though

Here's a video from sketch. Will post an illustrator one too for comparison =] https://vimeo.com/99062681

Yes, Illustrator performs better than Sketch. I thought this was obvious to everyone due to the fact that they have 1 million engineers working on it and have been around for 1 million years. Sketch has how many engineers and been around for how long?

A better comparison would be to compare the workflow for doing tasks on both tools. I'm sure with that comparison, Sketch's better UI would win.

I really love to use sketch but only to a point... It slows down really fast and as people have already mentioned, it becomes REALLY SLOW, everything lags behind. I hope future updates will fix the performance issues soon because sketch is a brilliant tool. I have a year old retina macbook.

I don't think I ever even come close to 500+ elements on a single screen.

At that point, I think the proper exercise might be one in restraint.

I would say there is a lot of bad things in Sketch and this is not one of them. At least for me.

Of course, their speed is limited by Objective-C and CoreGraphics which they use.

Skala promises OpenGL renderer so it should match in performance Illustrator.

If you want better performance go here and write about it, guy from BC are active there and right now they asking what are most wanted features we will like to see next.

It's like the iPhone vs Android, Xbox vs Playstation*, Mac vs PC all over again. I use both apps, and I love them equally.

Have you tried that with other shapes? I'm not familiar to Sketch but what I wonder is maybe drawing a circle/curve like shape is not optimized in sketch because it requires some other work. Does it change if you try squares instead of circles?

Sketch is miles (kilometres) ahead of the next best UI/Icon design tool and the workflow is superb. I just wish they would now focus on performance and stability. I'm confident they will get there :)

I don't use Sketch over illustrator because illustrator render images faster.

This is fallacy. I mean, there's a lot of others things to consider over performance, instead of just multiplying objects.

Interesting video, though.

Given that the debate between Sketch and Adobe so often comes down to subjective reasoning and performance isn't the core reason one uses one design tool over another, but it's nice to see something a bit more objective come out. I would be interested to see how other shapes do, but this seems fairly conclusive.

I'm Sketch user myself.

Your post would be taken more seriously if you did a true side-by-side between Sketch and Adobe Fireworks instead of Illustrator.

Ok Illustrator has better performance than Sketch. What was the point of this? You use them for completely different things, you are not going to replace one with the other.

I use sketch for design, but I also use Illustrator all the time. It's the best tool for vector graphics. The are examples of people making icons in sketch, but it's like that video of designing iOS7 in Word.

Just use indesign and you can print your webpage and make sketchy notes on it, then scan it and trace it in illustrator

Illustrator still doesn't have Inner Shadows, which continue to amaze me. Sure you can replicate the effect, but that again is a god proof of how slow Illustrator is to work with.

I would however love if Sketch started to adopt some of the performance and precision of Illustrator.

Yesterday I used Sketch for something I'd better have used Illustrator or InDesign.

I was designing my résumé in Sketch because I thought it was a single page with few and simple graphic elements and with some text. But then I had to add a QRcode... I generated one and downloded it as an SVG.

Guys, to move this thing around it was an enormous pain:

Am I doing something wrong? Is there a way to make things faster without converting to bitmap?

Don't get me wrong I think Sketch is great in some aspects but recently it just seems as Sketch is being totally emblazoned.

Glad this video proves there are still some downsides on this.

I am sure the guys from BC are reading this and are considering rewriting their engine :D

What piece me off is how little adobe actually cares about illustrator. I remember i had to wait 2 years before they made a 64 bit version of it... and nothing really cool and new since then.

Thats why everyone love sketch it's a small team, active and has big ambitions. They are the underdog !

I think there should be even more alternatives for designers... than those two

I find Sketch much more valuable when designing for native mobile applications for a variety of use cases (wireframing, user flows, cheap "interactive" prototyping, and asset creation...the Android Asset generator as well as Sketch Measure have been godsends). I've had a lot of success designing for both iOS and Android apps. However, I generally have to break things down (much more that I would if I were working in Illustrator) by specific workflows, controller views, etc... I also can't have the extremely complex notes/scratch/meta layers that I would normally have in a messy Illustrator document.

Honestly, I think that's more of a feature and not a bug. I find it much more useful having actual conversations w/ my team instead of trying to capture everything in one document by myself to later 'present'. There are better tools for facilitating conversation than outlining everything in one document.

That being said, performance is an issue and I still can't figure out how to successfully use it for web apps. For native mobile platforms, it has vastly expedited my workflow in a multitude of ways. Like many people have said, I would still use Illustrator for pure vector illustration but have generally used Sketch for my UI workflow.

reposted at top.

I would say that when it comes to picto creation, sharp vector illustrations and information architectures (with a large volume of assets), Illustrator is doing great. I just really liked manipulating art-boards along with guidelines and all the other function of AI. It's all about how you are good/efficient using it. Some of you might say there is a right tool for every tasks but I think it's a more a personal approach of how handy are we when using it, don't you think?

After using Sketch for some time when I reach some point everything becomes really slower. I mean, SLOW THE FUCK HELL. I am producing an iPhone app, no more than 10 screens and the thing goes slow as hell when I select, move objects.