Brilliant vs Visily

Visily is an AI-first UI design tool with real momentum, and it's honest about who it's for. It describes itself as "AI-powered UI design software," and its whole surface is built around describing or pasting rather than drawing: text-to-design, screenshot-to-design, even diagram-to-design, with a big template library and collaboration that doesn't charge you for viewers. If you want non-designers to produce plausible screens quickly, in the browser, Visily is good at that, and this page will say where it's genuinely strong before it says anything else.

Brilliant is aimed at a different job. It's a professional 2D vector design tool, in the Figma mold, that an AI agent can drive through a full command surface, with the design landing as real editable elements you own on disk. The two tools overlap on the words "AI" and "UI design" and diverge almost everywhere underneath, so the useful comparison is about depth, about what the agent can actually do, and about where the file lives.

Visily facts on this page are current as of August 2026. Where a detail matters, check it against Visily's own docs.

Where Visily is genuinely strong

None of these are things to wave away.

• It's built for non-designers, on purpose. The entire AI surface assumes you'd rather describe or paste than draw, and Plan Mode lets you shape intent before generating. That's a real thesis, well executed.

• Zero install, wide reach. It runs in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari, and design review works on mobile browsers. Brilliant has a web editor, but its home is a desktop app.

• One canvas for more than UI. Sitemaps, flowcharts, org charts, ERDs, sticky notes, and connectors live in the same board as your screens. Brilliant is a design canvas, not a diagramming surface.

• A large template library. Visily advertises over 1,500 templates across UI and diagram categories.

• Collaboration that doesn't meter viewers. Viewers and guests need no license.

• It ships prototyping. Real triggers, actions, and transitions across eight documented areas. Brilliant is a static canvas today, with no interactive prototyping at all.

Agents that write the canvas, versus agents that read it

Visily ships a real MCP server, and that deserves a fair hearing rather than a dismissal. Point your agent at a Visily board and it can find it, turn it into application code, or pull its theme tokens, generating a React, TypeScript, Tailwind, and shadcn/ui stack, with an installer set covering a long list of named agent clients. That's a legitimate design-to-code path, and anyone who told you Visily "has no MCP" would be wrong.

The honest distinction is about direction and access, not existence. Visily's documented MCP tools are read-oriented: get_design_context, get_screenshot, get_board_theme, and the list_* discovery calls. They read a design and hand it to your agent; none of them is documented to write or mutate elements on the canvas. And the server is gated: by Visily's own rule it "works only on workspaces on a Pro or Business plan where you are the workspace creator or have an editor license. Free workspaces and viewer/guest roles are not supported."

Brilliant's agent surface points the other way. Its MCP server lets an agent create designs as native editable elements, read structure, change properties, reparent, rename, delete, and reorder, search across every canvas, and run the same hundred-plus canvas commands you do, each with full undo, and it's unlimited on every plan including Free. Both are real MCP stories. One reads your design out to code; the other builds and edits the design itself. What an agent can do in Brilliant →

Professional depth, versus a five-shape catalogue

Visily publishes its complete shape list, which makes this easy to state without guessing. It's exactly five items: "rectangle, overlay, oval, line, and triangle." There's no pen or bezier path editing in that catalogue, no boolean operations, and no auto layout in the Figma sense (Visily offers alignment, even spacing, and anchor-based constraints instead). Reuse runs through saved templates rather than a master-instance component model with named properties and variant axes, and its design-token story is a per-board Theme plus token output to Tailwind and CSS variables, not an in-editor variables system with modes.

Brilliant is a full editor underneath. Pen and pencil with vector edit mode, boolean union, subtract, intersect and exclude, flatten and outline text, auto layout with hug, fill, and fixed sizing and layout grids, and component sets with variants, properties, slots, and cross-canvas instances. On tokens it compiles a Styles/*.ds source into eleven-step OKLCH ramps from one seed, with light and dark theming, modes as transforms, multi-brand overlays, and a resolved .gen.yaml that Style Dictionary and Tokens Studio read. How the token system works →

Your key, and your files

Visily's AI is hosted and metered in credits that reset each month, and it doesn't name the model behind them. There's no bring-your-own-key option. Brilliant is bring-your-own-key by design across Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, OpenRouter, Claude Code and Codex subscriptions, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint including local LM Studio, Ollama, and vLLM, hosting no inference and taking no markup. Your prompts go to a model you chose, on a key in your own name. Bring your own key →

The files diverge just as sharply. Visily is cloud-only: the unit of work is a board in a workspace, durability is expressed as recovery windows rather than files, and there's no documented open format or plain-text, version-controllable source. Its interchange .vis file exists only to move a design to the Visily plugin in Figma. Image export is PNG, JPG, and WebP with PDF; SVG isn't a design export, only an asset download in Inspect; and code export is paid, screens-only, up to ten at a time.

A Brilliant workspace is a folder on your disk, each canvas a plain-text Blueprint .bl file that diffs cleanly in git without unzipping anything:

 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"

Brilliant exports to ten formats including HTML in three flavors and React JSX, imports from Figma by URL, page, or node-id subtree, and has Send to Figma for the trip back. Your designs live where your code lives →

What Brilliant has that Visily doesn't

• Agents that build and edit the canvas. Create, reparent, restyle, reorder, and run 100+ undoable commands, unlimited on Free, versus a read-oriented MCP gated to paid editor seats.

• Professional editor depth. Pen tool, boolean ops, auto layout, and component sets with variants, next to a five-shape catalogue.

• Bring your own AI key, zero markup. A model you chose on a key in your name, versus hosted credits with the provider unnamed.

• Plain-text files you own. Blueprint on local disk that diffs in git, versus cloud-only boards with no open format.

• A full design-token system. OKLCH ramps, modes, and brands, with a resolved file Style Dictionary and Tokens Studio read.

• Figma interop in both directions. Import by URL, page, or subtree, plus Send to Figma.

What Visily does better

• Non-designer accessibility. Describe or paste your way to a screen, with generation, screenshots, and diagrams as first-class inputs. Brilliant is a professional editor and asks more of you.

• Interactive prototyping. Real triggers, actions, and transitions. Brilliant is a static canvas today.

• Diagramming in the same canvas. Sitemaps, flowcharts, ERDs, and sticky notes beside your UI. Brilliant doesn't do this.

• A large template library and browser-based, zero-install reach across desktop and mobile.

• Viewer-free collaboration. Unlimited viewers and guests without a seat charge.

If you want non-designers producing plausible screens fast, in the browser, with diagrams and prototypes in one place, Visily is a strong pick and you should try it.

At a glance

A new dance

Visily and Brilliant both put "AI" and "UI design" on the label and then head in opposite directions. Visily is the accessible front door: describe a screen, get one, prototype it, hand it to a developer as code. Brilliant is the professional editor an agent can build inside, with the depth of a real design tool, the model bill in your own name, and the file in your own git history. If your work stops at a plausible first screen, Visily is a fine home for it. If it starts there, that's the tool Brilliant is trying to be.

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