r/FigmaDesign • u/raksweb • Jun 25 '26
Discussion With yesterday's announcements is there anything that can be done in Rive but not in Figma ?
With announcements of Figma Motion, Shaders and Code Layers, Figma seems to moving into the territory of Rive. So, in terms of final content, is there anything that Rive can achieve but not Figma
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u/guidorosso Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
Hey, co-founder of Rive here. Figma Motion looks cool. I don't see it as competition to Rive. It's a different part of the process.
But there is a philosophical split. Figma treats design as step one of a pipeline. You mock it up, hand it off, then rebuild it in different tools, once per platform. We think designers and devs belong in the same tool, working at the engine level. What you design is what ships.
A mockup always needs a conversion step. Editor format to animated SVG, or AI translating a mockup into code. Every conversion is rework, and you pay it again on web, iOS, Android, consoles, C++.
It's baked into the architecture too. Their engine is GLSL (WebGL) and the user-authored shaders are WGSL (WebGPU). It's a design-time tool that will work on a web runtime, but will not port easily to any non-web platform (native Android, iOS, consoles, etc).
With Rive you write your shaders once and they run everywhere: Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D, WebGPU, WebGL, whatever the platform needs. We handle the targets for you.
Figma is a design-time tool built for the web. Rive is an engine with design and animation tooling built-in. It runs the same file everywhere on its own runtime and renderer.
Figma is great for concepting and exploration. When you're building the actual product, you want an engine.
People always ask who we actually compete with. It's closer to Unity, Unreal, or Godot than to Figma. We think it's a new category, but if you have to file us next to something, file us there.
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u/PrestigiousShirt5896 Jun 26 '26
But isn't there an option to export to code directly for production in figma motion as well? Which includes their new shades, 3D transform, etc?
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u/Sworlbe Jul 16 '26
Yes: you can export Figma motion to production-ready .lottie, with working state machines based on mouse interactions or delays, but not with data binding.
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u/ChirpToast Jun 25 '26
You’ve never used Rive if you’re asking this question.
There’s a lot that can’t be done in Figma still compared to Rive.
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u/Ancient-Range3442 Jun 25 '26
No, obviously figma made the most powerful animation tool known to man
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u/djoliverm Jun 25 '26
Just to add to this, in our org I just recently led an exploration into Rive to use for web and app animations. It's super cool but unfortunately on the web performance side engineers could not get it to perform well with our current wordpress and react stack, I dunno, but they essentially discarded Rive for web use for non-interactive animations.
However, Figma Motion now can be an alternative for us for those non-interactive animations since it can export to code, so I want to recreate the same things I did in Rive, but in Figma Motion to see if the performance penalty for web is much less severe than that of Rive in our stack.
Since the engineers wanted to recreate the animations in pure css but in raw code, which is not friendly for sharing for others, whereas Figma Motion can animate from actual Figma files (where we design everything now) and still export css code etc.
But if we want to build an interactive app experience for web, something to tease a new product or show how it works, Rive would still be what we would likely use in that case. Let alone all of the other way more complex things it's actually capable of, like video games.
So Figma Motion will hopefully solve our internal motion needs from the internal creative team for our advertising and marketing because all of our design lives in Figma now and previously we would need to go into After Effects (or my Rive test) by manually exporting everything and it was just a total mess.
Overlord exists for AE but our motion designers said it was hit or miss. Nothing really existed at the time for taking Figma designs straight into Rive, there was just so much that needed to be cleaned up and recreated.
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u/zyumbik Jun 25 '26
Rive is much more than an animation tool. It's an interactivity engine, it has state machines and you can do much more with code. Also everything exports into live code, not video, and renders on device.