Balsamiq vs Sketch

All the Balsamiq UI elements are drawn by hand and have a really nice low-fidelity design.

Balsamiq has a very easy to use drag and drop interface that lets you quickly build and adjust your mockups. The UI is centered around low-fidelity wireframes that help focus the reviews on the core layout and functionality instead of getting hung-up on visual design.

Balsamiq has a built in library of over 75 built-in user interface components and 187 icons, as well as community generated plug-ins.

myBalsamiq has been built with teams in mind and has a variety of featured to support collaborating on the mockups:

• Notifications - Real-time notifications to enable you to keep track of team member actions

• Revision Control - All mockups have a revision history to enable reverting to previous versions and keeping track of design decisions.

• Skype Integration - Easy to use Skype integration to host design reviews.

• Access Control - Access controls allow sharing projects with team members as well as allowing external reviewers to leave comments on the designs.

You can link together pages to create shareable user demos

You can use common keyboard shortcuts like Shift to select multiple elements or to resize while maintaing proportions, F2 for renaming labels etc.

Sketch is essentially a version of Photoshop built from the ground up to suit the workflow of web designers.

Sketch is hugely popular among designers so there are a lot of well maintained community resources for everything from iPhone frames to iOS/Android UI elements & icons.

Reactive panels keep the UI for Sketch clean from the sort of clutter the panel system in Photoshop suffers from. The panels in Sketch change based on the object in question, saving you from having to have a multiple separate panels.

Sketch lets you re-use the same design in multiple places, with changes synced throughout the various places it is used. You can also create text styles to sync typography changes.

Artboards let you easily work on multiple views side by side. Great for having a separate artboard on each page for the various responsive sizes.

You can rescale assets without quality loss, easily export x2 assets for retina designs and design high quality icons & artwork. Being pixel aware lets you set a grid and snap objects to it as well as round to the nearest pixel edge to clean up your layers.

Sketch has a built in exporter that supports PDF, JPG and PNG.

You can set the square grid to whatever dimensions you like as well as set thicker lines every x blocks. You can also configure the color of the lines to make them as obvious or subtle as you wish and toggle the grid with a keyboard shortcut (crtl+g).

Mirror lets you connect your iPhone to sketch and see how your current artboard looks on mobile. It's really useful as you can live check changes which lets you rapidly iterate mobile design.

Holding down alt will show the smart guides that show the distances between any layer you hover over to nearby layers or the edges of the artboard. Very useful for checking your spacing or aligning layers.