"Same guy just built a Figma": FigCraft's 4,400 stars were borrowed from PhotoCraft
What it is An open-source, account-free desktop Figma clone that works offline. The UI copies Figma one-to-one, and an AI agent can drive every operation through commands.
Why it caught on The same author's Photoshop clone had just gained 26k stars in a day. Big accounts and media passed it along as "that guy built another Figma." "Free Figma, no account" is instantly clear, and the feature set is broad enough to hold up under reviews.
CHow you could follow Don't build yet another open-source Figma. Pick a professional app nobody has cloned yet, whose users resent the subscription, and use the same playbook: one-to-one UI, every action a command an agent can call, honest completion reporting, and an open invitation for agents to submit PRs. When one takes off, ride it with "same person just built X."
- Data (updated daily) · Repo created 2026-10-09 · 4,592 stars · 7 days +626
GitHub · stars Data 2026-10-13 → 2026-11-08 (27 days, 27 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one
FigCraft is an open-source Figma clone: a native desktop app written in pure Rust, no account required, works offline, with a UI copied one-to-one from Figma. In 28 days it picked up about 4,400 stars and 1,700 forks. But it didn't surface on its own. It's one product in ArtCraft's series of "clone commercial software with AI" projects, and when it launched, the series' Photoshop clone had just gained 26k stars in a day. This piece looks at where its stars came from, why a different person making the same thing wouldn't get this much, and which tactics are worth learning.
"And now we have Figma"
In Oct 2026 13, Chad Moran posted on X: "And now we have Figma." The next day, developer account @rammcodes posted, in their words: "the same guy who went viral for building open-source Adobe alternatives has now launched a Figma alternative." Japanese designer こぎそ (@kgsi) and designers on LinkedIn also shared it that same day.
Notice how they introduced it. Nobody led with what FigCraft can do. Every opener was "that guy built another one."
"That guy" is Brandon Thomas, of the one-person company Storyteller.ai and its ArtCraft brand. In Sep 30 he released five clones at once: PhotoCraft (Photoshop), FilmCraft, PdfCraft, VectorCraft and LightCraft. In Oct 7 he added WordCraft, GridCraft, CadCraft, DeckCraft and SoundCraft. The Hacker News post "ArtCraft Apps – open-source Adobe compatible suite written in Rust" scored 180 points and 246 comments (10-04). On X, the explainer account @Rainmaker1973 posted "Software is over? Brandon Thomas…" in Oct 8. The next day PhotoCraft gained 26,462 stars in a day, and it now has 77k (per GitHub daily data).
FigCraft's repo was created in Oct 9 and launched publicly in Oct 13, right after this wave of attention.
The curve: 500 a day for four days, then it fell to 100.
| Date | Daily new stars |
|---|---|
| 10-14 | +153 |
| 10-15 | +558 |
| 10-16 | +547 |
| 10-17 | +473 |
| 10-18 | +594 (peak) |
| 10-19 | +224 |
| After 10-20 | 70–140 per day |
(GitHub daily star count)
Nov 6 total: 4,394 stars. The live GitHub page shows 4,508. In the last 7 days it gained 579 stars, and the first 7 days brought in 694, so it's cooling off gradually. That number is roughly 1/18 of PhotoCraft's. The later series entries (docs, spreadsheets, CAD) each sit in the thousands, and the novelty fades a little more each time. Also, fewer designers have GitHub accounts and star repos than developers do.
The FigCraft-only HN post scored just 3 points. It didn't take off through any one community. It rode the series.
What it actually does
Open the README and the first screen is a dark-theme screenshot: a hiking app called Ridgeline, three phone screens laid out on a canvas, a layers panel on the left and a Design panel on the right, almost indistinguishable from Figma. Four selling points below: the interface is "where your hands expect it"; native Rust, no Electron; no account, no data upload, files live on your own disk; and "every menu, every tool, every drag is a command," with the UI, CLI, JSON channel and MCP all running on the same engine.
The feature list is broad: auto layout, components and variants, vector networks, variables, prototype connections, Dev Mode exporting code in 9 frameworks, multiplayer collaboration with a self-hosted server, WebAssembly plugins, and 15 UI languages. The README itself says completeness is about 49%, with a line-by-line checklist against Figma. .fig files open, but the README says "best effort." It shipped 16 releases in 15 days, roughly one a day.
That gave reviewers material to write about. XDA's Nov 1 piece was titled "I ditched Figma for a free open-source clone, and it covers everything I actually use it for." The author opened by saying Figma ties you to an account and locks many features behind a subscription, and that she'd tried dozens of open-source alternatives, which either made her relearn the layout or forced her to self-host. FigCraft avoided both.
