The DOJ just called me about Adobe/Figma merger I only hire people who use the software. I couldn't answer all of their questions. So I thought you guys might be able to help.
1. What is the cost of each and how has that changed over time?
2. Are there any true alternatives to these two?
3. Has Adobe innovated more as a result of the competition with Figma?
4. Anything else you could contribute to show how a user/consumer would be harmed by the merger. Thanks for your help. |
Then a step further, Figma opened up a Community resource where people can publish their own, which are so simple to consume. My wife is the general manager of a dog kennel / daycare facility and I have made several posters and documents for them in Figma.
The only thing I can't speak to is the first point since all of that evaluation and decision making process was routed to people far above my paygrade. So to your other bulletpoints:
2. There are many alternatives to Figma - the industry standard in UI/UX design was Sketch from about 2013. Figma began really emerging in 2017-2019, and then skyrocketed in marketshare during the COVID pandemic[0]. uxtools.co is a great resource for data around this - not just as it pertains to the current Adobe/Figma context but as a year-to-year "State of UX design tools" pulse check.
However, and this is key: not one competitor holds a candle to both the amount of features and designer-friendly implementation of said features that Figma has. I have seen some of the staunchiest "It's just another design tool, it'll be replaced! Sketch is fine! The tools don't matter, it's your UX skills that are most important" crowd capitulate the superiority of Figma after getting to dig in for a while.
Sketch has been falling behind for years and hasn't even began to catch up. Other competitors like Adobe XD, UXPin, InVision Studio feel like clunky stripped-down Figma knockoffs in comparison. Webflow and Framer are too niche in my mind to be considered competitors: those are GUI-based low/no-code landing page builders. Those do not serve the needs of a UX practice, especially one at scale.
Someone will see this comment and say "but, Penpot!" Sure, that is potentially a viable competitor, but it is still in infancy though they did just raise a big round [1]. They went live I think mid-2021. And virtually nobody knew who they were until the day the Figma acquisition was announced. I would estimate that the adoption rate among mature teams right now is effectively zero. It looks like a great product and I am so thrilled someone is putting out an OSS design tool that looks competent, but it is far too early to call them a competitor as far as I am concerned.
3. Not that I've observed. I am sure they have aped some of Figma's features in XD in the last handful of years, but looking at the XD landing page now, the product looks the same to me as it did in 2017.
4. The biggest fears among my industry peers that I have observed:
-Fear of Figma being bundled into Adobe Creative Cloud, which is viewed largely as an annoying workflow dependency that only exists to keep recurring revenue going to Adobe and interrupt you with an update modal from time to time. People really hate OS-level depedencies that suck precious RAM. This is another reason people love Figma - they understand that nobody wants both Figma AND the "Figma Cloud Uploader" running 40+ hours a week on their work Macbook, bogging your system resources down. This was another point InVision fucked up - having the Craft suite running behind Sketch all the time is a shitty experience.
-Fear of Figma becoming less performant over time. Adobe products became synonymous with the pinwheel of death on MacOS. There have been a crop of memes in the design industry social realms [2] visualizing that future.
Figma have done some brilliant work in performance and architecture. Many of their engineering blog posts have been shared on HN. The post about building a plugin API, IIRC, generated a lot of discussion [3].
I only mention that because Figma leadership are saying that Adobe wants to learn from Figma's team on how to improve performance and architecture of their existing products. If THAT is true, then that actually strikes me as a win-win for everyone: if Adobe leaves Figma to their devices but uses insight from them to improve Adobe legacy products, I feel like everyone wins.
Of course, this could all just be honeymoon period, "grand plans post-acquisition" talk from newly minted wealthy folks. Lots of designers are expecting Adobe to take their enterprise chainsaw to Figma and fuck it all up for us. I am trying to be optimistic. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Figma fanboy and have been doing advocacy work (for free, stupidly, but whatever) for them for years. I hope the team will continue to build on what was a revolutionary change in design tooling for the industry. They insist that this is the case and that they and Adobe are committed to keeping things that way. Most people I know in the industry are not so positive about it.
[0] https://uxtools.co/blog/7-takeaways-from-2020-ux-tools-surve...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/28/penpot-an-open-source-rival-...
[2] https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*nWwTmO_oNUjc3537
[3] https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-sys...
As you say, Sketch and Adobe XD are desktop apps for the sole designer. In Figma, no designer presence needed for a myriad of use cases and user types.
I can only assume in the future soon Adobe will change Figma sign-ups into Adobe ID accounts (like Adobe have done with Behance).
[1] The Sketch team wrote a blog post extolling the virtues of native apps - no doubt with a nod to their Figma cloud rival.
Why we’re proud to build a truly native Mac app (Oct 2020): https://www.sketch.com/blog/2020/10/26/part-of-your-world-wh...
https://mockitt.wondershare.com/software-design/ui-design-so...
It's a way of getting a payout for them they otherwise wouldn't likely get.