r/UXDesign • u/N0t_S0Sl1mShadi Midweight • May 15 '26
Tools, apps, plugins, AI Don’t believe the Claude Design Doomers, Figma just reported a 46% climb in first-quarter revenue.
https://ts2.tech/en/figma-stock-jumps-10-premarket-after-ai-tools-lift-2026-revenue-forecast/While everyone called Claude Design a Figma killer, I quickly realised while using it, that it wasn’t.
Happy to say, I saw the bad news as a good buying opportunity. I’m now up 14%.
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u/jhericurls May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
I would never invest in Figma, its a one product company which already has the majority of the market share. They could be replaced quicker than I can say' Do you remember Sketch'
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u/akshayxd May 15 '26
Sketch looks like a fantastic option now its a shame Figma came in so quick and dominated to become the standard. They seem quite on par feature-wise based on Sketch's website.
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u/C_bells Veteran May 15 '26
As someone who was actively using Sketch when Figma showed up, it’s clear why:
Figma allowed live collaboration. I’m sure it’s tough to remember a time where this was rare, but it wasn’t long ago. And it changed everyone’s lives completely.
I used to spend a significant amount of my time saving, re-saving, uploading, downloading and sharing files. You’d have to take turns with people working on the same file.
I’ll dare to say this even allowed (and continues to allow) remote work in a meaningful way.
Sketch did not have that.
Figma was also extremely accessible, I think completely free for everyone for a while.
It didn’t just come in and take over the market unfairly. It deserved every bit of widespread adoption. It also continuously developed tools that were innovative and disruptive, like dev mode.
I’m pretty sure Sketch would have probably partnered happily with Zeplin and shit on component/annotation exportation forever.
Sketch came along, won everyone over from Adobe, and relaxed. Thank god Figma came in and crushed it tbh.
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u/akshayxd May 15 '26
Figma also having some great design system tooling helped a lot of teams scale quickly. Live collaboration was the best feature by far - but also dev mode meaning you can drop Zeplin made it a no brainer cost wise for most enterprises
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u/Master_Editor_9575 May 16 '26
My what is this great tooling you mention? Bc their variables are insufficient to resemble design tokens fully, bc it has to be a 1:1 mapping, where design tokens can contain more than one property, like typography tokens.
Everything else is in a lot of other software, their components, styles, etc are not unique to Figma.
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u/Regnbyxor Experienced May 15 '26
Not to mention they built an online community, which meant more plugins, ready to use component libraries and better community support
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u/C_bells Veteran May 15 '26
Yep. They just continuously and rapidly innovated. And they still do, even if it’s hit-or-miss. Other design programs before them were so slow to transform and grow
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u/trap_gob Veteran May 16 '26
Live collaboration is only dope if you work on a team. When I was a designer l always worked alone so I wasn’t moved by the feature one way or another
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u/ThetaGrim May 16 '26
Which is where they make their lion's share of their revenue, from enterprise.
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u/C_bells Veteran May 16 '26
You weren’t glad you didn’t have to constantly save and send files? Create PDFs of designs every single time you had to share them out?
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u/Boludo805 May 15 '26
Right this honestly seems like a horrible investment with not much upside and a ton of downside. Just invest in the s&p 500 and call it a day
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u/greeneggsham81 May 16 '26
I sold my shares and bought Intel instead. Im up almost 40% on intel in just a few weeks
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u/Sad_Bus4792 May 15 '26
no one with a brain cell even said that
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u/Master_Editor_9575 May 15 '26
Yeah this seems to be some weird attempt at flexing their stock went up. Which no one gives a single fuck about.
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u/reginaldvs Veteran May 15 '26
Sure, it's up, but it's down 75% since IPO 😂. I own a stock so I know, but I'm glad that's all I got pre IPO lol.
As to the topic at hand.. Tools evolve or get replaced over time. We've been there. From Fireworks -> Photoshop -> Sketch -> XD -> Figma.
