this new interface design tool is currently used by 880,000 teams including Microsoft Mozilla IBM and Google it has a massed over 400,000 users since it launched in 2022 on the day the Thanos of the design industry Adobe announced that they were going to acquire figma a small price to pay for salvation these two saw a spike of 5,6% in its new user the tool I'm talking about is port and it is an open source design tool that is in a subtle competition with figma in today's video I'm going to be talking about why some designers are ditching figma for port and I'm going to be doing a rapid fire comparison between both tools using factors like features ease of use Community pricing and the design to development flu I'll also be rating each of these factors on a scale of 1 to 10 by the end of the video I'll let you know what I think about pen part replacing figma as the ultimate design tool the major factor that differentiates pen part from other interface design tools out there is the fact that it's open source and what does this mean this means that the code of Port is publicly available for anyone to view use modify and distribute as they please as long as they know how to code this also means that you can decide to self host the tool on your own personal server so that you can make sure that your data is protected protected if that's something that's important to you that way you get to keep your data to yourself if you self host it and this is what makes this two different from every other interface designed to out there so let's talk about features like figma pmot is also a web based browser tool and it has most of the essential features that you would need to create interactive prototypes I'm talking about features like components interaction Transitions and real time collaboration features like comments sharing presentations and also has a wide boarding tool if you want to do any kind of whiteboarding as well figma has a lot more features because of its maturity I think one of the major gaps in features is the fact that figma's design system feature is a lot more robust than penot but penot is shipping very very fast so for features I'm going to give figma a nine and I'll give pimp poot a five next let's talk about ease of use I found pimp Poots slightly overwhelming the unboarding process for me was good it was quick but as soon as I got into like the interface itself like the the artboard where I actually get to put my designs together I find the interface slightly overwhelming it looks a lot like w flu and I find W flu overwhelming as well that's why I don't use W flu to today but this might also be because I've gotten used to like the mental model of Designing in figma so I'm expecting every other tool to look like that which is unfair to pmot I also think pmot is designed to be a lot more developer friendly than designer friendly and figma is designed to be designer friendly and they are just now bringing in a lot more developer friendliness into their product but I think Port is designed to be a lot more developer friendly which could be a strength and a weakness a strength because with the developer is they've thought about the design to development workflow from the very very beginning of the product so it is baked into the product so that way is easy to hand off to developer in fact there's no need for a developer hand off on pimp it can be a weakness because if the designers are like your main target um users then it might contradict the mental model of designers in such a way that they might not be able to start getting into the tool and using it as quick as possible because they've already been used to like designing in figma but I'll be honest figma has also started getting a little bit complex recently with introductions of new features like variables you can't just pick up these features and start using them you literally have to go through a lot of tutorials you have to go through a lot of learning to understand how to use these features so for ease of use I'll give figman eight and pmot a five next let's talk about Community figma has a community tab where where designers can find resources from other designers designers can share resources and designers can even get paid or monetize some of their own resources which I think is a very very fantastic feature figma also has the largest design event by m which is config so the figma community is really amazing port on the other hand also has a very very active Community I find Port Community quite interesting because of how involved the community is in the product and this this is one of the advantages of having an open source too because this way everybody is part of the development process even if you can't code you can recommend features that you'd like to see and anybody can take part in the community the community is so diverse you have people that are from developed countries contributing to the code and you also have somebody from a third world country also contributing to the code as well so this is something that I actually find interesting about pimpos the fact that it is a tool that is built by the community for the community Port also have their own design event which is growing rapidly which is called the penot first so for Community I would give figma a slight Edge I would give figma an eight and penot a seven next let's talk about the elephant in the room which is pricing pricing is the biggest reason why designers and companies might want to consider an alternative tool like pimp let's jump into figma to see what their price looks like here's the pricing page for figma figma has a separate pricing for figma and for their whiteboarding to Fig jam on the pricing page stter plan is still free stter plan has always been free on figma but the things that setup plan can access have been limited from time to time now you have the figma editor you can create three collaborative design files which means that you can only invite people to three files you still have unlimited personal drafts I think there's there's something around draft now that you have to like move draft into actual project and then you can have like the basic file inspection without the dev mode and then you have the professional which is at £14 per seat per month and you have all the features now you have organization which is at £40 which is where things start to get like really expensive yeah for each designer the organization you have to pay £40 for that person and then for Dev mode only that means if you want to bring your developers into the to to come and do their Dev mode inspection and leave you're going to pay £22 which is more than half of what you actually pay for a designer just for using maybe 20% of all the features that you have on figma I think that is quite expensive I understand that figma hasn't turned the profit since they launched in 2016 which is 8 years now so as a company they also need to make money at the same time it is getting really really expensive for like a freelancer or like a very small design agency of like two to five designers port on the other hand have a pricing page as well but on their pricing page it is clear there that pimp poot is free and they basically