Figma

The speed which Figma is operating is incredible and the possibility to have it working in any browser is great. The best feature at this point the the very advanced auto-layout function and the benefit of seeing fonts rendered actually in a browser - so there come no surprises later at development time.

Shortcuts and plugins are a bit of a pain. You can not remap shortcuts at this point and plugins can be installed and used, but there is no way of "hiding them" or "deactivating" when not used and the menu list gets way too long.

I can't believe software this good is available for free. Figma provides every single feature you need to create great user interfaces, advertisements, documents, and any other design you could possibly want to create completely free. We use the paid version of Figma which allows a large number of collaborators as well as a few other high-end features. While there is a bit of a learning curve, Figma is surprisingly easy to learn for non-designers with just an hour or two of video tutorials (I used Udemy). Once you understand how to manipulated elements of your design, even a design newbie can churn out some pretty incredible designs very quickly. This software is a godsend for marketing teams. With traditional creative suites like Creative Cloud, you end up going back and forth with a designer - in Figma, anyone can pop in and contribute their thoughts in real-time. Our marketing design team has moved to doing the majority of their work in Figma now and it's been unreal.

A few challenges have popped up with Figma. First, when you begin collaborating on designs in the cloud, there are times where you end up sharing a file with someone who doesn't have a Figma account. I would be nice if files could be more intuitively shared online with people who don't have a Figma account - especially if those people could drop comment pins on designs. Another con would be that because it is cloud-based software that's doing some pretty heavy lifting, it does tend to be more sluggish than running on-premises software with a high-end computer. That said, it's a minor annoyance and something that's probably worth not having to spend thousands on high-end hardware.