Tabletop systems have become quite popular in recent years, during which there was considerable enthusiasm for the development of new interfaces. In this paper, we establish a comparison between touch and tangible interfaces. We set up an experiment involving several actions like translation and rotation. We recruited 40 participants to take part in a user study and we present our results with a discussion on the design of touch and tangible interfaces. Our contribution is an empirical study showing that overall, the tangible interface is much faster but under certain conditions, the touch interface could gain the upper hand.