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Sketch makes design software for Mac that lets people build and share mockups of apps and websites.
Sketch is a design tool for Mac computers, and it is mostly used by people who design how apps and websites look before anyone writes the actual code. A designer opens Sketch and gets something like a digital drafting table: they lay out screens, buttons, menus, and icons, then turn those screens into a clickable mockup a team can review. It is aimed squarely at the people who build digital products — product designers, design teams, and the developers they hand their work to.
The business model is simple and familiar to anyone who knows software: customers pay for a subscription to use the app, and teams pay for seats and the tools that help them work together. Sketch sells this in two main forms — a per-person plan for individuals who just want the app, and a workspace plan where teams can share files, comment, and keep everything in one place. The money comes from subscriptions, not from one-time purchases, which gives the company a steady stream of recurring revenue. Sketch matters because it helped invent the modern workflow for interface design. The company began life as Bohemian Coding, and its tool became wildly popular in the early 2010s because it was built for screens rather than print and made it easy to produce clean, reusable design files. That popularity made it a standard in the field, though rival products have since taken a lot of that ground — the biggest being Figma, the browser-based design tool that lets teams edit the same file together in real time. That shift to real-time collaboration in the browser is exactly the pressure Sketch has had to respond to. Sketch's key advantage is that it is deeply tied to the Mac, and it has a long, loyal base of designers who learned their craft on it. That focus is also its weak spot: a browser tool that works on any computer and lets a whole team work on the same file at once is a hard thing to compete against, and many design teams have switched. Sketch still pushes its own collaboration features and workspace tools, but it fights for the same customers as its better-funded rivals.
Sketch is a private company, so it does not report detailed financials the way a public one would. Its main job now is holding on to the designers who love it and convincing teams that its Mac-native polish is worth staying for.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026