What's that old saying ? Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
Whether it's Adobe, Apple, Bloomberg, Microsoft or any other similar company. The fact is those companies have such an enormous moat that no minor competitor is ever going to get any serious traction.
In the specific case of Adobe. Figma, Canva, $name_your_competitor are, frankly NEVER going to get any serious traction. Just look how many decades it took Adobe to finally unseat QuarkXPress, and that was two Goliaths battling out !
Why do I say that ?
First, the old adage "time is money". If you are a business who employs designers, you want them to work in an efficient manner. You give them the tools they trained with. You give them the tools they used at previous employers. For designers, that is Adobe. The same goes for DTP and AdobeIndesign, or Video Editors and Adobe Premiere. Not giving a designer Adobe is a bit like telling a techie he can't install ping.
Second, collaboration. Your designers, publishers and video editors will be collaborating with others. They'll be importing and exporting files all over the place. Sticking with Adobe removes problems, and hence wasting time troubleshooting, "time is money".
Finally, integration. If you have used Adobe Creative Cloud remotely seriously, you will know how awesome it is. Adobe have done a spectacular job at cross-product integration with extensive native support. You can take Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator files and pull them straight into InDesign for page layout. You can be working on a video in Adobe Premiere and from within Adobe Premiere, you can throw the audio into Adobe Audition, manipulate it, and Adobe Premiere will pick up the changes without you needing to lift a finger.
That, my friends, is why you should take talk of minor competitors of Adobe claiming they are "winning" with a generous pinch of salt.
It’s anecdotal, but I’ve seen Figma become almost the de facto standard for web design over the last few years, whilst Canva is massively democratising design such that you don’t even need to work with professional designer for your day to day designs.
I agree Adobe will be sticky and nobody is suggesting they will die any time soon, but these tools are so good and so widely adopted that I don’t see how they can’t eventually take a bite out of Adobe.
I was of this mind for quite a while. I hate changing tools.
I do a lot of front-end dev work that involves translating non-technical designer's layouts into templates for a CMS.
Figma is way, way more efficient for me to use than Ai or PS.
Time is indeed money.
Most of our team isn't bought in to any specific package... I have to be able to take deliverables from a wide variety of systems, so it wasn't a big deal to add another system on my side of thing.
On the designers side, he likes it just as well, and the familiarity is the only hurdle. However, it's not like having to re-understand design, it's just another tool.
In the end, that's all it takes... because I don't care what general standard for cross-industry design is. I remember when it was Fireworks. All I care about is the specific tool chain that we use.
So, yeah, Figma isn't probably going to become some cross-industry standard, but it so much easier to use for the limited tasks we use it for that it's winning at our very local, agency, level.
As you yourself admit "for the limited tasks we use it for".
And there I certainly agree with you.
If you can work in a relative silo with a limited number of tools, then sure, there may well be scope for shopping around, just like you did.
But once you're in an environment where you may use multiple tools that come under Adobe's remit, then its likely better to stick with Adobe and get the benefit of the cross-integration.
For example, a friend of mine runs a small business, they have someone on their team whose day job is something else, but is good with design and has become the office's go to designer.
In the course of an average year, that person will regularly use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for all manner of graphics tasks. They will use InDesign to create print and electronic documents for dissemination. They will occasionally use Adobe Premiere and Adobe Audition to edit videos and podcasts. And they store photos in Adobe Lightroom.
Even as a small, non-design focused business, its not difficult to get your money's worth from Adobe.
And just for context, the documents that I get in Figma cost in the high 4-figures to mid 5-figures to create before I get them; the folks using these tools aren't picking them because they are cheap.
What is interesting is that the article left out Adobe XD, which is their product that should be competing with Figma or Sketch. I've tried to use it a few times, and well, honestly, it doesn't measure up (it could be that I'm stuck on the bottom of the learning curve, but that's a problem, too).
Tools like Figma, Canva and Sketch are enabling workflows where all that integration doesn't matter. For example, I'm not going to take a bunch of UI prototypes and polish the audio with Audition or bitmap edit with Photoshop.
