Surely we shouldn't be comparing? Yes, their tools and features do overlap but their main jobs are different.

I switched to Sketch roughly a year ago and I really dislike opening Photoshop now. I was the last designer at my company to switch, just because Photoshop did everything I wanted and I was really comfortable with it - I saw absolutely no reason to switch. When they finally convinced me to do it anyway, it took me less than 2 days to adjust and I'm really glad I made the jump. It just feels so perfectly tailored for UI Design, without all the clutter that I almost never used in Photoshop. So far I've never been in a situation where I had to go back to Photoshop, I only use it for it's original purpose now, editing photos. I also really dig the fast development cycle compared to Photoshop.

Sketch was really necessary for the whole industry, it also made Photoshop a much better tool and it will continue to do so. Competition is great, that's why I can't wait to see what Skala will be like!

Great post. I think the sentence "Using Photoshop sometimes feels like flying an airplane. It’s got 1000 little buttons and knobs all over the place, most of which you rarely touch." sums up the difference quite nicely. For most people Sketch will be easier and simpler to get started with and will be sufficient for doing most of the things you need in UI design. But for those who knows how to fly this complicated "airplane" it is not an upgrade.

It is still two highly different programs though. I use Sketch for mockups and PS for the actual design and love both for those purposes.

Some of the things included in the spreadsheet are the reason I, as a front end developer cringe when I get handed designs from designers who went too crazy with stylistic additions that are not easily feasible in CSS/HTML and Javascript.

Adjustment layers

These are the bane of my existence. I can recall a few times over the last few years where I have seen designers use adjustment layers to change colours using brightness and contrast which meant instead of being able to just select the element and copy the colour value, I had to use the colour picker and pray that I was sampling the right area.

Blur adjustment layer

Oh God. Do not get me started on Photoshop's unrealistic blur effects that can not be easily replicable in CSS 1:1.

Layer Masks

I can recall more times than I can count being handed messy PSD files with layers using masks to give images rounded corners and other hacky solutions that made it difficult to extract assets from a PSD file because it was being resized and masked using a layer mask which usually meant: A) Speaking with the designer and getting them to export the asset for me or B) Hitting my head against the wall and carefully selecting the element minus anything else I do not need to get the asset I require.

The issue I have with Photoshop from the perspective of a developer is that gives designers far too many options when it comes to effects, adjusting styles and manipulating layers to the point where I have to waste time pushing back and explaining why I can't replicate that layer effect in CSS easily, thus blowing out the timeline because the designer has to go back and rethink a particular aspect of their design that looks good in Photoshop, but just will not transition to real life.

These comparison posts are getting very tiring. I wish Fireworks was still around, it might have been buggy, but it was 98% of the way there being the perfect tool for web design. Sketch is nice, but it does not come close to Fireworks CS6 (which I still use).

Bring back Fireworks and let us be done with these childish and useless schoolyard taunt comparison posts: "But Billy is cooler than Trevor, so I am going to sit with Billy and his friends..."

For me Ps Vs. Sketch has not much sense.

• Ps is a photo editing tool but in the past years we've used it for hacking interfaces.
• Sketch is a UI tool for drawing simple vector shapes.

I agree with the comments from most others saying it is not fair to compare both. But it is fine if you compare it in context of what you are trying to get out of it. Sketch is fantastic for UI design. But if you are looking for something that needs raster treatment, you would want to turn to Photoshop, Pixelmator or the new kid called Affinity Designer which looks really promising.

I'm on the fence about switching. I know photoshop so well, I'm wondering what the point would be. Maybe an omnigraffle replacement.