> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that
The reaction that designers I know have given Claude Design couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for designers, their workflow is very different from software devs. You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs.
People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate.
Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers.
Figma will probably better integrate AI in their own offering at some point which will help designers become more productive. And that will be the end of it.
> couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for designers, their workflow is very different from software devs. You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs.
Haha, that's exactly how cc was received initially. It's just autocomplete. It's useless. It can't even x. I tried to y and it gave me z. Over and over all over the internet this was the reaction. Then the bargaining began. Oh, it will maybe speed up some simple things. Like autocomplete on steroids. Maaaybe do some junior tasks once in a while. And so on...
As someone who does both development and design, I agree. With some caveats.
At this point, Claude now writes > 99% of my code. I wasn't an enthusiastic early adopter; it took me a while to be willing to let go of the reins. But in tandem with LLMS getting better, I also began to realize that what happens inside the code is very rarely important enough for me to care about. Like, I care that it's secure, and performant where it needs to be, etc. -- but mostly I just care about its outputs. If it does what I want it to do, then how it does this doesn't really matter to me or my clients. On the development side, my attention has focused to writing specifications and monitoring the correctness of the test suite, and > 99% of the time that's good enough. It's been a lesson in non-attachment to let go of lovingly crafting every single line of code, but the tradeoff in terms of productivity has absolutely been worth it.
What makes this viable is the fact that there's essentially a "hidden layer" (the code) upon which Claude can operate. My clients don't actually care about the code, and within certain bounds (correctness, security, performance, extensibility, etc.) it turns out that neither do I. This gives Claude a lot of latitude to solve things in its own way, and I think that's a bit part of its effectiveness.
On the other hand, with design there is no hidden layer. Every single aspect of the design is visible to the user and the customer. So the design reflects upon my work in ways that code does not. This means that the conditions which allow me to relax my grip on coding just don't exist for design. It's very difficult for me to imagine delegating design in the same way that I've become comfortable delegating coding.
That said: I suspect that the use-case for Claude Design will be for applications which today receive very little design attention. There are loads of applications where design is less than an afterthought, and the product suffers terribly for it. Delegating to Claude, in those contexts, would likely be a very big win. But for applications which already have designers obsessing over every pixel, I see a very limited role for this. Figma's market is mostly the latter -- the former, by definition, is not part of the market for design tools -- so I don't see them being threatened by this for a long time.
I tried uploading our design system. Claude Design’s environment was so limited it had to reimplement it from scratch in HTML, JS and CSS. Doing that burned through more than half the token limit. Along the way it completely changed it and made up things that don’t fit in at all, neither visually or as code. The output of making a mockup is one huge HTML file with minified CSS that just can’t be used meaningfully for anything.
I guess I had expected something like Claude Code with visual tools added on top, but that’s not what this is.
There are many designers. I know a bunch who basically stopped using Figma altogether and just prototype what they're working on directly in code these days. For them, Claude Design was a very interesting addition.
> Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers.
Quoting from the article, which of course you did not read:
>Looking at Figma's S1 (which is somewhat out of date by now, but is the only reported breakdown I can find) corroborates this potential weakness. Only 33% of Figma's userbase in Q1 2025 was designers, with developers making up 30% and other non-design roles making up 37%.
>A lot of Figma's continued expansion depended on this part of their userbase.
Plus, Figma uses Claude, so
>At this point Figma is effectively funding a competitor - and the more AI usage Figma has - the more money they send over to Anthropic for the tokens they use. Even worse, Sonnet 4.5 is miles behind what Anthropic uses on Claude Design (Opus 4.7, which has vastly improved vision capabilities)
> Quoting from the article, which of course you did not read
What makes you think that I didn’t read the article, but rather just disagree with it?
“which of course you did not read” is such a negative/toxic statement that adds no value.
obviously developers use the product to collaborate with designers. but it’s not the developers that are buying this product. they’re just stakeholders.
The developer seats are read-only, so they rely on designer seats existing to actually create files to inspect for development (and I’d guess PMs are using figma because designers are using figma).
If designers still want Figma then the other people are along for the ride (unless the idea is the designers are being replaced with a PM+Claude.)
A very large portion of the non-design users are using it to reference/implement the designs created by their designer colleagues. They’re not going anywhere.
Sure, if your design decisions are completely one-sided and transactional. In my experience, though, being able to comment and collaborate in Figma is important, as is being able to go find specific icons and components on my own.
> People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate. Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs.
Maybe it will replace (a large share of) Figma users.
Yeah this is my take too.. I know a lot of front-end developers who pay for Figma and/or are not so invested in design that they need to do it all by hand.
They will gladly use something like this (many have already started experimenting with other similar products) to get them even 60% of the way there and then they can polish the rest in code...
Which is basically how they used Figma before. Visualize to close enough and then iterate to final in code.
