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Comment by lewisjoe | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering why is there zero competition for Figma? I understand their app is basically a browser-like engine running inside the browser - which is cutting-edge tech, tough to copy, etc.

But given enough interest in this space and the valuation Figma has now - I'm wondering why isn't other big tech companies not building their own Figma alternatives.

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Because literally 90% of developers today are wholly incapable of producing the cutting edge performance Figma requires. It's an engineering marvel. It's like wondering why more people can't just compete in F1. Money and talent at the rarest levels. Most companies engineer at the performance level of Atlassian. Which is not remotely sufficient.

where can i read more about the engineering behind Figma? Is it not just a UI for rendering polygons? Is all the technology in getting high performant rendering on top of a javascript engine? If so that doesn't seem like anything that crazy.

The hard part is the multiplayer editing, which works seamlessly with quite large groups, even on less-than-ideal internet. You can even see everyone's mouse cursors moving in real time! This is something most video games struggle with, let alone productivity tools.

https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology...

I will suggest that perhaps: 1) because the valuation is wrong? 2) because Figma has not actually created a new category/market? this is where you get new entrants into the market. Take AI chips for example.

I think its entirely possible that Adobe has realized 1) and/or 2) and didn't fight all that hard to make the deal work?

I'd direct you to Figma's incredibly impressive patent portfolio https://patents.justia.com/assignee/figma-inc

That's like 7 patents, not sure it's particularly impressive from a tech patent portfolio perspective unless a few of them are real bangers, and/or Figma is known to be litigious which I don't think they are?

Isn't Zeplin a competitor?

Zeplin doesn't do what Figma does, but Figma does what Zeplin does, if that makes sense. You wouldn't stop using Figma and use Zeplin instead, you'd only supplement your Figma license with Zeplin if you thought Zeplin did design handoff better than Figma (maybe it does, I haven't used it in years, but that wasn't the case a few years ago).

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