Overview

Once again a new challenger has entered the arena to compete against the heavyweight champion, Figma, for market supremacy in the UI/UX sphere.

Today, we’ll explore the question on everyone’s mind: will the upstart UI/UX design platform, Lunacy, overthrow the reigning champion as the new de-facto design tool in 2023?

Let’s find out!

Side-note

If you’re interested, I also looked at Penpot, so if you’d like to check out my findings on that too, you can do so here:

Figma vs Lunacy

To be as fair as possible, I tested Lunacy out head-to-head against Figma to see how it felt in the context of a designer looking to transition from one platform to the other.

Lunacy is essentially what you’d expect from a modern UI/UX toolset

The results were definitely interesting, and it makes me think Lunacy may be a solid contender moving forward, but there’s a some ground to cover between where it’s at and where it needs to be.

Let’s take a look at what I mean.

What’s at stake and why it matters

To give some context, Adobe just bought out Figma, which means it’s only a matter of time before the platform will probably fundamentally change to align with Adobe’s plans for it.

This could include any number of things from rolling it into creative cloud, decommissioning it to make room for Xd, or something entirely different.

The reason this matters is because with Figma out of the picture as a largely independent player in the UI/UX and product design sphere, designers may need to look for another viable option that doesn’t fall under the control of a major corporation.

Pros and cons of Lunacy

I wanted to make sure I was as fair as possible here so I tried to pit the two platforms against each other in terms of how most designers will probably use them in their everyday workflows.

The following major pros and cons are what I took away from testing.

There’s plenty to be excited for with Lunacy, and I would be highly remiss to not mention some areas where it really shines as an up-and-coming alternative to Figma.

• Solid interface
• Robust features
• Quality illustrations

Pretty solid interface, adheres to conventions nicely

Overall, Lunacy’s got a really solid interface and some great features like automatic background removal, image upscaling, and placeholder text built-in.

Text autofill and placeholder text built-in

Moreover, the instant access to high-quality icon sets, photos, illustrations, and UI kits is really convenient, and can save you a decent amount of time hunting around for and managing assets.

High-quality illustrations are just a drag-and-drop away

With all the pros of Lunacy, especially considering the fact that it’s free, it’s a little hard for me to pick on it.

That said, I do feel, for the sake of fairness, that I’ve gotta talk about some of it’s weak points to give you a more complete picture of what you may be getting yourself into if you decide to give it a shot.

• Limited prototyping
• Lack of autolayout
• Weird bugs

The prototyping is still pretty limited, and while it does work sort of, the hotspot tool feels like kind of a strange way to deal with prototyping interactions in 2022. Again, not bad per se, just a little weird.

As you can see, the options here are simple, but again not super robust in terms of being able to design richer interactions, page transitions, or smart animated effects.

There’s also no autolayout which, at least for me, is a pretty necessary feature just because it saves so much time and headache during the design process.

Lastly, there are definitely some weird bugs like when selecting a color it only applies it after you release the mouse button. Not absolutely devastating, but not great for when you’re trying to fine-tune color applications.

The bottom line

Lunacy is a damn good contender in the UI/UX space with a lot of potential, no doubt about that. This is way more than a slap-fight; Lunacy packs a lot of heat for a free alternative, and I’d be a liar if I said that it didn’t make a serious impression on me.

My humble opinion

→ That said, in my humble, honest opinion, it still can’t compete with Figma in terms of flexibility, feature set, community, plugins, and overall completeness to be a total replacement, but that doesn’t mean it won’t get there!

We’ve seen a ton of new features come out, and it’s getting better with every release. I’m confident that in the days and months to come, we’ll see much more out of Lunacy, and I’m looking forward to seeing how Figma and Lunacy stack up against each other a year from now.