Broadly this is great to see and I’m sure the team has worked hard on this.
But can’t help but feel like this is a bit of knee jerk reaction to the growth of the much smaller open source product Penpot, that’s received increasing interest and even some funding since the Figma sale was announced.
Penpot has bet on making all the controls match the html/css spec as well as save everything as svg, in short having a big focus on making devs first class stakeholders.
This feels like a late response following Penpot Fest that ran recently and announced many cool dev features.
That's not been my impression as a designer. Outside of HN, I've not seen anybody talk about switching to Penpot. My team even looked at it and concluded it was several evolutionary steps from being an option. It's not a viable replacement for Figma yet. To be clear, I'd love it if it were, because I want competition in a space Adobe is trying to monopolize, I just don't feel like Penpot is providing that pressure at this point.
I see Penpot primarily taking Figma's market share around the edges. For established design teams with robust workflow needs, there's no competition right now despite some of Penpot's novel design features like grid layout. For independents, enthusiasts, and teams running on a shoestring, however (read: Figma's free-tier customers), it becomes considerably more compelling as a potential alternative.
To paraphrase Reed Hastings' classic line: Penpot needs to become Figma before Figma can become Penpot.
Posting anonymously as I have made some investments in the design tooling space.
Overall I don't see Penpot being a realistic competitor to Figma, and I can't see this as being something that was done as a knee jerk reaction to Penpot's social success.
First, why it isn't a realistic competitor. While building everything out leveraging SVG as its main rendering engine allows for parity with code as an advantage, the inherent disadvantage it has is handling large files. For larger design teams, files often have thousands of designs and pages. Sketch has an advantage here over Figma primarily because it has a higher upper bound on possible memory that it can allocate to each file. Penpot not only has the memory restrictions Figma does (since it operates in the browser), it's also tied to the browser rendering performance of SVG, which simply wasn't designed for the scale designers operate at. It tends to get extremely slow once you have 50 or so pages in a single artboard. This means realistically, Penpot is competing for the casual design market, rather than the larger enterprise-scale design market. Figma's approach for this market has always been to use it as a top-of-funnel expansion opportunity, which is why their free tier targets these users. In general it's very hard to compete with something that is both industry-standard, and free. Penpot theoretically offers more functionality than the Figma free tier, but since it can't support the scale that Sketch/Figma does for larger files, it greatly narrows the market they're targeting. The market for users who want to build extremely advanced designs, but who also want to create extremely small files, is a narrow group.
Second, with regards to this being a knee-jerk reaction to Penpot's dev tooling, the dates just don't line up. Penpot really exploded in reaction to the Adobe acquisition announcement in late 2022, but Figma acquired a YC company known as Visly in 2021. Visly was apparently working on some design->code elements, which was really the first inkling that Figma was exploring this. It seems like this was being worked on / thought about long before Penpot took off. Given the submitter of this story appears to be Emil Sjölander, one of the Visly founders, I suspect that it's a fair assumption that Visly turned into Figma's Dev Mode feature: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/visly
> it's also tied to the browser rendering performance of SVG, which simply wasn't designed for the scale designers operate at. It tends to get extremely slow once you have 50 or so pages in a single artboard
Haven’t tried Penpot so this is in the hypothetical, but surely not all of that needs to be kept around as full live SVG trees? You could draw the SVG to a canvas and keep it static until it changes.
Penpot's CEO here. In terms of the knee jerk reaction, it's hard to say but we have the impression that there is some of it in terms of priorities, particularly long-awaited flex-layout-ish capabilities, for instance. Let's not forget that Penpot is an open source project that has been sharing its code and roadmap way before the Adobe/Figma deal.
Regarding the "isn't a realistic competitor" point. You bet we are! The only realistic competitor in a while, actually, because we come from a deep understanding of how cross-functional teams address design & code instead of doubling down on silos or "modes". To be successful you need to do things VERY differently.
- We're open source and we're enjoying an extremely active community of contributors.
- We rely on open standards so designers (and organisations) can own their future while developers can treat design files as first class citizens in a git repo if they want to.
- You can use SaaS or self-host, we don't care about your deployment strategy.
- We bring code vocabulary and abstractions to the design process (see Flex Layout or upcoming Grid Layout https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx0ufKErqVk) so we get rid of the lost in translation issues that plague teams.
- We partner with people like Design Tokens (which are also open source) to build the future of Design Decisions so we can transcend the current status quo of design systems.
