Brilliant.design vs Figma: I Tried the Free Tool That Claims to Replace Figma

I put it side by side with Figma and tested the AI myself

Quick note before you dive in: every tool or feature I mention here, I’ll tell you straight up whether it’s free or paid as of today. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched a video, gotten excited about some AI result, tried it myself, and only then found out the person was on a paid plan the whole time. Not doing that to you.

Every few months a new tool shows up claiming to be “the Figma killer.” Most of them fade out within a year. So when Brilliant.design started showing up in design circles with that exact pitch, I wanted to try it myself instead of trusting the claim.

This isn’t a credit-tracking test the way my last few posts were, but the free plan does have a daily cap worth knowing about. This post covers what Brilliant is, where it matches Figma, where it differs, and what I found when I actually tested the AI myself.

What Is Brilliant.design?

Brilliant.design is a free design app for macOS and Windows, built around AI working directly on the design canvas. The AI isn’t a chatbot sitting in a side panel giving suggestions. It’s meant to edit layers and components on the canvas itself, the same way you would with a mouse.

Outside of the AI part, it’s a full vector design tool. Frames, components, auto layout, Boolean operations, design tokens, the same vocabulary any Figma user already knows. You already have the mental model. You’re just learning a new interface for it.

It’s built by a small team, and the framing they’re going for is design files that work more like code.

What the Free Plan Actually Gives You

Brilliant’s pricing has three tiers. Free is $0 forever, the desktop app, 10 AI chat messages a day, and 2 GB storage. Personal is $16 a month ($192 billed annually), unlimited AI chat, and 50 GB storage, aimed at private solo work. Team is $20 per seat a month with a 2 seat minimum, unlimited editors, and 1 TB of pooled storage.

So there is a real cap on the free tier, 10 AI messages a day. It doesn’t show up as a running credit counter while you work the way Google Stitch or Figma Make show you, it’s just stated on the pricing page. Ten a day is tighter than either of those free plans, so if you’re testing this seriously, that’s worth pacing yourself around.

How It Resembles Figma

If you’ve used Figma for more than a week, Brilliant will feel familiar quickly.

Some of the overlap:

• Auto layout that behaves the way you’d expect
• Components and variants, same conceptual setup
• Full vector editing and Boolean operations
• Design tokens for color, spacing, and type
• Frame-based canvas structure

For manual design work, someone who builds screens by hand without touching AI at all could switch over and lose almost nothing.

Where It Differs

Files you can read and diff. Every Brilliant file is a .bl file, plain text you can open and read outside the app. That means version control through git, the same way developers track changes in code, so you can see exactly what changed between two versions. Figma keeps version history inside its own system. Brilliant's version history lives in a format you control.

AI editing inside the file. In Figma, AI tools, including Figma’s own features and MCP integrations, mostly generate output that lands on the canvas from the outside. Brilliant’s agent is built to work inside the file directly, editing the specific elements you point it to.

GPU shaders. Brilliant renders real-time materials, metal, glass, iridescent surfaces, through the GPU. Figma has no equivalent for this. If your work involves high-end visual polish beyond flat UI, this is a capability Figma simply doesn’t offer.

No per-seat pricing. Figma charges per editor. Brilliant’s design tool itself is free with no seat cost.

No built-in prototyping. Figma’s interactive click-through prototyping has no equivalent in Brilliant. If prototyping is part of how you present work to clients or stakeholders, this is a gap.

Testing the AI Directly

Brilliant actually gives you two ways to use its AI.

The recommended one, the one it leads with, is connecting an agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) or adding an API key. That lines up with what Brilliant’s own homepage pushes: “point Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP agent at a real canvas.” The agent connection is clearly the feature they want you using, it’s the whole pitch.

The second way is a prompt bar at the bottom of the main canvas, with a few preset options shown as clickable pills. That one worked with nothing connected. I stuck to those preset pills for my testing and didn’t try typing a fully custom prompt of my own into that bar, so I can’t tell you whether free-form typed prompts work the same way there.

First test: a note page

I clicked one of the pills:

“Notes app entry view, one note hero, beautiful typography”

This one I watched happen in real time. A small label followed the cursor showing each step. It starts with loading animation, header, setup color palette, layout, typography, main content, and side panels.

The result worked well. A full note page came together: a header with metadata (entry number, reading time, word count), a pull quote, body text, a related-entries sidebar, all built with real auto layout and a layer structure any Figma user would recognize instantly, right down to a properties panel on the right showing fill, spacing, and typography controls that look almost identical to Figma’s.

Second test: a Kanban board

I tried a second prompt from the pills:

“Project management hero, one task board mockup, organized feel”

It starts with loading design knowledge (colors, typography, layout, components, shadows), then building the navigation, then the copy and CTAs, then the Kanban board itself. At one point the second row of cards got clipped by the frame, and it caught that mid-process and extended the frame so everything fit. The final result was a full SaaS landing page hero with a working Kanban mockup, tagged cards, a progress bar, and status colors that stayed consistent throughout.

What this actually means

I can’t tell you if this preset route runs on a limited number of free prompts, a bundled model, or something else. That’s not something I could confirm just by using it, but you can check it yourself.

This was two prompts on my end, not exhaustive testing. If you try it with something heavier or more complex, drop what you find in the comments. I’d like to see how far this goes.

Pros

• Free, no per-seat pricing
• Feature parity with Figma for manual design work
• Plain-text, git-diffable files with real version control
• GPU shaders Figma doesn’t have
• AI built to edit inside the file, not just generate flat output
• Preset prompts work immediately, no account setup or API key needed to start building

Cons

• No built-in interactive prototyping
• Only 10 free AI messages a day, tighter than the free plans I tested on Stitch or Figma Make
• Smaller team and ecosystem compared to Figma’s plugins and community
• No browser-based version, desktop app only for macOS and Windows, unlike Figma which runs anywhere with an internet connection
• Still a young tool, so features and pricing could shift faster than an established product like Figma
• Only tested on two prompts myself; how it holds up on more complex, real client work is something you’ll want to check yourself

Whether any of that matters to you depends on what you’d actually use it for. If you’ve used Brilliant yourself, especially for anything past a quick test, I’d like to hear how it went. Drop it in the comments.

I’m Usama, a UI/UX designer based in Islamabad. I write about what design tools actually do, not what they claim to do. More of these coming.

Brilliant.design vs Figma: I Tried the Free Tool That Claims to Replace Figma was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.