Brilliant vs Sketch

Sketch was the original. Before Figma, before the browser tab, before shared cursors on a link, Sketch was the Mac-native design tool that made product designers feel like they had a home. Fifteen-plus years of craft, an open file format, a thoughtful plugin ecosystem, and a deliberate refusal to turn every workflow into a cloud subscription.

Brilliant shares the craft-first, desktop-native philosophy. The difference is where it runs: Brilliant is built in Flutter and ships on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Sketch is Mac-only, and has been for fifteen years. Same canvas on your desktop, fewer people locked out.

Feature-wise, Brilliant is a full professional design tool: auto layout, components, instances, vector editing, pen tool, boolean operations, design tokens, design systems, typography controls, frames, groups, all of it. If you sit down and design by hand, you get near-complete feature parity with what you'd expect from Sketch. Same muscle memory, same primitives, same final output.

What Brilliant adds is a team of AI agents that work directly on the canvas alongside you, and they don't work the way Sketch's agents do.

Agents that design alongside you

Brilliant gives you a team of AI agents that do real design work on the canvas. Prompt them in plain English and they create elements, rebuild layouts, swap design tokens, try typography, pull in brand assets, and generate variations on what you're already working on. Every element they produce is a real vector you can nudge, recolor, or throw away. You stay the creative director. They handle the work you'd rather not.

The output is professional. Auto-layout rules, components and instances, design tokens, effects. Agents use the same primitives you do, so what they hand you fits into the rest of your file. Accuracy is high enough that you're editing their work, not rescuing it. Read the architecture →

Sketch ships a local MCP server with two tools for agents: capture the current selection as an image, and execute arbitrary SketchAPI code. In practice, agents have to write Sketch plugins on the fly to do anything. Powerful in principle, but it's asking frontier models to author plugin JavaScript against an API designed for humans. What comes back is code the agent wrote, not design work on your file.

No setup needed with Brilliant either way. Click the AI input in the bottom toolbar, bring your own key for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or OpenRouter, or sign in with your Claude Code subscription. If you'd rather drive Brilliant from your editor (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, Antigravity, Lovable, anything that speaks MCP), that works too. You set the vision. They execute. You override.

Free, all of it

Sketch is cheaper than Figma, which is a real credit to Sketch. But it's still a per-seat subscription (or a perpetual license with a paid upgrade path), and the cost still climbs with headcount.

Brilliant is free. The full design tool. Auto layout, components, vector editing, effects, design systems, tokens, animated GPU shaders, full export (PNG, JPEG, WebP, SVG, PDF, HTML, React, MP4, MOV), Figma import, unlimited MCP usage. Bring your own AI key. Not a trial, not a stripped-down version. Free.

Monetization lives in the integrated AI chat and in team features. Free gives you 10 AI messages a day. Personal lifts the cap and adds priority support. Team adds an admin dashboard, user management, and centralized billing. Enterprise layers on SSO, dedicated support, and custom contracts. Same model that's worked for developers on GitHub and VS Code for over a decade. Designers shouldn't pay rent on the act of moving elements on a canvas, either.

Your designs, your disk, your git

Sketch files are a credit to their era. Before everyone else went cloud, Sketch kept its files on your disk as .sketch archives, which are ZIP bundles of JSON and asset files. You can unzip one and read the JSON, which is more than Figma can say. But you can't git diff two versions meaningfully, and you can't branch a design the way you'd branch a feature. The format is inspectable, not collaborative-in-git.

Brilliant files are plain-text Blueprint on your local disk. They end in .bl, and they diff cleanly in git. Branch a canvas to try a direction. Commit the experiment. Revert it if it doesn't work out. Run git blame to find the commit where the hero color drifted off-brand. Every primitive your codebase already uses is now available for your designs:

 c16fc75741feed85 fr p(80,80) s(480,320) rd(16) "Hero"
-  88625e475868c087 r p(24,24) s(160,100) f[(r1,#F8F8F8)] rd(8) "Panel"
+  88625e475868c087 r p(24,24) s(160,100) f[(r1,#0080FF)] rd(8) "Panel"

"GitHub for design", visual design-file diffs, branching, pull-request review, publishable component libraries, is the next chapter of Brilliant. The primitives (plain-text files, git compatibility) are here today.

Superpowers that actually render

Sketch has a strong effects system for a tool of its era. Fills, strokes, blurs, shadows, and a rich plugin marketplace that extends it further. But animated gradients, metal, iridescence, glass, shader art, have always lived outside the tool.

Brilliant ships a real GPU shader stack as first-class canvas fills. metaballs(), metal(), irid(), steel(). They render live while you design, compose with the rest of your effects, and export cleanly to raster or video. A professional 2D vector design tool, with superpowers.

What Brilliant has that Sketch doesn't

• Cross-platform desktop support. macOS, Windows, and Linux. Sketch has been Mac-only since 2010, which locks out a real chunk of any mixed-OS team.

• Agents that do design work, not plugin work. Sketch's MCP gives agents one lever: write and run SketchAPI code. Brilliant's agents work through design primitives directly, the same ones you use. What comes back is a file you edit, not scripts you debug.

• A free, full-featured design tool. No subscription seat, no license purchase, no gated primitives.

• Plain-text, git-friendly files. Blueprint on disk, clean diffs, blameable history.

• Native GPU shaders. Metaballs, metal, iridescent, steel as first-class fills.

• Nine export formats including code and video. PNG, JPEG, WebP, SVG, PDF, HTML, React, MP4, MOV.

• An integrated AI chat out of the box. Zero setup required to start working with agents.

What Sketch has that Brilliant doesn't

• A mature plugin ecosystem. Runner, Sketch Plugins, and the rest of a 15-year community library of extensions.

• Interactive prototypes. Sketch has native prototyping with Smart Animate, Overlays, and clickable hotspots. Brilliant is a static canvas today.

• Perpetual license option. Sketch lets you pay once for a Mac-only license (one year of updates, yours to keep forever after that). Brilliant's Free tier already covers that need differently, but the license model is genuinely rare and worth naming.

If any of those is the single feature your team can't work without today, Sketch is a reasonable call for that workflow.

At a glance

A new dance

Brilliant is what a desktop-native design tool looks like when you build it for every platform, and with agents as the other half of the team from day one. Agents that do real design work, not write plugin code. A file format that goes straight into git. A full professional design tool that doesn't ask for rent.

Read the full manifesto to see the rest of the argument, or install Brilliant and try it for yourself.