Figma Alternatives
stackdiary.com
stackdiary.com
From some cursory review, it seems pretty good! And there's now effort underway to be able to import Figma files.
edit: okay, I've gotten signed up with penpot, made rudimentary sketches, it seems solid and promising. I'm now a fan and I think this seals the deal for me, I'm glad that it was an easy decision. And I will give them the benefit of the doubt when it's not exactly up to par because 1) they seem to be new and characterize themselves as still being in beta and 2) it's self-hostable OSS and the inherent security of this offering is something I value deeply.
Adobe can buy the company that is supplying the devs for penpot the same way it bought Figma.
Sure the source can be reused, but you think another collection of individuals will come along and host the project in the same way?
You think the codebase would be developed/maintained at all if all the original devs left? History says otherwise, from the examples I've seen.
Like last week when Safari 16 broke any use of the command key on Macs and we received 5+ reports per hour until it was fixed.
Of course, I’ll be on a 15 year old OS but the answer appears to be “yes”.
Not the case with Figma or other hosted tools. Not even the case with Photoshop or tools that require license checks / internet connectivity.
Most people here need open source tools to do their job in one way or another. They love the fact they don't need to pay for it and they can just use it. They've been sold on the free software ideogly that it's possible to fork means that someone will or they even they will do it. No matter how much their employers refuse to open source their code, refuse to pay for open source contributors they fully believe that using an open source library or tool means there is less risk for their company because they can make the changes themselves. However, the risk is often greater. Almost certainly their employer won't pay for it and they will have to look for a replacement. They won't have any support contracts that can enforce how much notice they get given to find a replacement. The open source tool will most often just be abandoned.
It also, a couple minutes later, devolves into a hilariously entertaining rant about Oracle and Larry Ellison and the perils of anthropomorphizing lawnmowers, and it's one of my favorite things ever.
Look at OpenOffice vs LibreOffice. MySQL vs MariaDB. It can happen. At the very least it's more likely than if you're using commercial software.
VMs are a thing as well. These are not insurmountable issues.
It at least gives it a chance, unlike closed source where once it dies it most definitely is gone forever (barring some very dedicated and helpful people reverse engineering the code, this seems to largely happen with video games).
Meanwhile I'm running Strawberry, a fork of Clementime, which is a fork of Amarok, which probably has code from other projects older than me in it.
Will FOSS software always live on after the original maintainers move on? Of course not, but not only does it stand a much better chance, you'll still always have the source available to compile it yourself on newer systems, given the will.
So penpot is a great alternative to Figma for as long as you're damn sure someone will be willing to keep it alive.
Everyone has become so used to pulling or downloading whatever random software and have it work and creating forks like wildfire (just look at how many ubuntu flavors there are) without considering what will happen if the devs just don't have the time anymore or don't care. And if something massive upstream changes like CPU architecture (hello M1) or some browser change or some migration to Oauth5, everything gets borked in one shot.
Also, what's going to happen when a package creator dies? The first generation of FOSS devs are still alive and well. Will the second generation decide to maintain their work or is it easier to rewrite things?
Personally this is why I started only pushing packages that have extremely small surface areas (a single function call) that I know I'm willing to maintain indefinitely.
This is also why I became so married to plain text.
Out of the box, the referenced sources doesn’t even compile or run. I’ve been fighting random Python/Java/Scala dependencies, using whatever version was the “latest” at time of publishing usually works, unless of course, it doesn’t support M1…
I took a bit of time a little while back to convert a wee app of mine to using Nix flakes to build, specifically because I was getting bitten by API changes in a key dependency. Once I nailed down the configuration to include the version(s) that worked with my original code... it worked. Took a while that first time, but got it done, and now it should be defined in a way that stays robust.
Your hyperboles aside, I don't think there's much to prove. Maintained and long lasting forks abound. Enough to instill confidence in the principle.
If Figma was open source, there would be a fork right now and a team of contributors forming around it as we speak. That and a migration of a substantial part of its community.
> This isn't true in my experience.