If Claude Design can ingest your design system and previous examples and go further than templates and scaffolding, if it can help you brainstorm ideas and variations so you can - as the human in the loop - get to your final design faster..
People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate.
The entire workflow between designer --> dev hand off is going to change.
I think the most effective teams will be working within Claude, not within Figma.
For individual creators, this will definitely replace Figma. I bought Sketch for use as an individual creator because I wanted to create mocks before coding them. There's no way I'd make the same purchase today.
Anyways, I'm sure Claude Design will incorporate some of Figma's features such as a company wide design language.
While a big fan of Claude's models, I am starting to worry about the "winner takes all" game starting to play out in the open. With free inference to them (as pointed out in the article), why won't Anthropic build significantly more products related to software development, and kill all other competitors? Developers first, Designers next, would some kind of a clone of Jira / Monday / Asana be next?
It's funny to see all of these dramatic articles coming out about Claude Design, when Google's Stitch[0] has been around for at least 6 months and no one has batted an eye. https://stitch.withgoogle.com/
I'm not sure how much of that is overhyping Claude, or Google's poor marketing of their own products.
Anthropic today feels like 1990s Microsoft, when mere rumors that MS might enter yet another software vertical (publishing, CAD, 3D etc.) were enough to destroy the stock prices of current market leaders.
> A lot of their recent product development has been to enable further expansion in organisations - "Dev Mode" for developers (which now looks incredibly quaint against LLMs), […] all are about expanding their TAM out of "pure" design.
I don't think this is correct. In my experience no one buys Figma because of Dev Mode only. Dev Mode just makes it easier/faster to go from an existing design to working code. So it is/was a means to increase Figma's moat, not to get new customers or users. (Devs already needed access to Figma before the introduction of Dev Mode.)
The inference provider conflict is the structural detail the article makes but the thread hasn't focused on: Figma is paying Anthropic for Sonnet 4.5 inference to power Figma Make while Claude Design runs on Opus 4.7 — that's a permanent capability ceiling for any Anthropic-dependent product, not a temporary execution gap. Traditional SaaS moats (multiplayer, design systems, plugin ecosystems) are moats against other SaaS companies. Against the company providing your inference, the only real moat is model-agnosticism, and Figma's design workflows are hard to decouple from a single provider at this stage.
Claude Design into PenPot via its MCP was a really neat flow, for something generic looking anyway. With the correct prompts and it even built out reusable PenPot components and design system tokens etc
Used Claude Design to build the landing page for my side project (strimoza.com) over the weekend. Honestly impressive for a solo dev with no design background — got something shippable in a few hours. That said, I still ended up going back to tweak things manually. It's great for 80%, the last 20% still needs judgment. Not sure it kills Figma for teams, but for indie devs it's a game changer.
It’s pretty hard to read on a phone, and the prose, particularly in the bullet points, has that annoying LLM-y trait of focusing way too much on implementation details ("Bunny CDN"!) rather than telling me a single reason why I'd actually want to pay for your product.
The other commenter went a bit hard on their critique.. to each their own, I think your design is mostly fine except for that super squished title font (that is also sadly used on buttons)..
It makes it very hard to read, and if you're counting on people scanning the page to quickly understand your offering, and then stick around, you should consider fixing that.
Choose a better proportioned font to improve readability and it will make your site instantly better and easier to understand.
I honestly thought the rendering was broken when I first loaded the page (I'm on an ultra-wide monitor) but then realized it was just like that.
If i can be forthright, it looks like any other llm slop website design. The grain effect, the extra long FAQ, the reveal animations, the bad combination of font sizes and contrast ratios.. you're better off ripping off a website that has been actually designed by someone who understands what they are doing.
my 2 cents - Claude is not going after EVERY single SaaS (or maybe not yet), but after those products that are adopted by individuals that are keen at experimenting new tools (software engineers, designers etc etc).
At the same time I have the feeling Claude Design is more useful to get UI context closer to Code Claude then anything (and eventually some quick prototyping), but I might be wrong.
Either way, I've been trying to upload a 95MB .fig file and I get a generic error message without any information on the issue itself (is the file too big? not the right format? Tell me!)
Great take. I think the only way forward for Figma will be the good old "let's cannibalise our own product" playbook. They are actually in prime position (with one of the best brands and distributions out there) to create an AI design product that dominates the market.
> Anthropic themselves launched Claude Design which is a pretty direct competitor to Figma in many ways. While it's nowhere near functional and polished enough to replace Figma's core design product, I expect it will get significant traction outside of that
The reaction that designers I know have given Claude Design couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for designers, their workflow is very different from software devs. You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs.
People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate.
Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers.
Figma will probably better integrate AI in their own offering at some point which will help designers become more productive. And that will be the end of it.