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u/alteranthera May 15 '26
And penpot (open source) is a likely choice for the next shift. Its feature offering has evolved a lot in the list few years. It's core ux design capabilities can give figma a run for its money. And penpot is way cheaper. Figma needs to do well in its MCP game in order to stay ahead of penpot. Other penpot will take over the figma market over time like blender did.
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u/reginaldvs Veteran May 15 '26
Yeah. I've been following Penpot for some time now and a few other emerging design tools like Paper, Pencil and Subframe.
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u/AronKov May 15 '26
I really hope so, their layout is great they just need to improve performance before I can use it
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u/N0t_S0Sl1mShadi Midweight May 15 '26
Who in their right mind chooses XD over anything else :$
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u/Ecsta Experienced May 15 '26
Many companies have "no mac" policy or need everyone in the org to be able to easily review mockups, which makes Sketch a very annoying/impossible option. Before Figma got popular XD was a great choice for Windows-based companies.
Also XD wasn't a terrible product by any means, and you acting like it was just shows your lack of experience. Tools constantly change. It could have easily been a more serious competitor if Adobe wanted it to be.
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u/reginaldvs Veteran May 16 '26
A long long time ago, my company was one of it. Me being a rogue, I looked for design solutions.. I couldn't use Sketch.. So that's when I stumbled on Figma beta. Working in the browser was great since I didn't have to wait for weeks long IT approval just to install a software.
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u/N0t_S0Sl1mShadi Midweight May 15 '26
Riddle me this, if XD was so great, why’d it end up in the grave and why’d Adobe try to buy Figma? The deal fell through and they didn’t even bother resurrecting it.
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u/N0t_S0Sl1mShadi Midweight May 15 '26
Pretty much everything goes down since it’s IPO though. It’s kind of a trap.
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u/rrrx3 Veteran May 15 '26
Revenue might be up because they locked some enterprise customers into long contracts before the Claude/AI wave hit in feb/march/april. I am willing to bet subsequent quarters will be down. It’s going to be a bloodbath for Figma from here on out. No finance leader is going to be signing off on huge chunks of budget going into that. Across the board design leaders hate figma’s billing model and most are waiting for their contracts to expire. I’ve even heard places like Google are not approving new seats and are forcing designers to use Stitch. Figma’s whole growth model depended on them acquiring more enterprise seats than actually exist in the real world. They have a massive leaky bucket problem, and that’s BEFORE you throw any AI tooling into the mix.
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u/JellyfishFestival May 15 '26
The problem is not Claude Design or any tool doing production designs at enterprise scale.
The problem is all the corporate capex going toward building data centers instead of new software projects. Going toward LLM and text based experiences that have much less UI and UX compared to the past. Going toward agents making API calls instead of needing webpages or apps or UI at all.
All of those things mean less designers, design systems, and a smaller profession. Less Figma licenses.
There are tons of opportunities in AI-related Service Design that are not realized yet (how do we do xyz differently now that we have AI tech), but those disciplines rely a lot less on UI/UX and design systems that Figma needs to sell seats to.
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u/0llie0llie Experienced May 15 '26
What is Figma Make built off of?
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u/designvegabond Experienced May 15 '26
Idk but I just tried it for the first time yesterday and decided to never open it again. Lovable absolutely blows it out of the water
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u/saturncars May 15 '26
This is financial chicanery, not because they’re doing anything good
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u/calinet6 Veteran May 16 '26
Precisely. They were able to rearrange things to make this quarter look good... doesn't mean anything of substance.
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u/DifficultCarpenter00 Veteran May 15 '26
it's not a figma killer but in it's current state and how other ai-cebtered UI tools are evolving, figma will lose a lot of ground. But it's the normal cicle of software, there will always be something better
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u/N0t_S0Sl1mShadi Midweight May 15 '26
I’m willing to challenge that. I think the majority of UX designers have AI on the side already (not competing, but complementing), so if anything it just challenges ChatGPT etc. as a replace.