Could you share, so that the naive optimist could at least have some context?
- freeze the versions, keeping using it until you find a better one. Practice shows it can be done for quite a while in many cases (years if needed)
- migrate to the different similar software, or hire an expert to do it for you
There were too many cases of wonderful proprietary products suddenly becoming ransomware overnight, holding your data hostage.
Open source is not a panacea. But just because keeping the door open doesn't guarantee anyone will bother to use it doesn't mean having the door open is not ridiculously useful.
I think there Is a way to tell if an open source project is robust against shenanigans:
- The more stakeholders investing, the better.
- Projects with governance and copyright not assigned to a single company have a lot less chance of needing a fork to begin with.
What you say might be true, but at least open source give us second chance, no matter how miniscule (which I'd argue is not miniscule at all). If it's closed source it's pretty much game over.
Is it the lack of a free tier that's the problem?
Penpot seems to be funded by an interesting and unusual Spanish incubator. That's better than I expected, but still not great given there isn't a clear good path to profitability.
Sure it's open source, but there's no way I'm taking over development if they stop. That means them stopping their subsidy of the open source software is as bad for me as Adobe raising Figma prices.
For me, it's been a 10x tool since it was always the only piece of software that was designed from the ground up as a UI design tool, rather than being some other kind of app that was pressed into service for UI design. Auto-layout, responsiveness, and flexible components that can be edited per instance without breaking their link to the master component are all features that were present from day one rather than being awkwardly bolted on.
[1]: https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...
You sure about this? What about UXPin? XD? Axure?
Exactly what Adobe would need to stay relevant because they’re usually the opposite on these fronts :-)
I can’t see switching being too realistic.
$20 billion is a lot of money. That’s worth more than Cloudflare, Snap, Spotify, and just $3b shy of Zoom’s current market cap.
Spotify is a low margin business since no matter how much it makes in revenue, it will always have to give 70% to the labels - a company with high marginal costs that scales with revenue is the opposite of a successful tech company.
Cloud flare is also losing money.
Why would any of these companies besides Zoom be considered a successful company that should have a high valuation?
What do you mean you can’t flatten layers? Isn’t it what “exporting an image” is?
You can absolutely compress the exported image, well you can decide whether you want to export it at 1x 2x etc. It’s a bit different from changing dpi but honestly using figma for print is rough
And 1x 2x etc isn't compression. I want a quality slider for JPGs, an 8-bit option for PNGs, I want to explicitly set the output resolution, I want to know how large the original source file is, how it's being cropped, etc.
"how it's being cropped" - it's not being cropped.
"I want to explicitly set the output resolution" - why tho?
I ask because I found the lack of ability to set resolution as pretty jarring, however to my surprise I never needed it for digital assets
And you don't always have time to go back to the design team and ask them to rework tons of comps just because you need to get an asset out of a Figma.
The resolution, I give you that, working with non-vector assets in figma is a bit annoying. But then again, I can export an image out of illustator at a 300dpi but if the original file was 72dpi, that will do absolutely fuck all.
As for not having time to go back to designers, I was not saying you do that every time, I meant, there is a way to have proper process when it comes to hand over to devs. Normally it’s a conversation you’d have once. If you work with people that have no regard for other people’s jobs, I don’t think it’s fair to be blaming the tool. I’ve seen absolute horror in design files on any platform.
Perhaps it was just how that particular design team used it but
- they put a huge amount of information in a single document.
- lots of sticky note style additions that were not clearly associated with what they referred to.
- hard to search.
- hard to determine what a single unit of work could be. Again, maybe this was the team but they didn't have a concept of discrete tasking. It was just "here's the giant figma doc with everything from p0s to stuff we might not even want"
What are the upsides?
CSS is the language of design, yet for some reason every design tool completely ignores it.
Every top feature request on the Figma Forums is for HTML/CSS type features. We need a design tool built from the ground up on HTML/CSS rendering that has a Figma-like interface. Framer and Plasmic are sort of like this except made the mistake of wrapping everything in React code with tons of unnecessary abstractions that make the HTML/CSS output really messy.
