Our design team had used Sketch for years, with design files handed off to developers via Zeplin. When the whole team went remote this spring, the friction of that workflow — waiting for a Sketch file to sync, not being able to see what a teammate was actively working on — became a real bottleneck rather than a minor annoyance.
We evaluated both Figma and Adobe XD as replacements and landed on Figma, mainly for its real-time multiplayer editing — multiple designers, and even developers, can be in the same file at once and see each other's cursors and changes live, the same way Google Docs works for text. Being fully browser-based also meant no more "which version of this file is current" confusion, since there is only ever one.
Developer handoff also improved measurably: Figma's inspect panel gives exact spacing, colors, and font values directly in the browser, without exporting anything or opening a separate handoff tool. A few months in, we have no plans to look back.
The learning curve for designers coming from Sketch
Not every transition was frictionless — a couple of senior designers who had built years of muscle memory around Sketch's specific plugin ecosystem needed a few weeks to feel as fast in Figma as they had been in their old tool, particularly around a couple of Sketch plugins with no direct Figma equivalent at the time. We treated this adjustment period as a real cost worth naming rather than pretending the switch was frictionless, even though we remain confident it was the right call overall.
What we did with the old Sketch files
Rather than a hard cutover abandoning years of existing Sketch files, we kept them accessible in read-only form for reference on ongoing projects that started in Sketch, while requiring any new project kicked off after the switch to start directly in Figma. This avoided forcing an immediate, disruptive conversion of every existing client file, some of which were close enough to project completion that migrating them purely for tooling consistency would have cost more than it was worth.
A concrete example of the real-time editing paying off
On one client project, a developer noticed during a live Figma session that a spacing value looked inconsistent with the rest of a page and flagged it directly in the file while the designer was still actively working, rather than waiting for a formal handoff and filing feedback afterward. The designer fixed it in the moment, and the whole exchange took under a minute — a correction that, under the old Sketch-and-Zeplin workflow, would likely not have surfaced until a later review pass, if it surfaced at all before reaching a client.