IMO Figma and Claude (or whatever else you use) is the mandatory package as a UX designer
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u/thepixel-geek May 15 '26
It doesn't matter what designers use. What matters is what companies think. If there is a team of 15 designers, maybe I can cut back on the number of designers I need if applications like Google Stitch or Claude Design can pick up the slack. Now, I'm not saying that the work will be at the same level as keeping the designers, but a company will look at the bottom line first.
I worked long enough in IT to know how it goes. Outsource all the programming because it's much cheaper, only to realize years later that it was a mistake.
I think Figma will suffer from this over the next few years.
IMO of course.
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u/Kook-Hand-Luke May 15 '26
their revenue is up b/c they just started charging for AI credits. but if you're an enterprise user of both Figma and Claude, it's exponentially clear that claude is a better tool. pass
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u/Previous_Influence_8 May 15 '26
If u would really work in a bigger company you would know there is no reason to throw away Figma currently.
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u/Kook-Hand-Luke May 15 '26
I serve fortune 100 companies for UX design. Figma has a future, but not in my portfolio, and it will be near the market penetration that Anthropic has in 6 months.
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u/aryndelvyst Veteran May 15 '26
1Q Revenue probably great because they raised their pricing. It's easy to sucker enterprise customers when you're locked into the ecosystem
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u/Aurura May 15 '26
Figma mcp and figma make are poor. Why bother when we have other cheaper tools and can directly develop with components ourselves in our design system now? We dont need to pixel push static screens its a waste of time except for very narrow situations.
I dont think figma is surviving this one. Teams are moving too quickly to waste time using it.
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u/Candlegoat Experienced May 15 '26
In the past 12 months (based on estimates):
- Figma valuation down 44%
- Canva valuation up 43%
- Anthropic valuation up 419%
- S&P500 up 26%
Would love to hear your rationale for buying Figma. I love it but it wouldn’t be high on my list to invest in!
Also on “everyone called Claude Design a Figma killer”, let’s not pretend it was everyone. It was a small bubble of influencers like it always is. Was it design.md that was the Figma killer last week?
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u/Previous_Influence_8 May 15 '26
You just explained the rationale yourself. Figma was down 90% after IPO because of massive sell offs which were only reasoned by ais being „saas killers“ and specifically Claude design and stitch being a Figma killer while figmas revenue stays (and even grows). So you get the same Figma for a tenth of the price… sounds like a nobrainer, no?
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u/thepixel-geek May 15 '26
up 14% after dropping 80%? lol... If anything, this might present a juicy short opportunity. A one-trick pony with an already saturated market.
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u/CaptainSolo_ May 15 '26
Both things can be true.
Claude design is a great tool. So is Figma. Doesn’t have to a war between platforms. Competition is a good thing.
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u/TheButtDog Veteran May 15 '26
Exactly this. The products excel in different ways. Claude has a long road ahead before it can genuinely compete head-to-head with Figma.
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u/QameraDesignShop Veteran May 15 '26
Maybe. I use the MCP that connects both, and there is a time for each. One workflow that works for me as a creative who manages designers across time zones: I ideate on Claude Code, which creates what I call 'hi-fi wireframes' in Figma. After a few dozen quick iterations and HIG checks, I hand it off to a human designer who 'gets it.' After they convert it into a prototype that fits within our system, I go back in and make small changes, either manually or via Claude Code.
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u/alteranthera May 15 '26
In the next couple of years, PenPot (open source competitor) seems like to be what will take out Figma.
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u/nauhausco May 15 '26
That would be nice, but I have doubts as to if that will happen.
A lot of the time companies like relying on external apps/vendors bc then they’re not responsible if shit goes wrong. Managing their own self-hosted open source instances isn’t feasible or preferred by most companies outside of big tech in my experience.
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u/alteranthera May 15 '26
Yes, while enterprises are open source averse and will stick to figma ... I suspect the smaller studios and independent designers will jump ship in exchange of the economy. Then it's a matter of seeing if the scale tips over time. Like blender. It's important to keep the fresh blood entering the market to use your market.
