What's better? Sketch vs Photoshop


Since the introduction, Photoshop has gained a lot of accreditation among web designers who use it to create mockups for the web and mobile app designs. But, with the introduction of Sketch, it seems like a competitor to Photoshop has finally arrived.

Sketch vs Photoshop has become a highly debatable topic in today’s web designing market. It keeps on raging day-by-day as the competition between these two is increasing at a fast speed. Photoshop has always been a commonly used tool for web designing activities and its compelling features encourage web designers to come up with exquisite websites. Whereas, Sketch is comparatively easy to use app used for creating striking web & mobile user interfaces.

Primarily, Photoshop was developed to edit and manipulate photos/pictures, but now, it has broadened its realm of creating highly appealing web pages. The emergence of Sketch has affected the importance of Photoshop as it provides fast and easy methods to build web-oriented layouts.

Both tools are reliable & superior and no-one can differentiate these two as they both have attained a prominent niche in the design industry. Sure, some people are in favor of Photoshop but many are now moving towards Sketch or at the very least considering it. So how do you know which one is the right application for you?

Vector-based Designing

Everything you build in Sketch is completely vector-based which means your illustrations would be 100% scaled up and won’t loose quality throughout the life of the design. You can’t have this in Photoshop as when you create a small design or icon in Photoshop, it gets blurred and looses quality when expanding up to some pixels. Sketch produces crisp lines and edges of designs, no matter how far zoomed-in and zoomed-out your design is. Photoshop is not developed for vector graphics hence can create a less clear image or designs.

Range of Tools

With Sketch, users will not have that wide range of tools that they can have with the Photoshop such as various different Photoshop actions (see more). It is the most amazing invention for web designing domain which saves a lot of time and helps integrate various outstanding effects. This ability has not been added in the Sketch, thus users need to install required plugins to add effects in designs.

Grid Design Layout

Designing a website is not a cakewalk as it requires a lot of concentration and designing skills. Whenever you go for website design, it is impossible to work without grid layout. Another standout feature of Sketch is its inbuilt layout grid which makes it more popular among users. Designers need to rely on plugins or a wide series of layers that are not easy to edit. With Sketch, you don’t need to take any tension because it gives the ability to change the columns of the designs just by pinning the transparent layout guide.

Color Management Criteria

Tools exist in Photoshop allow you to fill colors in the designs, but you are limited here at some steps. With Sketch, color management has become easier as you can simply create a color palette as per your preferences. From the palette, the colors you mostly use will be pulled out for your references which let you use the suggested colors in the future. Photoaspects.com says the most important feature of Sketch is it allows users to access all the files in a single document where it is easier to copy and paste the objects of designs including color fills and color gradients. If we talk about Photoshop, this feature is missing in that.

The Bottom Line

Which tool is the best to choose for web designing? This question has been asked many times by many people and the answer (as with most things) is it depends on you to decide as per your web design requirements. First, you need to decide on your internal requirements of the web/app design project at hand, use the information above to determine which app is the best match for the criteria you have set. But perhaps most importantly, use the tool that you are most comfortable with as both can get the job done.