Where the stars came from
| Channel | What happened | Did it work? |
|---|---|---|
| Series brand | After PhotoCraft blew up, big accounts and media covered FigCraft as a "new release from the series" | Main driver |
| Developers and designers on X | Chad Moran (10-13), rammcodes (10-14), @kgsi (10-14) | Yes, it lines up with the peak from 10-15 to 10-18 |
| Owned channels | Official app directory getartcraft.com/apps, one launcher for the whole family (craft-launcher, 5,000 stars), Discord, r/ArtCraftAI ("BT dropped FigCraft" with 50 upvotes) | Steady referrals |
| YouTube reviews | At least 10-16 videos since 8: "Figma Has a FREE Open Source Alternative?!" and "FigCraft? Someone Vibe Coded a Free Figma Clone" | Yes, but the volume can't be separated out |
| Media and multilingual long tail | XDA(11-01), Magica(10-18), plus articles in Italian, Spanish, Russian and Chinese. Many of them are AI news sites. | long tail |
| Reddit controversy | On r/opensource someone asked: "Could ArtCraft apps just be decomps" | The controversy also brought attention |
| Single HN post | 3 ratings | Didn't work |
No ads spotted. It doesn't charge either: ArtCraft's revenue comes from subscriptions to its AI image and video generation, $8–48 a month (per the pricing page on the website). The open-source suite is there to funnel people into that subscription.
1,700 forks is not fake
The fork-to-star ratio is about 38%. For new repos that pass 5,000 stars, the median ratio is about 11%. The reason is traceable: in 4 weeks there were 1,370 PRs, 1,077 merged, and 1,019 of them were opened by accounts other than the main one; 135 contributors, and Issue/PR numbers have already reached #2045. The repo ships an AGENTS.md and org-wide contribution rules (storytold/craft-contrib), openly inviting people to open PRs with their own coding agents. Sister repos in the same org show the same play: designcraft fork rate 69%, cadcraft 43%. I haven't verified how many of these PRs come from internal or agent accounts.
GitHub Releases show roughly 1M cumulative installer downloads; in the 3 days after v0.15.0,3 (Nov) shipped, 39k Windows installers and 17k macOS. Every release has similar numbers, so it's likely the launcher's auto-update inflating the count. Don't read it as user count (inference).
Already crowded
The "open-source Figma" spot was taken long ago. Penpot has been at it for ten years, with 62,000 stars, a browser version, self-hosting and team accounts. This February two AI-focused entrants appeared: open-pencil/open-pencil with 9,600 stars, and ZSeven-W/openpencil with 7,100 stars (the latter is cooling off). For letting agents read and write Figma, the MCP project Figma-Context-MCP has 16k stars.
A crowd of name-riders too: figcraft.net runs a "FigCraft Online" web version, and there are figcraft.org, artcraft.tips, artcraft.run, vectorcraft.app and photocrafteditor.com. An unofficial downloader, craftsuite.net, got a Show HN. On X, @FigCraftai is an unrelated product. XDA, YouTube and multilingual media have all covered it in turn, so plenty of people already know about it.
If it were you
Verdict: C. FigCraft's stars mostly come from the ArtCraft brand and the "one person cloning all of Adobe with AI" story. Followers can't get either. If you build another open-source Figma now, you're up against Penpot, two OpenPencils and FigCraft itself. Getting thousands of stars will be hard. What's worth copying is the playbook.
Who it's for: developers who already have a project past a thousand stars and want to keep going with a second and third; or people who know one expensive piece of software well in a niche and know which features people actually use (e.g. typesetting, subtitling, circuit diagrams, quant backtesting).
Who it's not for: people who want to head-on build yet another general-purpose design tool; people with no previously successful project who expect a single repo to take off on HN or Trending (FigCraft's solo HN post only got 3 points).
How to do it: pick a professional app that ArtCraft hasn't cloned yet and whose users resent its subscription. Build the 30% of it that people use most, copy the UI one-to-one, make it native, offline, no account. Make every action a command, usable from both the CLI and MCP, and generate the README's example images with those commands. Put an honest completion percentage and a feature-by-feature checklist in the README, along with AGENTS.md and contribution rules, ship a version a day, and turn forks into PRs. You can also target what FigCraft left undone: high-fidelity .fig import/export, or compatibility with the Figma plugin ecosystem. Its own docs say "best effort" or nothing at all for those.
How to get users: the first project only needs one hook you can explain in a sentence ("a free X, no account"). Once it takes off, ride it with "same person, now X" posts, each one carrying its own news angle. Link the READMEs of all repos to each other at the bottom, and build a unified app directory and launcher. On launch day, get developer creators on X and designers and practitioners in the relevant field to share it; YouTube reviewers will find you on their own.