I like the attitude relate.app (now Rainbow) has, but I don't see Figma being the final design tool, particularly when working with developers.
Maybe for web development, but people use Figma for mobile app designs too and those do not for the most part use CSS as the language for design.
I work on native app designs and other non-product design work in Figma and having the features CSS would provide out of the box would save me literally dozens of hours a month.
Figma shows CSS code in the Inspect view. It's limited, but not ignored.
Once you get the basic design abilities down, you can behind the scenes setup logic using some framework (sure you can use React, but I think tying a tool to a framework like that is a bad idea, React won't last forever and hopefully will die soon in place of newer better frameworks) that doesn't actually impact the basic HTML/CSS that is output.
Devs will still be needed to hook up designs to code logic, but at least give designers the ability to give devs clean HTML/CSS for them to wire up into JSX or Vue templates or whatever because currently many front-end devs are absolutely shit at HTML and CSS and React encourages lots of bad practices with HTML and CSS.
> Some sort of open AST
well React is kind of that but it's not serializable. The "React Server Components" is trying.
---
We just need HTML but in form of AST so that it is serializable and programmable.
Sure, you can encode whatever you want inside of data attributes, but that's just ignoring the problem. You still have to decide on a language to express all that within your data attributes.
React server components also does not is not trying to serialize this. Quite the opposite. We have an in-depth write up here: https://www.plasmic.app/blog/how-react-server-components-wor...
(Sise note: Plasmic's AST is in the open and has an API.)
That's what I'm talking about.
It has one of the best overall general diagramming/graph layout engines and UI of anything I've used on the desktop and web. My experience in the diagramming, layout and technical-ish drawing realm includes Figma, as well as Illustrator, Photoshop, Pagemaker, Freehand, Deneba Canvas, Mac Draw Pro.
I still love Omnigraffle for flow charts, presentations, UML diagrams, and UI wireframes. It's not a 1:1 replacement for Figma, but it suits many of the same problems.
But its existence as a solo, mac-only, desktop-only app relegates it to my personal projects and I can never use it fully at work.
I was trying to figure out why I’d never heard of Omnigraffle and then saw this. Makes sense. It’s interesting that there are so many Mac-only design tools
Figma solved online tooling, collaboration, interaction protoyping, design systems, and stakeholder review with a single product. Their renderer can handle hundreds of frames in the same screen with no performance degradation.
Meanwhile Adobe continues to struggle putting together version of photoshop or lightroom on a tablet that people like.
On the other hand you have a Figma, product-led, figuring out what's best for users, and kicking ass with a web-based solution that IS what designers/devs need. Legends!
I'm sure there's more to it than this, but Figma started with a clean slate. Having a legacy codebase means a few things, and one that doesn't get talked about very often is that there is a lot of pressure to re-use code even if it would be more difficult than a re-implementation.
I've worked on legacy codebases, and it goes something like: you start working on a new feature. You realize you need to implement some extra detail you didn't think of. You mention this in standup, and your manager says something like, "oh, no problem, Steve implemented a function that does that back in '97. You should use that because the old code already handles all these edge cases." So then you spend the next 2-3 sprints struggling to get Steve's code working, because his code and your code both made some assumptions about the data model that are incompatible. It doesn't really help that Steve's code has some subtle reliance on global state, so you have to worry about saving that global state, changing it, calling Steve's code, restoring the saved state, all while praying to various gods that it doesn't break anything on another thread you didn't know about.
Or it would have taken just a couple of days to reimplement it in a way that already plays ball with your data model. Sure, it's not DRY, but dogmatic DRY can be a big source of pain in legacy codebase.
If I were searching for a Figma alternative, its file format being documented would be a priority because otherwise, one is subjecting themselves to some degree of lock-in.
Also, we'll import from Figma this fall. You're right, it's never easy. It's a bug valley of countless files that render a little distorted.
