Figma
Ranked 2 of 5 AI design tools by recommenders
Recommended for browser-based, real-time collaborative UI design with design systems and shareable links; critics say it has grown bloated, memory-hungry and expensive per seat.
Recommended for browser-based, real-time collaborative UI design with design systems and shareable links; critics say it has grown bloated, memory-hungry and expensive per seat.
216 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 113
- criticize it
- 103
- approval share
- 52%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 113 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1 recommender for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Real-time collaborative multiplayer editing
“What made Figma the go-to tool is the in-browser approach, collaborative editing, and features like design tokens and constraints”
Comment from 1 Nov 2025 on Hacker News “The biggest evidence for collaborative editing is the immense popularity of Google Docs, Notion and Figma.”
Comment from 17 Mar 2026 in “Lies I was told about collaborative editing, Part 2: Why we don't use Yjs” “it feels like these choices (wasm, multiplayer, etc) have been so core to building such a great business”
Comment from 29 Mar 2026 in “Figma's MCP Update Reflects a Larger Industry Shift” - Comment from 12 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: Opus 5.5 made a fully featured Figma clone in 3 hours / 8 prompts”
- Comment from 16 Nov 2025 in “The US AI Bubble Reminds Me of the Eve of China's Real Estate Collapse”
- Comment from 20 May 2026 in “Saying Goodbye to Asm.js”
Runs in browser, easy sharing
“What made Figma the go-to tool is the in-browser approach, collaborative editing, and features like design tokens and constraints”
Comment from 1 Nov 2025 on Hacker News “you could just send a Figma link to anyone in your org and it opened in the browser”
Comment from 19 Apr 2026 in “Thoughts and Feelings Around Claude Design” “Figma is doing quite well in that regard, especially with the use of WebAssembly.”
Comment from 7 Oct 2026 in “Tell HN: GitHub refuses to remove cracked copies of my software after a month” Powerful, polished design tool
“I've been using Figma for a while, and true, it's powerful. At the same time it becomes increasingly complex, difficult, bloated overall.”
Comment from 6 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use” “Figma, TigerBeetle, and much software of the highest class have won the market on the basis of technical excellence”
Comment from 16 Feb 2026 in “The Sideprocalypse” “Figma is already a very clean UI, which tries it's best not to shove too many features in your face.”
Comment from 6 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use” - Comment from 10 Jan 2026 in “Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project”
- Comment from 27 Nov 2025 in “Penpot: The Open-Source Figma”
- Comment from 7 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use”
Design systems speed up features
“I find it to be sometimes easier to utilize my Figma library to design what I want as I generally don't have to do rework.”
Comment from 27 Nov 2025 in “The gruesome new data on tech jobs” “It’s so easy nowadays to get a Figma file with an established design system and produce new features.”
Comment from 20 Apr 2026 in “Figma's woes compound with Claude Design”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Increasingly complex and bloated
“I've been using Figma for a while, and true, it's powerful. At the same time it becomes increasingly complex, difficult, bloated overall.”
Comment from 6 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use” “If the tool crumbles under its own usage modalities, that's because it's poorly designed, not the user's fault.”
Comment from 27 Nov 2025 in “Penpot: The Open-Source Figma” “Figma costs cuckoo bananas money for your entire team for the privilege of enduring this byzantine nightmare”
Comment from 18 Apr 2026 in “Thoughts and Feelings Around Claude Design” Expensive seats and paywalled features
“their seats system has always been brutal it's extremely easy to have the seats balloon if you're not careful”
Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “Claude Design” “Figma costs cuckoo bananas money for your entire team for the privilege of enduring this byzantine nightmare”
Comment from 18 Apr 2026 in “Thoughts and Feelings Around Claude Design” “I can’t really get behind saying that a company should bait and switch with their pricing models harder.”
Comment from 19 Apr 2026 in “Thoughts and Feelings Around Claude Design” - Comment from 24 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: Open-source Figma design to code”
Heavy memory use
“Running Slack, Figma, Linear, Spotify, Discord, Obsidian, and others at the same time consumes a lot of memory for no good reason.”
Comment from 3 Feb 2026 in “The Codex App” “each of those is going to require an additional GB or two of memory on every staff member's computer”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “The RAM shortage comes for us all” Lagging on AI integration
“Figma screenshots work sometimes (with vision models), but they are token-heavy, slow, and impossible to git commit as text.”
