Brilliant vs Figma

Figma set the standard for the last decade of product design. Canvas in a browser tab, cursors on a link, a component model an entire industry learned by heart. Any honest comparison starts there.

Brilliant is a full professional design tool in the same mold. Auto layout, components, instances, vector editing, pen tool, boolean operations, design tokens, design systems, typography controls, frames, groups, all of it. If you sit down and design by hand, you get near-complete feature parity with Figma. Same muscle memory, same primitives, same final output.

What Brilliant adds is a team of AI agents that work directly on the canvas alongside you. You're not trading one tool for a smaller one. You're getting the same tool, with superpowers.

Agents that design alongside you

Brilliant gives you a team of AI agents that do real design work on the canvas. Prompt them in plain English and they create elements, rebuild layouts, swap design tokens, try typography, pull in brand assets, and generate variations on what you're already working on. Every element they produce is a real vector you can nudge, recolor, or throw away. You stay the creative director. They handle the work you'd rather not.

The output is professional. Auto-layout rules, components and instances, design tokens, effects. Agents use the same primitives you do, so what they hand you fits into the rest of your file. Accuracy is high enough that you're editing their work, not rescuing it. Read the architecture →

Figma's agent story runs the other way. You configure an external agent in Claude Code or Cursor, it talks to Figma through a partial MCP server (read is free; write is in beta on the paid remote server), and the output lands from outside. Brilliant's agents work from inside the canvas, in the same tool you're already in.

No setup needed either way. Click the AI input in the bottom toolbar, bring your own key for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or OpenRouter, or sign in with your Claude Code subscription. If you'd rather drive Brilliant from your editor (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, Antigravity, Lovable, anything that speaks MCP), that works too. You set the vision. They execute. You override.

Free, all of it

Figma is a seat-based SaaS. You pay per editor, you pay extra for developers who want to look at your work through Dev Mode, and the price climbs with headcount.

Brilliant is free. The full design tool. Auto layout, components, vector editing, effects, design systems, tokens, animated GPU shaders, full export (PNG, JPEG, WebP, SVG, PDF, HTML, React, MP4, MOV, Replay), Figma import, unlimited MCP usage. Bring your own AI key. Not a trial, not a stripped-down version. Free.

Monetization lives in the integrated AI chat and in keeping your work private. Free gives you 10 AI messages a day and unlimited public projects. Personal lifts the daily cap and unlocks private projects, drops, and share links. Team adds pooled storage, unlimited editors on private work, user management, and one invoice for the group. Same model that's worked for developers on GitHub and VS Code for over a decade. You don't pay rent on the act of writing code, and you shouldn't pay rent on the act of moving elements on a canvas.

Your designs, your disk, your git

Figma files live on Figma's servers in .fig, a proprietary closed format you access through a browser tab. Version history is linear and vendor-controlled.

Brilliant files are plain-text Blueprint on your local disk. They end in .bl, and they diff cleanly in git. Branch a canvas to try a direction. Commit the experiment. Revert it if it doesn't work out. Run git blame to find the commit where the hero color drifted off-brand. Every primitive your codebase already uses is now available for your designs:

 c16fc75741feed85 fr p(80,80) s(480,320) rd(16) "Hero"
-  88625e475868c087 r p(24,24) s(160,100) f[(r1,#F8F8F8)] rd(8) "Panel"
+  88625e475868c087 r p(24,24) s(160,100) f[(r1,#0080FF)] rd(8) "Panel"

"GitHub for design", visual design-file diffs, branching, pull-request review, publishable component libraries, is the next chapter of Brilliant. The primitives (plain-text files, git compatibility) are here today.

Superpowers that actually render

Figma gives you fills, strokes, and a handful of fixed effects. Anything richer, animated gradients, metal, iridescence, glass, shader art, lives outside the tool or behind plugin gymnastics.

Brilliant ships a real GPU shader stack as first-class canvas fills. metaballs(), metal(), irid(), steel(). They render live while you design, compose with the rest of your effects, and export cleanly to raster or video. A professional 2D vector design tool, with superpowers.

Feature for feature

Every primitive you reach for in Figma has its equivalent here, driven with the same muscle memory:

• Auto layout with direction, hug, fill, and fixed sizing, gap, padding, wrap, alignment, and layout grids.

• Components and instances, with component sets, variant properties, slots, override detection, and cross-canvas instances.

• Vector editing with a pen and pencil, a full node-and-handle edit mode, boolean union, subtract, intersect, and exclude, flatten, and outline text.

• Frames, groups, and masks, with clip-content and per-corner radii.

• A full design-token system: eleven-step OKLCH color ramps from one seed, light and dark theming, modes as transforms, and multi-brand overlays, resolved to a file Style Dictionary and Tokens Studio read.

• Typography down to per-character overrides for mixed-style runs.

• Fills, strokes, gradients, and effects: linear, radial, and angular gradients, image fills, drop shadow, inner shadow, glows, layer and background blur, and blend modes.

• Ten export formats: PNG, JPEG, WebP, SVG, PDF, HTML in three flavors, React JSX, MP4, MOV, and Replay.

• Figma import by URL, page, or node-id subtree, plus Send to Figma for the trip back.

Sit down and design by hand and the primitives, the shortcuts, and the final output match. What is new is everything around them.

What Brilliant has that Figma doesn't

• Agents that work on the canvas alongside you. Not a prompt box next to it. A team that creates real vectors, applies your design system, and iterates in the same file you're already editing.

• A free, full-featured design tool. No seat tax, no Dev Mode upsell, no gated primitives.

• Plain-text, git-friendly files. Blueprint on disk, clean diffs, blameable history.

• Native GPU shaders. Metaballs, metal, iridescent, steel as first-class fills.

• Ten export formats including code and video. PNG, JPEG, WebP, SVG, PDF, HTML, React, MP4, MOV, Replay.

• Unlimited MCP usage on Free. Your external agent can drive Brilliant without a rate limit.

The honest gaps

The one capability Figma ships that Brilliant hasn't shipped yet is interactive prototyping: the mode that wires frames into clickable flows. Brilliant is a fully editable static canvas today, with prototyping on the roadmap, and everything you'd build a prototype from (frames, components, variants, auto layout, tokens) is already here at parity. If a click-through prototype is the one artifact your week turns on, that single step still lives in Figma; everything around it is already here, with the agents, the plain-text files in git, and the shaders that Figma doesn't have.

At a glance

A new dance

If Figma is the standard, Brilliant is the question the standard is no longer the right answer to. One designer directing thirty agents. Design files in git. A full professional design tool that doesn't ask for rent.

Read the full manifesto to see the rest of the argument, or install Brilliant and try it for yourself.