It sounds like they have basically bundled in a lot of their own icons/svg stuff and that's their business model? But even then building such an app seems like a huge investment if it's just a platform to sell your icons. So I must be missing something.
And how does it compare to Penpot?
You have correct observations and ask the right questions.
1. We do promote our content. It's not enough to support the development. 2. We could afford a generous freemium. Unlike Figma, Lunacy is resource-efficient and has no pressure from investors. 3. However, collaboration requires cloud, so we'll charge for cloud storage.
TLDR Lunacy will be a highly generous freemium.
As a developer it's been a bittersweet journey to see Sketch grow to be so popular amongst designers.
In 2012 I was excited to "buy" Sketch for $50, but I am less enthused to subscribe at $100/year. At this point I'm looking for a more lightweight and longer-lived solution. Figma is a nice alternative but the price is likely only going up from here.
Btw, I've been a happy Affinity [Designer, Photo, Publisher] user for many years now. Can't even believe I'm still getting updates with my years old licences. +1
It's quite annoying paying good money for old rope for years and years on end.
I'd not be so bold, personally.
- ed: I wondered perhaps if Smart Guides were newer than I remembered, but nup, having checked - they were there in CS2.
$85 / (30 * 24 = 720) hours. Wow so cheap! Now we have some sense of how business is working.
Figma threw every single artist and designer in the world that does 2D work under the bus when they could have saved us all and built better tools.
Actually I'd go beyond saying it's the principle, actually now it's personal all the money I spent on Figma, all the hours I spent pushing Figma in organizations and building our workflows around it has just gone to strengthen Adobe's grip on my livelihood.
This might sound dramatic but imagine for a moment how you'd feel if you could only work within your industry if you used VSCode, it was closed source and it cost $60 a month and the only chance of fighting against that had sided with the enemy.
Your analogy once was true with Microsoft and Visual Studio in the 90s. It was the main IDE for Windows development (there was no Linux, not really). And it was expensive. There wasn’t much competition until Java took off.
These days Microsoft isn’t seen as the enemy as often. Github is doing fine for example. Companies can change.
- I used Fireworks every day in my job, they killed it.
- After Effects was a top 3 digital creative tool ever made, they let it rot till it's a janky shadow of its former self, it can't even the timeline without audio glitches making ANY audio work to animation impossible, same can be said for Photoshop, can't even save an image without it trying to force you onto their dropbox competitor.
- They had the perfect entry point tool for multimedia creation with Flash that a whole generation of teens learnt how to express themselves online with and they let parts of it rot because they saw it as nothing more than a videoplayer and enterprise app Java competitor.
How are they not my enemy, we're talking decades of attacks on my workflow at this point.
Apple tried very hard to support Flash on the iPhone. Apple flew out Adobe engineers to help them get it work on mobile. It was a tire fire and that's why Apple killed it. The dysfunction with Flash started before the iPhone, and arguably started with the acquisition of Macromedia.
The irony is that Microsoft gave us freedom, Apple gave us lockdowns.
So yeah it's sort of like climate change. Probably ok for now, but you should definitely start making moves to live somewhere else in the next few years.
It's just natural and common sense to look for alternatives if you rely on Figma and don't trust them to be a viable product in the hands of Adobe.
Looks to me like most people acknowledge that it’s great and natural for the company but just feel distraught by the implication for users.
I have no problem paying a subscription fee for a corporate account. Having to fork over $100 a month to adobe for personal use is ridiculous. Problem with adobe there was never a free tier
The point is that we dislike Adobe and we don't want to deal with them in any context.
The fact that overwhelming amount of designers switched over to figma in the past few years, proves that how people feel about adobe is very real.
Personally I am never thrilled to switch software and endure initial period of relearning how to do my job in a new tool unless there are measurable advantages.
I ve used adobe products since the age of 12 and not having to install their crappy software on any computer since 2019 has been liberating af
We have learned experience being hurt by Adobe. Ignoring that would be silly.
I'm a product to a lot of companies but not all of them are worth being concerned about.
