Can anyone here lay out a few major differences that I might be missing?
https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360038006274-Files-...
that is why it is so easy to migrate into figma from sketch, and impossible to migrate away from figma into anything else...
It better be fixed before they become big enough not to care.
from my point of view the only way to guarantee is to use software that provides open file formats and develops their features around those open formats. inkscape and sketch seem to be doing this
Multiple people can be working on the same thing at the same time and anyone can view the in progress work. This changes the traditional file based workflow where designers pass a file back and forth if they want to keep the work together - often working in a separate file then "merging" the work into a master file one at a time.
Because all the files are online it's possible to see who is working on what including at the very moment. Its really easy for me to get a sense of what other designers are working on and whats been updated recently.
A huge bonus beyond designer collaboration is the way Figma breaks the previous separation of working file and final export. Non-designers can check in on an in-progress file at any time without needing a designer to export some static version of it. This allows designers to work on related things in the same file but each "thing" can be in at various stages of completion without having a negative impact on delivering final work. This is also great for transparency.
I recently came across a Windows-only app called Lunacy which offers Sketch file import and editing for Windows users (I haven't tried the app).
The published Sketch file specification [1] is what allows Figma and Adobe XD (and Lunacy) to import Sketch files. Ironically, neither Figma or Adobe XD publish their file formats.
I think where Figma is pulling ahead of Sketch (in terms of usage behaviour) is that it is being used by more than just designers. In fact, Figma is beginning to encroach (possibly unintentionally) on digital whiteboard tools like Miro and Mural.
Can you imagine that if designers before this wanted to move an element in a list, they would have to move every single one instead of having some drag and drop swap functionality? That if they wanted to dynamically change a button size for the text inside it, like we can do easily on the web, they simply couldn't?
Basically, Figma is turning design more into something like front-end development, doing things in a design program that engineers could do normally with code. This is because the developers of Figma are themselves coders rather than designers, so they know what real ease of use should look like (ironically). This is the fundamental corporate culture shift that is the difference between Figma and others like Sketch.
Of course, you could go all the way and simply turn the design software into a web/mobile development framework, which is what software like Framer [1] does, which is literally a design software built on React, and it can spit out React code for you once you're done designing.