FigCraft Is a Free Figma-Style Design App That Says It Is 49% Done. Its List of What Is Missing Is the Best Part.

Software almost never tells you how unfinished it is. Launch pages say "powerful" and "everything you need," and you find the holes on deadline.

FigCraft, a free and open-source interface design app that started trending on GitHub this week, puts a number on its own front page instead. It is in alpha, an early test version, and the README says it is "about 49% of the way to replacing Figma for real work, by our own estimate." Then it links to a document called "Where FigCraft falls short of Figma," which ranks every known gap by how much it would stop a working designer.

That is an unusual thing for a design tool to publish. It is also the most useful thing in the repo, because it answers the question every designer asks about a new tool before the feature list: can I trust it with real work yet?

The short answer is: some of it, and the gap list tells you which part.

What FigCraft is

FigCraft is a desktop app for designing screens, websites and prototypes, built in the Rust programming language by the ArtCraft team as part of its family of free "Crafting Apps." The repo was created on October 9, and the team has shipped six releases since, the latest (version 0.6.0) on October 14. It has about 2,250 stars on GitHub, a rough measure of how many developers are paying attention. It is free under the MIT or Apache 2.0 licences, which means you can use it for client work without paying anyone.

If you have used Figma, the feature list will look familiar: frames with auto layout, components and variants, vector editing with boolean operations, colour and number variables with modes, clickable prototypes with transitions, and a developer handoff view that writes out CSS, HTML, React, SwiftUI and other code. It exports PNG, JPG, WebP, SVG and PDF. It runs on macOS (a signed installer that Apple has checked, so it opens normally), Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and in a browser.

Two things set it apart from "yet another Figma clone."

The first is that your files live on your disk. The README says there is "No account, no telemetry, and nothing leaves your computer unless you share a file." No login, no cloud seat, no subscription.

The second is that every action in the app is a named command, more than 400 of them, and an AI assistant can run those commands directly. FigCraft ships what is called an MCP server. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a standard connection that lets assistants such as Claude operate an app instead of only talking about it. The project's MCP guide says an agent can "create and edit layers, run any menu command, inspect the result as JSON and look at it as a PNG." You can run it with no window at all, or attach it to the open app and watch every change land live on your canvas.

The gap list is the real product page

Open docs/gaps.md and you get a ranked table. As of the October 15 update, the top three are:

1. Figma files. FigCraft can open .fig files on a "best effort" basis, and has an experimental export back. The list marks this a "beta blocker" until it has been checked on real files.
2. Multiplayer and sharing. Live sessions exist as a preview, "without accounts." Another beta blocker.
3. Fidelity. "Nothing checked against real Figma files." The team has not yet compared FigCraft's output against real-world Figma documents.

Read those three together and the picture is clear. The part of FigCraft that works is the part where you, alone, make something new inside it. The part that does not work yet is everything that touches someone else's Figma file or someone else's screen.

There is one more detail in that document that tells you how this app is being built. Each gap has an estimate in hours, and the note above the table says the hours are for "one Opus 5.5 agent working sequentially, tests included," and tells agents to "pick work from the top." In other words, a large share of FigCraft is being written by AI coding assistants working through a public to-do list. That explains six releases in five days. It also means the app changes fast, and things you rely on may shift from week to week.

I think that is fine, as long as you know it going in. The gap list is the team telling you where not to stand.

Where it is useful this week

Here is where I would put FigCraft to work right now, and where I would not.

Use it for private first drafts. Because nothing leaves your machine, it is a good place to sketch an idea for a client under NDA, or a personal project you are not ready to show. No account means no question about who else can see your files.

Use it to let an assistant build the boring first pass. This is the genuinely new part. The home screen has eight starter templates (a mobile app, a landing page, a dashboard, a design system starter, a wireframe kit, social post sizes, presentation slides and an icon set starter), and an agent can open them by command. The README says every example design in its gallery "was built entirely through FigCraft's command API, the same one the MCP server" uses. So you can ask an assistant to lay out five variations of a pricing page with real auto layout, then step in and do the part that needs taste. You end up with a layered, editable file, not a flat picture.

Use it for handoff code you check by hand. The developer view writes code in several formats. Treat that as a starting point for a developer, not a finished component.

Do not use it for shared client files yet. Opening a client's Figma file is best effort, and the team says plainly that it has not been checked against real Figma documents. If a layer comes in slightly wrong, you may not notice until the developer does.

Do not use online sharing for anything confidential. The README is direct about this: when you share online, "the server stores the file unencrypted and whoever runs the server can read it." Sharing on your local network involves no server, but it is not encrypted either.

Put this into practice

A one-afternoon test that tells you whether FigCraft belongs in your kit:

1. Install it. Download the installer for your system from the releases page. On a Mac it is a signed app, so it opens like any other.
2. Rebuild one real screen by hand. Pick something you made recently in Figma, a settings page or a card component, and rebuild it from scratch in FigCraft. Pay attention to auto layout, text and components. This is where you will find out whether the "49%" covers the 49% you use.
3. Open the same screen as a .fig file. Compare the import with your hand-built version. Every difference is a difference you would have shipped by accident.
4. Connect an assistant, if you are comfortable with a terminal. The MCP guide shows a one-line setup for Claude Code, such as claude mcp add figcraft -- /path/to/figcraft-cli mcp, and a config snippet for Claude Desktop. The catch: the guide says to build the command-line tool from the source code first, which means installing Rust developer tools. It says the Linux download bundles that tool and does not say the Mac app does, so on a Mac plan to build it.
5. Give the assistant a narrow job. "Open the landing page template and make three versions of the hero section with different headline lengths" is a good test. "Design my app" is not. Watch it work in the attached window, then judge the result the way you would judge a junior designer's first pass.
6. Keep notes on what broke. The team asks for issue reports. If FigCraft becomes useful to you, your report is how the gap list gets shorter.

Honest limitations

It is alpha software built at speed. Six releases in five days is exciting and also a warning. Expect features to change, and do not put the only copy of anything important in it.

Figma compatibility is unproven. Best-effort import, an experimental export, and no testing against real Figma documents. If your work lives in a team Figma library, FigCraft does not replace that today.

Collaboration is a preview. No accounts, no teams, no cloud. Live sessions run from your app or a server you host yourself.

Plugins are not Figma's. FigCraft runs its own plugins. Your favourite Figma plugins will not come with you.

The agent setup takes some technical comfort. Building the command-line tool on a Mac means installing developer tools. If that sentence makes you tired, wait for a packaged version.

"49%" is the team's own number. It is an estimate weighted by their judgment of what matters. Your 49% may be different, which is why step 2 above matters more than the headline.

Where this leaves you

Most new design tools ask for trust up front and earn it back slowly. FigCraft does the opposite. It tells you what is broken on day one, in a ranked list, with hours attached.

That makes it easy to use well. Keep your shared client work where it is. Use FigCraft as a private sketchbook that an assistant can draw in, and check the gap list once a week to see what moved. If the top three lines clear, the question stops being whether to try it and becomes how much of your work to bring over.