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Design, graphics & illustration

Sketch

The ui design classic, still sold as a mac licence you keep

Price: $120 once

This versionThe next major is a new purchase

Buy direct Website

Price read on sketch.com, the page Buy direct opens.

The catch

Updates stop after a year, and the licence buys the Mac app alone with no trial first

The full picture

Updates are included for twelve months only; after that you keep the version you own and pay again to move forward, which makes this version-locked rather than updates-forever. The licence covers the native app and nothing else: no Workspace, no shareable web links, no real-time collaboration, no iOS mirroring, and Sketch offers no free trial on this tier. Mac only, so handing files to Windows collaborators is awkward. Separately, if you ever run a Workspace subscription and let it lapse, its documents go read-only — that is the subscription's behaviour, not the licence's.

Pays back in
8 months
Seats
1 MacOne registered device at a time — moving to another Mac means unlinking the first from the app or the licence manager.
Developer account
None needed
Buy once$120Rent 5 years$960

$840 kept over five years, and you still have the app.
Against Figma Professional at $192 a year, Professional full seat at the $16 a month rate on Figma's pricing page. Also replaces Sketch Workspace (Standard) at $144 a year and Adobe XD.

What it looks like

Sketch: The complete Sketch Mac window at 3196x2340: toolbar with the diamond insert menu, crop/align/distribute/component/grid tools, notification and comment badges, 100% zoom, prototype play button and the collaborator avatar stack; left sidebar with Documents, Pages, Designs/Explorations/Symbols and the full layer tree of a 'TV Dashboard' design; the artboard selected on canvas with its handles; and the right Inspector showing Frame, alignment, X/Y/W/H, Layout, Stack, Style, Corners, Fills, Borders, Shadows, Effects and Selection Colors.
The complete Sketch Mac window at 3196x2340. Vendor site (sketch.com homepage, unsigned CDN original)
Sketch: Sketch canvas and right Inspector with three named collaborator cursors (Megan G., Preston L., Peter G.) editing an album-cover artboard — Graphic panel, alignment row, X/Y/W/H fields, Layout and Clip content toggle, plus the notification/comment badges and avatar stack.
Sketch canvas and right Inspector with three named collaborator cursors (Megan G., Preston L., Peter G.) editing an album-cover artboard — Graphic panel, alignment row, X/Y/W/H fields, Layout and Clip content toggle, plus the notification/comment badges and avatar stack. Vendor site (sketch.com /design page)

Images belong to their developers.

What you’re buying

Sketch defined UI design on the Mac before Figma moved the whole discipline into a browser tab, and the app itself never got worse. Symbols, shared libraries, smart layout, prototyping and a vector engine that still feels precise — running locally, against .sketch files sitting in a folder you control, at native speed and with no network in the loop.

The $120 Mac-only licence is the reason it belongs here. It is the one mainstream UI tool you can still buy rather than rent, and for a solo designer or a two-person studio that passes files around instead of living in a shared canvas, the maths is straightforward against $192 a year for a Figma seat.

Read the boundary carefully, though. Twelve months of updates come with the purchase; after that the app keeps working exactly as it is, and moving to a newer version costs again. Everything collaborative sits on the subscription side — web sharing, live editing, iOS preview — and there is no trial on this tier, so you are buying unseen.

If your work involves handing links to developers and clients, or anyone on your team uses Windows, buy the Workspace or use Figma; fighting that is not worth $120. If you design alone on a Mac and want the file to be a file, this is the obvious purchase.

What owners report

Points that recur across the discussions below. A report of what users say, not our verdict: we don’t review software.

Praised

  • Designers who have used both say moving from Figma takes days, because symbols, styles and constraints map across
  • Owners who kept it push back on the dead framing, describing it as still solid for solo work

Criticised

  • Commenters repeatedly point to Figma as the industry standard and the more employable skill
  • Users of both describe Sketch as a feature subset of Figma, with less advanced tooling

Details

The price in full

$120 per seat, one-time, for the Mac-only licence, which includes one year of updates and is described on the pricing page as yours to keep, forever. The collaborative Workspace is a separate subscription at $12 per editor per month on the Standard tier, $24 on Professional and $44 on Enterprise, all billed yearly.

The Sketch page at sketch.com
The developer’s own page. sketch.com, captured 22 Sep 2026
Free trial
No
Works offline
Yes
Apple Silicon
Native
On Setapp
No
Minimum macOS
not stated
Developer
Sketch B.V.

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IconJar$75

Icon library manager with a real buy-once option next to the yearly plan

RightFont$59

Font manager that charges once where its rivals charge monthly

Pixelmator Pro$49.99

Mac-native image editor you can still buy outright for $49.99