just talking about how they plan to make the product successful and sustainable without charging anything one of the things that they mention here is that they're going to make sure that all the features remain free for every user and then there will be other simply paid tiers which might include storage based threshold for their s or Enterprise ready certified build for self host so when you want to get into where you want to host this in your Enterprise for example a military agency might want to use port and host it as their Enterprise because they want to keep all their data to themselves or Security Agency like the CIA for example might want to keep everything private to themselves they don't want to use any kind of tool that they would send their to then those kind of agencies would have to pay for it which makes sense it means that this is free for the average person either you're making money through your business either it's a commercial project you're working on or it is just a simple passion project that you're working on Port is free for everyone forever P has become really expensive for an average freelancer or a small team of two to five to use so on pricing I'm going to give figma a six and I'll give port a nine I mean it doesn't get any better than being able to get a tool that you can use for absolutely free even if you are using it commercially lastly let's talk about the design to development flow figma launched the dev mode fature at their config conference last year I think it has become obvious that for an interface tool to be successful you have to think about simplifying the design to development handoff process and this is the gap that figma is trying to breach figma saw that 30% of their users were actually developers so what did they do they develop the dev mode feature and monetize it by charging companies to pay for every developer seat that gets to use the dev mode feature which I think is you know yeah it's a bit Ash but then capitalism you know they have to make money in typical figma fashion the dead mod feature is a welld designed but expensive after now pimp on the other hand has designed the development feature as part of it products from day one I said it before that pimp seem to be a lot more developer friendly so they they really consider the needs of developers as part of the product and that really shows in the newly launched flex and grid CSS layout which actually mirrors how things are developed in the web I think that was the reason why it felt a bit overwhelming when I looked at the interface the very first time but this means that it completely erases the need for handoff you don't need a separate tool or a separate feature to be able to hand off to your developers developers can easily just build what they want to build based on how it has been designed in the tool itself and again it's free forever so for this reason I'll be giving figma a six and pmot an eight overall figma scores 37 and pmot scores 34 obviously figma still the superior to here I'm sure no one was surprised by that even though this were just like my own ratings for each of these features but I'm actually surprised by how close Port is for a product that only got launched about two years ago they are shipping really fast they putting a lot of features the community is very very active and I'm actually really rooting for this product I believe there are three reasons why designers are switching to an alternative to like pimp poot the first reason is the obvious reason the fact that it is absolutely and figma is just getting more expensive second reason is because most designers do not want to feel like they using another tool that is owned by Adobe this was the reason why there was so much sge in users that migrated to port and I've even seen a a lot of questions on Twitter on Reddit about people asking for alternative tools because of all of this new features that figma is bringing in and the fact that they are more focused on teams and companies thankfully the deal with Adobe fell through that threat of actually being part of adobe does not exist anymore but this was one of the major reasons why a lot of designers ordered to check out this tool in the first place just because of the fact that this company Adobe has introduced a lot of dark patterns into their product and it feels like if they do acquire figma they're going to bring in a lot of their DNA into figma so yeah a lot of people opted to even check out this two called ports just because of that announcement from figma and if that acquisition has actually gone through I think a lot more designers would have migrated the third reason is the fact that some people are inclined to support open source projects because they believe they are ethical projects because these projects don't make any kind of Revenue or any kind of money and it just feels like it's it's it's good for the society people can contribute people support by using the product and there has been a couple of successful open source projects as well WordPress is an open source project I think one of the brows um is an open source project as well I can't remember what the name of the browser is but I would put in the name as I'm talking through this so you can see now do I think ppot can actually replace figma as the ultimate design tool in the next 5 years I don't think so that's the short answer um pmot is going to get a lot of market share because of the fact that it is very very freelancer and small team size friendly but a lot of teams are still going to rely on F FMA to be able to get their job done a lot of designers will still rely on figma to be able to get their job done mostly because figma is a lot more advanced when it comes to the features one of the disadvantages of Open Source projects is just like that ke to like the smallest detail of things might not really be there with open source projects but a closed source project like figma that has a team that is actively behind it would make sure that they put proper care into every little detail of every kind of product or feature that they release and we've seen this with figma already figma actually does care about how they design their product although when it comes to monetizing it I wouldn't really say they they care about that but you can tell that figma actually cares about how they actually design their product and this is one of the disadvantages that I see from Port being an open source project because it is a project that is developed by the community that final piece of just caring for like the smallest simple detail might not be there however I'm really really rooting for pimpo in all of this I am a big fan of the underdog in this story and I want to see how they actually get progress I'm actually going to be using pimpos for some of my own personal projects as well would you be using pimpos for any of your personal projects let me know in the comment section and if you'd like me to make a tutorial on how to create a Lon page using pmot just type in pmot tutorial in the comment section that'll be all for this video don't forget to hit the like button and subscribe to my channel for more videos like this I'll see you in the next one son