Comment from 11 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: A Markdown DSL to stop AI agents from hallucinating UI code” “Figma accidentally excluded themselves from the training data that would have made them relevant in the agentic era.”
Comment from 18 Apr 2026 in “Thoughts and Feelings Around Claude Design” “AI is great for prototyping and refining use cases in ways that are far superior to static figma designs”
Comment from 6 Jul 2026 in “Mark Zuckerberg tells staff that AI agents haven't progressed enough” - Comment from 1 Oct 2026 in “Figma restricts MCP access to whitelisted clients, excluding Pi”
Other AI design tools people recommend
The four most recommended other AI design tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Design | 145 | 110 | 57% | 7 | — | — |
| FigmaThis page | 113 | 103 | 52% | 12 | — | — |
| Google Stitch | 25 | 14 | 64% | 9 | — | — |
| Diffui | 7 | 1 | 88% | 5 | — | — |
| Pomelli by Google | 6 | 14 | 30% | 2 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 233 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“the value of something like Figma isn't the functionality so much as the multiplayer platform aspect”
“Figma is doing quite well in that regard, especially with the use of WebAssembly.”
“Figma's reluctance to integrate with all the popular AI tools might actually accelerate their decline”
“Both are great _products_ and I use them, but using them on a browser tab makes me unhappy.”
“AI is great for prototyping and refining use cases in ways that are far superior to static figma designs”
“tools like Figma can serve as an essential part of the solution, but nonetheless, I feel there's something missing”
“Users were migrating to us _from_ desktop applications. Collaboration was the key differentiator”
“bespoke webapps like a figma or google docs which are near impossible to see what they are doing via the dom”
“It’s so easy nowadays to get a Figma file with an established design system and produce new features.”
“they are actually in prime position (with one of the best brands and distributions out there)”
“you could just send a Figma link to anyone in your org and it opened in the browser”
“I can’t really get behind saying that a company should bait and switch with their pricing models harder.”
“a lot of things like 3d features don't exist because they had the awareness to really hone in”
“Figma accidentally excluded themselves from the training data that would have made them relevant in the agentic era.”
“It may look like a crappy Electron app, but Figma has a quite interesting architecture.”
“Figma costs cuckoo bananas money for your entire team for the privilege of enduring this byzantine nightmare”
“their seats system has always been brutal it's extremely easy to have the seats balloon if you're not careful”
“in the end we picked slightly different behavior because at the end of the day it was faster”
“I like seeing changes in the vector tool first, and then pushing out any changes to a JSON file”
“it feels like these choices (wasm, multiplayer, etc) have been so core to building such a great business”
“The biggest evidence for collaborative editing is the immense popularity of Google Docs, Notion and Figma.”
“Figma screenshots work sometimes (with vision models), but they are token-heavy, slow, and impossible to git commit as text.”
“I never really experience any problems running Notion, Figma, VScode and Linear side by side”
“Figma, TigerBeetle, and much software of the highest class have won the market on the basis of technical excellence”
“it was the best thing available at the time. It made incumbents look lazy.”
“I used chrome devtools to edit the hero text and navbar and got instant results .. as in I sort of liked it.”
“it's powerful. At the same time it becomes increasingly complex, difficult, bloated overall”
“I've been using Figma for a while, and true, it's powerful. At the same time it becomes increasingly complex, difficult, bloated overall.”
“Figma is already a very clean UI, which tries it's best not to shove too many features in your face.”
“Running Slack, Figma, Linear, Spotify, Discord, Obsidian, and others at the same time consumes a lot of memory for no good reason.”
“It's unfortunate figma paywalls dev mode and this might be a good way to work around the limitation.”
“Figma Design nailed the UX, but the actual guts/business logic I had to spend time on.”
“each of those is going to require an additional GB or two of memory on every staff member's computer”
“Figma is fantastic software, but it has become a single point of failure for entire product orgs.”
“From the user perspective Figma is great, and I might say it's even better.”
“I have absolutely massive pages with ~100 screens on them that work just fine on this base-tier M2 MBA.”
“If the tool crumbles under its own usage modalities, that's because it's poorly designed, not the user's fault.”
“I find it to be sometimes easier to utilize my Figma library to design what I want as I generally don't have to do rework.”
“At its core it’s a very nice design tool that bought the innovation of collaborative live editing”
“What made Figma the go-to tool is the in-browser approach, collaborative editing, and features like design tokens and constraints”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.