Yes, of course we have performance challenges with SVG on browsers (not Figma 2MB WASM memory limits, though, since we can access DOM memory availability which is now 16GB!) but these are temporary engineering challenges and we're working super hard on cracking them.
I'm fine having these debates on whether Penpot is a viable competitor to Figma, it's healthy and I get it, it happens all the time when new tools pop up (sometimes signalling the end of a cycle, even if it's not sudden). But what really matters to us at Penpot is that this goes beyond "competing" with a particular tool, this is about a specific world vision on how designers and developers want to collaborate to scale up design and software building.
And a key ingredient to all this is "what are developers going to do?" That's the real battleground out there. Developers outnumber Designers 10 to 1. People that keep wondering why Adobe paid $20B for Figma tend to miss the point. It's the developers, obviously! Of course they are worth $20B when you're not exciting to them!
This is not a static picture, it never was and it never is. Every single day we keep working hard on building the best design & prototyping tool for designers and developers, every single day we're re-balancing the status quo. It's already paying off with 400K+ users worldwide, half of them on self-host.
To be honest, we can't be more excited about everything that's going on and what's making everything worth it's not just the growing community of users and contributors but the amazing quality of it, these are not casual users coming for the free stuff, these are forward thinkers really getting it!
> Penpot really exploded in reaction to the Adobe acquisition announcement in late 2022, but Figma acquired a YC company known as Visly in 2021.
It is not mutually exclusive that Figma bought Visly in 2021 and these features are in reaction to/are copying Penpot. Given the gap of three years between this post while owning Visly makes it more plausible.
Figma isn't a collaborative platform beyond your own project, it isn't a GitHub, it's for propertiary design of your products.
The only thing Penpot has to do is "disrupt" the pricing equation and some businesses will pick it up to save some bucks, heck to even retain independent control.
I think the main blockers are the pain of re-learning the software, and migrating things over. Lots of designers have down this already in the last few years from sketch.
It's like software frameworks where young designers want to learn the most popular, coolest tool to help find a job, and companies want to use the most popular, coolest tool to help with hiring.
I don't think it being self-hosted changes this for better or worse, but they still have a tough task ahead to get a critical-mass switching.
Wouldn't that be a good thing? Armchair regulators have been booing the Adobe acquisition on the grounds of "something something competition" -- this seems to prove that yes, indeed, great design tools can still be created in a post Adobe Figma world, and those upstarts can spur Figma to continue to compete.
I was an early adopter of Figma. Unlike many designers, I chose not to use a Mac since I'm more attuned to Linux. So, when I discovered Figma as an alternative to Sketch, it felt like a breath of fresh air.
Over the years, I've been a fan of most of Figma's updates, but the recent ones have been somewhat disappointing to me. The notable exception is the flex mode, which seems to draw inspiration from Penpot.
As for the developer mode, I find it lackluster. Its primary value seems to be in its read-only mode. In the past, I addressed this by copying deliverables to a separate file to prevent accidental edits.
Lately, I've observed more and more designers with coding skills or coders with design skills. When I work with people that they understand both worlds, I prefer workflows that incorporate Figma and Storybook, emphasizing code as the ultimate source of truth. I'd like to see more in this direction where there is no artificial barriers between coders and designers...
Figma has been such a cool story, I'm so disappointed that the buyout wasn't blocked. Obviously it's an awesome tool and still getting better, but competition is a good thing and I'd really hoped in 5 years we'd have figma and others pushing adobe to be more innovative and user-friendly.
Is it not still blocked, or at least under heavy scrutiny? I would also dread Figma being folded into Adobe's bloated ecosystem. Thank god for penpot as mentioned in another comment as I would need an alternative if Figma does indeed get taken over by Adobe.
I bet Adobe would like to back out of the deal too, they paid an extreme premium before tech took a general nosedive. I doubt Figma is worth $20 billion in todays climate.
I do wonder how Adobe will fare with empowered governments in the EU, UK, and US that want to thwart these types of acquisitions for big tech. Frankly I hope they succeed too. Mergers are not good for competitive markets and Adobe nearly owning every tool out their in the design space is extremely bad.
Yeah, I saw this move as a general protective manoeuvre rather than an acquisition intended to become a cash cow in and of itself. Figma is remarkably useful and capable. Over the years I've found myself leaning on it more and more for things I didn't really expect to.
I can guess what's coming next: dev mode will get locked behind the "editor" per user pricing and then it's going to become a pain getting stuff out of Figma.
Also, there's an annoying "bug" in Figma when it tries to implement its own hotkeys: I have various Ctrl/Cmnd key combos swapped and hitting Ctrl causes Figma to de-select whatever I've highlighted so that trying to copy some portion of a colour code or whatever with Ctrl+C causes me to copy nothing but thin air.