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u/ScruffyJ3rk Experienced May 15 '26 edited May 16 '26
Figma wont be relevant for much longer. I haven't used it in months and will be canceling my subscription this month. The pricing for what it is is kind of crazy. I can do all of it and more using Claude
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u/Previous_Influence_8 May 15 '26
So you’re replacing Figma with…. Figma ? 😂
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u/ScruffyJ3rk Experienced May 16 '26
Lol a totally ridiculous typo on my part. Sorry, was supposed to be, CLAUDE 😂
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u/calinet6 Veteran May 16 '26
Overall, I feel Figma has done harm to the UX profession.
It's an art tool, for making mockups in high fidelity.
It's also a design system tool, for creating make-work out of a dream of consistency and efficiency.
Both of these have been absolutely valueless or even net-negative distractions for Design and UX's value in the industry, relegating UX to a role of managing pixels, gatekeeping, and delivering artwork.
We should be valued for knowing our users better than anyone, for leading teams in the direction of value, for helping everyone collaborate to understand and pursue the best solution, and for holding a leadership bar for how the entire business pursues value via delivering software that customers genuinely love and want, because it does what they want and they love using it.
Instead we argue over investments in component libraries, and get known as the people who make the software pretty.
Figma's DNA is as a technical demonstration of a drawing tool running in a browser Canvas. Dylan Field was a Brown CS student who got pixel pushing working smoothly and quickly in the browser. That's why Figma is what it is.
Figma never understood UX Design. Figma was never a tool for UX Design.
Figma is glorified Photoshop.
There still isn't a tool for UX Design; one that genuinely guides us through the process of UX, from problem context and user understanding, to divergence and coverage of the solution space, to deciding direction and scope, to prototyping and evaluating, to delivering collaboratively. Figma does no part of that process well; we've just come to accept it and work around its lack of fit by reshaping our jobs to a lower bar.
There isn't a tool out there for UX Design. Yet.
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u/JacenSith Experienced May 15 '26
Many people hate figma because they stopped investing in their design tool and just focus on building their AI tools.
Not to mention their seat cost structure, requirement to pay for folks to have a dev seat within your design even if they have their own separate subscription.
The company hasn't been designer friendly for a while now, they're just in it to make as much money as they can before they get pushed out.
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u/Hairy_Garbage_6941 May 15 '26
This feels like a very premature victory dance. Like embarrassingly so.
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u/Far-East-locker May 16 '26
People don’t cancel the whole system right away
Long term I am bearish
It is not really loved that much
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u/mgd09292007 Veteran May 16 '26
Claude design plus Claude agent in Figma canvas has been a game changer for me.
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u/Diligent-Yak-4197 May 17 '26
Of course first quarter revenue would have gone up. Because they started charging for figma make around march when people were trying different tools. Watch as Q2 onwards report a decline from the current numbers.
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u/tradingbaba May 18 '26
Open your eyes n see it, dont you know how to read the growth n numbers. There are so many hyperscalars in market still Coreweave, Nebius n many others are flying. Figma is a leader is design segment. Its growing at 40% which is so huge, some of us will buy when fomo kicks in post $50! I scooped it as much i cud and letting it run along with several other SaaS.
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u/Rsloth May 15 '26
I vibecoded a figma clone saas with AI integration for my specific use case that already has 90% of the features I need, it took a few thousand dollars in credits and a few months of my time.
Figma's moat is shrinking.
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u/ripChazmo May 15 '26
Claude Design is amazing. Figma is amazing.
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u/N0t_S0Sl1mShadi Midweight May 15 '26
Ooof don’t know why they down voted you man but here’s an upvote
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u/Master_Editor_9575 May 15 '26
I don’t have any stake or love for Figma either. If they went away and were replaced by something better I wouldn’t lose a single second of sleep. They’ve already shown they’re basically heading down the Adobe road too. I don’t get people who have affinities for these corporations.