> couldn’t be different than how Claude Code was received by software devs. It’s simply useless for designers, their workflow is very different from software devs. You can’t “oh let Claude Design come up with a quick logo for this” in the same way that Claude Code was able to quickly solve small annoyances for devs.
Haha, that's exactly how cc was received initially. It's just autocomplete. It's useless. It can't even x. I tried to y and it gave me z. Over and over all over the internet this was the reaction. Then the bargaining began. Oh, it will maybe speed up some simple things. Like autocomplete on steroids. Maaaybe do some junior tasks once in a while. And so on...
As someone who does both development and design, I agree. With some caveats.
At this point, Claude now writes > 99% of my code. I wasn't an enthusiastic early adopter; it took me a while to be willing to let go of the reins. But in tandem with LLMS getting better, I also began to realize that what happens inside the code is very rarely important enough for me to care about. Like, I care that it's secure, and performant where it needs to be, etc. -- but mostly I just care about its outputs. If it does what I want it to do, then how it does this doesn't really matter to me or my clients. On the development side, my attention has focused to writing specifications and monitoring the correctness of the test suite, and > 99% of the time that's good enough. It's been a lesson in non-attachment to let go of lovingly crafting every single line of code, but the tradeoff in terms of productivity has absolutely been worth it.
What makes this viable is the fact that there's essentially a "hidden layer" (the code) upon which Claude can operate. My clients don't actually care about the code, and within certain bounds (correctness, security, performance, extensibility, etc.) it turns out that neither do I. This gives Claude a lot of latitude to solve things in its own way, and I think that's a bit part of its effectiveness.
On the other hand, with design there is no hidden layer. Every single aspect of the design is visible to the user and the customer. So the design reflects upon my work in ways that code does not. This means that the conditions which allow me to relax my grip on coding just don't exist for design. It's very difficult for me to imagine delegating design in the same way that I've become comfortable delegating coding.
That said: I suspect that the use-case for Claude Design will be for applications which today receive very little design attention. There are loads of applications where design is less than an afterthought, and the product suffers terribly for it. Delegating to Claude, in those contexts, would likely be a very big win. But for applications which already have designers obsessing over every pixel, I see a very limited role for this. Figma's market is mostly the latter -- the former, by definition, is not part of the market for design tools -- so I don't see them being threatened by this for a long time.
I tried uploading our design system. Claude Design’s environment was so limited it had to reimplement it from scratch in HTML, JS and CSS. Doing that burned through more than half the token limit. Along the way it completely changed it and made up things that don’t fit in at all, neither visually or as code. The output of making a mockup is one huge HTML file with minified CSS that just can’t be used meaningfully for anything.
I guess I had expected something like Claude Code with visual tools added on top, but that’s not what this is.
There are many designers. I know a bunch who basically stopped using Figma altogether and just prototype what they're working on directly in code these days. For them, Claude Design was a very interesting addition.
> Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs. It’s not aimed at designers.
Quoting from the article, which of course you did not read:
>Looking at Figma's S1 (which is somewhat out of date by now, but is the only reported breakdown I can find) corroborates this potential weakness. Only 33% of Figma's userbase in Q1 2025 was designers, with developers making up 30% and other non-design roles making up 37%.
>A lot of Figma's continued expansion depended on this part of their userbase.
Plus, Figma uses Claude, so
>At this point Figma is effectively funding a competitor - and the more AI usage Figma has - the more money they send over to Anthropic for the tokens they use. Even worse, Sonnet 4.5 is miles behind what Anthropic uses on Claude Design (Opus 4.7, which has vastly improved vision capabilities)
> Quoting from the article, which of course you did not read
What makes you think that I didn’t read the article, but rather just disagree with it?
“which of course you did not read” is such a negative/toxic statement that adds no value.
obviously developers use the product to collaborate with designers. but it’s not the developers that are buying this product. they’re just stakeholders.
The developer seats are read-only, so they rely on designer seats existing to actually create files to inspect for development (and I’d guess PMs are using figma because designers are using figma).
If designers still want Figma then the other people are along for the ride (unless the idea is the designers are being replaced with a PM+Claude.)
Personally, as a developer, I interact with figma to use designs made by designers. So a portion of that userbase probably isn't going anywhere?
A very large portion of the non-design users are using it to reference/implement the designs created by their designer colleagues. They’re not going anywhere.
if you export the .fig file (even programatically) and you ingest in Claude Design you won't need to create users in Figma, right?
Sure, if your design decisions are completely one-sided and transactional. In my experience, though, being able to comment and collaborate in Figma is important, as is being able to go find specific icons and components on my own.
i believe it depends on the design system maturity too.
> People that think that Claude Design is going to replace Figma don’t really understand how both products relate. Claude Design empowers non-designers to make decent designs.
Maybe it will replace (a large share of) Figma users.