$25/mth seems like an egregious price for such an unhelpful feature. I understand it will get better, but at this point... I can't imagine paying more than $5/mth on top of my current price assuming it was more polished.
Maybe I'm not the target market. I can transcribe visuals to CSS and HTML fairly automatically due to so many years of doing it, and I can do it reliably and consistently in ways that fit various workflows and other challenges. I understand Figma probably wants dev mode to provide a source of truth and gradually add some show stopping features, but even then... $25 is so much. I already feel like Figma costs me more than I want to pay for it. Their pricing model is really aggressive.
> In 2024, Dev Mode will be included in all editor seats or can be purchased separately for $25 per seat/month on Organization, and $35 per seat/month on Enterprise.
I use Figma to design and then build what I design. This might be a bit unusual :)
The switch to "Dev Mode" as a different modality has unfortunately been a bit frustrating, because I can no longer hop back and forth between designing and grabbing "developer" values (e.g. Android ARGB colour values). This means I'm toggling in and out of dev mode for only a few seconds.
I wish the Figma team had found a way to introduce these features more contextually, rather than introducing a new modality.
Those "modes" are extremely frustrating and represent a silo-based conception of how teams work. If the tools creates disconnects... the team gets disconnected, that's not progress at all.
Can they fix file navigation next? I’ve never been able to figure it out, somehow I can have files shared with me that are impossible to browse/ search for, you just have to bookmark the link.
I think this is why they’re making dev mode distinct from other modes. As others have mentioned though, this comes with several friction points and may actually be more confusing than the people at Figma expected.
That’s not unreasonable or anything either. This is a hard thing to do, UI/UX wise, and it’s a complex set of features being added to an already complex application. It’ll take time to iron out, but hopefully it winds up landing nicely like past features in figma have, rather than like I’d expect adobe features to land.
It's clear you've never experienced significant amounts of tech debt that you aren't allowed to fix because it doesnt Excel chart nicely for the boomers higher up who only see things in terms of "something working on the screen" or not.
And no, I'm not going to rebel by secretly fixing it silently and unappreciatedly while peers pile on hacks and get promoted for things on the screen.
Luckily Figma has a great engineering background as its basis with technical founders, so they can avoid becoming that, but not all companies are like that.
This is a precise description of The Problem with software, and, as noted, Figma has (or had, depending on one's opinion) very good signaling that they are one of those minority companies that are avoiding The Problem. I don't agree with ramesh31's implication that this is what's happening just because the ticket count is large, but it is absolutely a valid concern, especially when it threatens such a superlative product.
PM over here at Figma. We don't have dedicated bug teams whose only job is to fix incoming bugs. Feature teams are responsible for their own bugs, so we typically have an ebb and flow of feature work vs quality work.
Quality is also pretty high on our pri list for leadership, so we typically don't have pushback if we want to focus on bug fixing vs pursuing new features.
Also just FYI, the purchase hasn't gone through yet.
Hey that sounds more like what I’ve heard then! :)
And as for the pending Adobe buy-out… you can’t say it out-loud, but I can: I really hope they treat you folks right, but I doubt they will. Figma is awesome. Probably too good for a company as famous for it’s customer hatred as Adobe.
They're known for consistently shipping significant new features fast, so call it what you want but whatever they do works!
What you really don't want is to work at a ticket factory where every ticket is for a new hack that could be avoided by paying down basic technical debt :)
>consistently shipping significant new features fast
This is an external result of talent. However, it's also an external result of bad management. From the outside, we can't see how much of column A and how much of column B it really is, until the day we notice superfluous features, weird UX, bugs, and fix timelines on the order of years. Figma did give me almost 100% column-A vibes more than almost any other product I've used, so I was quite optimistic, but since the buyout I've noticed a few bugs/UX-issues of the concerning variety, and regardless of whether that timing is a coincidence, I'm starting to worry that in the end it will just be more business as usual for this piece of software.
Edit: Since the buyout announcement. But again, no idea if it's related.
But can’t help but feel like this is a bit of knee jerk reaction to the growth of the much smaller open source product Penpot, that’s received increasing interest and even some funding since the Figma sale was announced.
Penpot has bet on making all the controls match the html/css spec as well as save everything as svg, in short having a big focus on making devs first class stakeholders.
This feels like a late response following Penpot Fest that ran recently and announced many cool dev features.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgcCPfOv5v56-fghJo2dHNB...