The balance seems to be the “government should own/regulate all businesses I need or hate” crowd. Which feels like younger folks that haven’t thought through that endgame.
The reason this anti-corporate stuff appears is because the point of sale is also the best moment Figma competitors who no doubt lurk on here have to throw their name out there and convert users.
No one is traumatized by this and no one is giving up their profession.
Like read the threads dude, some people are seriously upset to the point of questioning their careers. Believe what you want of course. From the reactions I see on my own corporate slack whenever there are big changes announced, sensitivity and poor coping skills are in abundance.
Is there a logical fallacy for this? I see it a lot online and it drives me nuts. Just because you can point out that the general viewpoint of a group might be hypocritical, that doesn't mean the individuals themselves are necessarily hypocritical.
(personally I have no opinion on figma/adobe, but this class of comment drives me nuts)
I call it the "fallacy of the crowd" and I agree it is very common.
I first noticed it enough to give it a name (and then see it everywhere!) about 12 years ago.
Not just online, and it's not always talking about a negative, i.e. apparent hypocrisy or contradiction. It is also used to talk about apparent consequence or implication.
E.g. political campaign speeches often use it. "They" this so "they" that; "they" this and then "they" that; "they" say this yet "they" do that: Different subsets of people referred to by "they" in the same sentence or train of thought.
It's a great rhetorical trick for persuading large numbers of people of something rousing yet wrong.
Who is HN? Is you HN?
Did you add your thoughts about Avast and the acquisition of the browser extension?
If you found a common opinion on that topic, perhaps it's because data harvesting and selling user data is a common pattern associated with similar acquisitions. It's not like people latch onto gloomy conspiracies pulled from the nearest echo chamber, repeating them in unison, swaying to the beat of an HN drum. Is that what you're suggesting?
At the end of the day, "data harvesting and selling user data" is done by programmers. I find it unacceptable that some do it and then come to HN to complain about other people's work.
That said, changing doesn’t really make much sense at the moment, it does make sense to think through the point you will change.
...But I have a better chance of finding the 'z' in 'Susan'
For example, I wanted to cancel my CC subscription, and when I contacted their terrible chat support (fuck Adobe for not letting me cancel it on my own? and they offered me two months free. I said no. They upped it to four months free, and I specially asked if I could cancel after the four free months if I wanted. The Adobe customer service person said “of course, no proven”. Four months later, I try to cancel and guess what? They are saying I agreed to a yearly subscription and I have eight months left. I explain that I specifically asked about that four months ago, and ask him to consult the conversation logs. They insist they don’t keep logs and there is nothing they can do. After some back and forth, the rep SENDS ME a excerpt that supports their argument (the excerpt was taken out of context and was meaningless on its own of course).
I immediately pointed out that they had just confirmed the chat log of the previous conversation did exist, that they were lying, and I wanted to speak to a supervisor. The service person quickly agreed to cancel my sub without penalty, said their supervisor wasn’t available and disconnected.
Single-handedly one of the most under-handed CS experiences I’ve ever had, and I’ve come across countless other stories similar to my own. Adobe is scum.
"You son of a bitch...I'm in."
The few times I've tried to use Figma, I walk away frustrated by the fact that I can't easily cut things out of an image that I've imported/pasted in. I thought I was insane at first for not being able to figure this out but after searching around, it sounded like this is a feature that is missing. The workaround is spending way too much effort making multiple copies of your image and then cropping each individual element you want control over moving. Pretty absurd but this my need here has to be an edge case, even though it doesn't seem like one. I suppose if 99% of people are designing interfaces natively in Figma and aren't using screenshots as a starting point, this isn't an issue.
Ironically, we can design the whole thing in Figma.
Do any of these alternatives have integration with Bravo Studio?
I have been an engineer for many years and started to do more design work with Figma. I even enrolled in a design bootcamp. Figma inspired me a lot and sparked an interest in design.
This acquisition has killed it for me.
Keep at it, maybe read up on physical product design where there is less tool talk.
Penpot should be added to this list.
lol yeah right.