Figma Arrives at Config 2025 With Something to Prove
Figma’s annual Config conference has always been part product showcase, part cultural statement for the design community. But Config 2025 carries a different weight. With Adobe’s attempted acquisition now a distant memory and Figma operating as a fully independent company again, the San Francisco-based platform arrived at this year’s event not just with feature updates – but with a clear signal that it intends to absorb the remaining market territory still held by legacy tools, most notably Sketch.
Sketch built its reputation as the tool that killed Photoshop’s grip on UI design. For years, it was the default choice for product designers working on Mac, celebrated for its clean interface and plugin ecosystem. That grip has been loosening for some time, but Config 2025 may be the moment that marks the transition from “Sketch is declining” to “Sketch has been cornered.”
Figma’s announcements this year were not incremental.
What Figma Actually Announced – and Why It Matters for Sketch
The centerpiece of Config 2025 was Figma’s expanded push into what the company calls “design systems at scale.” New features around variable management, multi-mode token support, and deeper component libraries address the exact workflow pain points that Sketch users have historically managed through third-party tools and manual workarounds. Figma is no longer just matching Sketch’s core strengths – it is building infrastructure that makes Sketch’s ecosystem look fragile by comparison.
Figma also announced significant updates to its AI-assisted design features, including layout suggestions and auto-annotation tools that cut down the handoff time between designers and developers. This is territory Sketch has not meaningfully entered. Sketch’s development-side integrations depend heavily on third-party platforms like Zeplin and Abstract, adding friction that Figma’s native tooling now eliminates entirely. For teams already evaluating their stack, the question of why they would maintain a Sketch workflow when Figma handles the full pipeline – from wireframe to developer handoff – becomes harder to answer.
Perhaps the quietest but most strategically meaningful announcement was Figma’s offline mode improvements. One of Sketch’s enduring advantages was its native Mac application, which never required an internet connection. Figma has historically been browser-first, and that distinction mattered to designers in studios with spotty connectivity or strict data policies. Closing that gap removes one of the last genuinely practical reasons to choose Sketch over Figma for new projects.
Sketch’s Remaining Ground – and How Small It Has Gotten
Sketch is not standing still. The Amsterdam-based team has continued releasing updates and has built out its own collaboration features over the past few years, pushing into territory it once ceded entirely to Figma. Its subscription pricing remains competitive, and its Mac-native performance is still noticeably snappier on certain operations. For solo designers or small studios deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem, Sketch still makes a reasonable case for itself.
But the structural problem Sketch faces is not about individual features – it is about where new designers are being trained. Design bootcamps, university programs, and self-taught designers entering the field in 2025 are almost universally learning Figma first. That pipeline matters. When a junior designer joins a team, they arrive expecting Figma. When a startup hires its first designer, Figma is typically the assumed default. Sketch’s user base is not replenishing at the same rate it is aging out, and no single feature update is likely to reverse that dynamic.
Sketch also remains Mac-only. That decision made sense when its user base was entirely design-focused professionals working on Apple hardware, but cross-platform teams – increasingly common as product design functions expand across engineering and business roles – find the limitation genuinely disqualifying. Figma runs on any browser, any operating system, and increasingly offline. The gap in accessibility is not a minor inconvenience; it determines which tool gets used when the design file needs to be opened by someone outside the core design team.
The Collaboration Economy Already Decided This
What Config 2025 makes clear is that Figma has been winning not by outcompeting Sketch on design features alone, but by embedding itself into how product teams collaborate. Developers comment directly in Figma files. Product managers track design progress through Figma’s project views. Stakeholders leave feedback without needing a separate account. Sketch, fundamentally, is still a designer’s tool that requires a designer to mediate every interaction with it. That worked when design was a more isolated discipline. It does not work as well when product development is expected to be a shared, continuous process across roles.
The design tool market does not operate like enterprise software, where switching costs keep legacy platforms alive for decades regardless of quality. Designers switch tools when their teams switch tools, and teams switch when the workflow friction becomes impossible to justify. Figma has spent years making its platform the path of least friction for collaborative product work – and Config 2025 extended that lead rather than consolidated it.
Sketch still has users who are loyal, practiced, and productive within its ecosystem. But loyalty built on familiarity erodes faster than loyalty built on dependency, and Figma has spent three years becoming the tool that entire product organizations depend on – not just the designers. The question for Sketch is not whether it can release a feature that matches Figma’s Config 2025 announcements. The question is whether it can do so before the last cohort of teams still choosing between the two stops asking.