Yeah this is my take too.. I know a lot of front-end developers who pay for Figma and/or are not so invested in design that they need to do it all by hand.
They will gladly use something like this (many have already started experimenting with other similar products) to get them even 60% of the way there and then they can polish the rest in code...
Which is basically how they used Figma before. Visualize to close enough and then iterate to final in code.
If Claude Design can ingest your design system and previous examples and go further than templates and scaffolding, if it can help you brainstorm ideas and variations so you can - as the human in the loop - get to your final design faster..
Why wouldn't you do that?
I think the most effective teams will be working within Claude, not within Figma.
For individual creators, this will definitely replace Figma. I bought Sketch for use as an individual creator because I wanted to create mocks before coding them. There's no way I'd make the same purchase today.
Anyways, I'm sure Claude Design will incorporate some of Figma's features such as a company wide design language.
While a big fan of Claude's models, I am starting to worry about the "winner takes all" game starting to play out in the open. With free inference to them (as pointed out in the article), why won't Anthropic build significantly more products related to software development, and kill all other competitors? Developers first, Designers next, would some kind of a clone of Jira / Monday / Asana be next?
It's funny to see all of these dramatic articles coming out about Claude Design, when Google's Stitch[0] has been around for at least 6 months and no one has batted an eye. https://stitch.withgoogle.com/
I'm not sure how much of that is overhyping Claude, or Google's poor marketing of their own products.
Anthropic today feels like 1990s Microsoft, when mere rumors that MS might enter yet another software vertical (publishing, CAD, 3D etc.) were enough to destroy the stock prices of current market leaders.
> A lot of their recent product development has been to enable further expansion in organisations - "Dev Mode" for developers (which now looks incredibly quaint against LLMs), […] all are about expanding their TAM out of "pure" design.
I don't think this is correct. In my experience no one buys Figma because of Dev Mode only. Dev Mode just makes it easier/faster to go from an existing design to working code. So it is/was a means to increase Figma's moat, not to get new customers or users. (Devs already needed access to Figma before the introduction of Dev Mode.)
I tested it yesterday. Kinda impressive, but also design output is pretty boring.
The inference provider conflict is the structural detail the article makes but the thread hasn't focused on: Figma is paying Anthropic for Sonnet 4.5 inference to power Figma Make while Claude Design runs on Opus 4.7 — that's a permanent capability ceiling for any Anthropic-dependent product, not a temporary execution gap. Traditional SaaS moats (multiplayer, design systems, plugin ecosystems) are moats against other SaaS companies. Against the company providing your inference, the only real moat is model-agnosticism, and Figma's design workflows are hard to decouple from a single provider at this stage.
And which model did you use to generate this comment? Please use your own voice.
Claude Design into PenPot via its MCP was a really neat flow, for something generic looking anyway. With the correct prompts and it even built out reusable PenPot components and design system tokens etc
Used Claude Design to build the landing page for my side project (strimoza.com) over the weekend. Honestly impressive for a solo dev with no design background — got something shippable in a few hours. That said, I still ended up going back to tweak things manually. It's great for 80%, the last 20% still needs judgment. Not sure it kills Figma for teams, but for indie devs it's a game changer.
Please change your hero font. The extra wide style hurts reading
It’s pretty hard to read on a phone, and the prose, particularly in the bullet points, has that annoying LLM-y trait of focusing way too much on implementation details ("Bunny CDN"!) rather than telling me a single reason why I'd actually want to pay for your product.
The other commenter went a bit hard on their critique.. to each their own, I think your design is mostly fine except for that super squished title font (that is also sadly used on buttons)..
It makes it very hard to read, and if you're counting on people scanning the page to quickly understand your offering, and then stick around, you should consider fixing that.
Choose a better proportioned font to improve readability and it will make your site instantly better and easier to understand.
I honestly thought the rendering was broken when I first loaded the page (I'm on an ultra-wide monitor) but then realized it was just like that.
If i can be forthright, it looks like any other llm slop website design. The grain effect, the extra long FAQ, the reveal animations, the bad combination of font sizes and contrast ratios.. you're better off ripping off a website that has been actually designed by someone who understands what they are doing.
Did you checked it in mobile device?
my 2 cents - Claude is not going after EVERY single SaaS (or maybe not yet), but after those products that are adopted by individuals that are keen at experimenting new tools (software engineers, designers etc etc).
At the same time I have the feeling Claude Design is more useful to get UI context closer to Code Claude then anything (and eventually some quick prototyping), but I might be wrong.
Either way, I've been trying to upload a 95MB .fig file and I get a generic error message without any information on the issue itself (is the file too big? not the right format? Tell me!)
Great take. I think the only way forward for Figma will be the good old "let's cannibalise our own product" playbook. They are actually in prime position (with one of the best brands and distributions out there) to create an AI design product that dominates the market.