Finally, tools like Affinity, Da Vinci and so on are showing that smaller budgets focused on specific workflows can deliver a competitive product. I have a Creative Cloud subscription. I also bought Affinity. Why? Because Designer and Publisher save my team time vs. Adobe. And that includes import and export. We're not a print design house, so all the print specific tooling doesn't really matter in our all-digital, made for the screen, RGB world.
Counter-point: I used Adobe products as a professional designer since before CS1, right up until switching to Sketch in 2015.
The moment I used Sketch, I knew I'd never use Illustrator or Photoshop for work again. Then, a few years later, I used Figma for the first time and realized I'd never use Sketch again if I could help it.
The point is, at least in the realm of UI/UX design, the competition has leapfrogged Adobe. XD is a distant third^1, and you'd have to add every Creative Suite product together to get to second place. So, they've already lost that race, and the trend seems to my mind accelerating rather than slowing down.
I don't think the argument that designers experienced with Creative Suite will be hesitant to switch holds up. I'm the oldest working designer I know, and like I said above, I jumped ship in like five minutes of working with superior tools. I don't know anybody younger than me who has any loyalty whatsoever to Adobe; quite the opposite, Adobe seems creaky, and old-fashioned in a "I can't believe you used to use that, Grandpa" way.
Genuinely asking, because these are the sorts of things that I have long used Photoshop for, but if there's a new, better tool, I would like to take a look.
The first example would be easier than the second, but yes, you could technically do both. The second one has more pixel-based textures (like the drawings), and you could certainly use those as layer fills, though I wouldn't advise trying to draw them there. I wouldn't say that either Sketch or Figma handle pixel artwork particularly well, because they're both optimized for vectors, but you can import and manipulate that kind of artwork (move, resize, crop, change color properties, etc.) fairly well.
It might be worth checking out Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer as lighter, cheaper alternatives that handle pixels better. But PS is still the best tool for this, sure.
For the textures in the second link:
You can go a long way in Figma and just use stock-photo images like wood for textures.
You'll still need a bitmap-based app like Photoshop for the bubble, and import them into Figma
I think things might be shifting more than you realize. All the designers at my current workplace use Figma. The workplace before that was Sketch. It's only the older members of the team who have any Photoshop skills, and they rarely seem to use them these days.
Having said that, I don't think this matters so much for Adobe. They're well aware that professionals are dropping their tools. It's part of their plan, even. All their comms these days focus on "the democratization of creative tools" -- they make more money selling subscriptions to hobbyists than they ever did selling to pros.
Whether it's Adobe, Apple, Bloomberg, Microsoft or any other similar company. The fact is those companies have such an enormous moat that no minor competitor is ever going to get any serious traction.
In the specific case of Adobe. Figma, Canva, $name_your_competitor are, frankly NEVER going to get any serious traction. Just look how many decades it took Adobe to finally unseat QuarkXPress, and that was two Goliaths battling out !
Why do I say that ?
First, the old adage "time is money". If you are a business who employs designers, you want them to work in an efficient manner. You give them the tools they trained with. You give them the tools they used at previous employers. For designers, that is Adobe. The same goes for DTP and AdobeIndesign, or Video Editors and Adobe Premiere. Not giving a designer Adobe is a bit like telling a techie he can't install ping.
Second, collaboration. Your designers, publishers and video editors will be collaborating with others. They'll be importing and exporting files all over the place. Sticking with Adobe removes problems, and hence wasting time troubleshooting, "time is money".
Finally, integration. If you have used Adobe Creative Cloud remotely seriously, you will know how awesome it is. Adobe have done a spectacular job at cross-product integration with extensive native support. You can take Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator files and pull them straight into InDesign for page layout. You can be working on a video in Adobe Premiere and from within Adobe Premiere, you can throw the audio into Adobe Audition, manipulate it, and Adobe Premiere will pick up the changes without you needing to lift a finger.
That, my friends, is why you should take talk of minor competitors of Adobe claiming they are "winning" with a generous pinch of salt.