Deadline: the "one person clones commercial software with AI" theme peaked in October, and ArtCraft's new launches have been getting less hype with each one. To ride this wave, ship your first one before Q1 2027.
Where this could be wrong: ① If FigCraft keeps gaining 200+ stars a day after late November, with no new series news, the product itself is pulling people in, so there's room for an open-source design tool head-on. ② If someone passes 5,000 stars within a month, with no previously successful project and only a single "AI clone of X" post, the path works. ③ Conversely, if Figma takes legal action against ArtCraft over the "clean-room" controversy, redo the risk math for this path.
Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
- Competitors
Name Where Launched Scale How it differs from this one Figma Big-company features 2016 Industry standard, with a free Starter tier FigCraft is free of accounts, offline, open-source and native; but .fig import is only "best effort", with no plugin ecosystem or team permissions Penpot Open source 2015 (2.0 version 2024-04) 62,109 stars, +277 in the last 7 days Penpot is web + self-hosted + team accounts; FigCraft is a native desktop app that copies Figma's UI one-to-one and can be driven by agents open-pencil/open-pencil Open source 2026-02-27 9,634 stars An AI-native Figma alternative; FigCraft relies on feature coverage and its series brand ZSeven-W/openpencil Open source 2026-02-17 7,079 stars, cooling off Same as above Onlook Open source 2024-06 27,121 stars A visual editor for code, not a design-file tool Figma MCP tools (GLips/Figma-Context-MCP, figma-console-mcp) Open source 2025 16k / 3.1k stars Those let agents read and write Figma; FigCraft is itself an editor that agents can fully drive - Where users come from
- Verified Legacy from the brand (PhotoCraft and other hits): PhotoCraft 10-09, +26,462 stars in a single day; rammcodes 10-14 posted "the same guy who went viral for building open-source Adobe alternatives has now launched a Figma alternative"
- Verified Big developer / design accounts on X: Chad Moran 10-13, rammcodes 10-14, @kgsi 10-14; at the series level there's Rainmaker1973 10-08
- Verified Owned channels: official app directory, launcher, Discord, r/ArtCraftAI, cross-linked READMEs: getartcraft.com/apps/figcraft pushes downloads through craft-launcher (5k stars); the r/ArtCraftAI post got 50 upvotes
- Verified YouTube reviews: at least 8 videos starting from 10-16 (KB4SwHZRo0o, GViXkqTHVS8, pnA9fPYrlzU, etc.)
- Verified Tech media + multilingual SEO long tail: XDA 11-01, Magica 10-18, reveneau, pasqualepillitteri, DongVPS, etc.
- Verified Reddit: r/vibecoding "The ArtCraft team have now made an open source Figma"; a questioning post on r/opensource
- Verified HN: FigCraft's solo post got only 3 points and didn't gain traction; the series post got 180 points
Why storytold/figcraft (FigCraft) took off
Channel: GitHub · Research day 2026-11-06 · data card gh_storytold__figcraft.json
Bottom line
FigCraft isn't a standalone library. It's one of the roughly 13th products in ArtCraft, Brandon Thomas's one-person "clone the whole commercial software suite with Claude" series (Learning Machines / Storyteller.ai). The series built its attention early in October with PhotoCraft (a Photoshop clone, +26k stars in a single day). FigCraft launched on 10-13, riding the series' momentum: "the guy who made an open-source Adobe just made a Figma." Its own 4.4k stars come to about 1/18 of PhotoCraft's. The broad feature set and agent support (MCP) make it hold up, but that isn't why it took off.
1. Basic data (GitHub API and our github library)
- Repo created 2026-10-09; public spread began 10-13 (first HN post 10-13; Chad Moran's X post "And now we have Figma" was 10-13).
- Stars: 2026-11-06 4,394 (data card), live on the GitHub API that day 4,508; forks 1,727.
- Daily star gains (github library repo_day): 10-14 +153,10-15 +558,10-16 +547,10-17 +473,10-18 +594 (peak), 10-19 +224, then down to about ~100/day; last 7 days +579, the 7 days before that +694, cooling off.
- Fork/star ≈ 38% (median for new repos with ≥5000 stars is about 11%). The reason is clear: real people are contributing. In 4 weeks there were 1,370 PRs (1,077 merged), 1,019 of them not opened by the main account bflatastic; 135 contributors; Issue/PR numbers have reached #2045. The repo ships an AGENTS.md and unified "house rules" for both humans and coding agents (storytold/craft-contrib). The fork rate is high across the org (designcraft 69%, cadcraft 43%), the same "invite agent-made PRs" playbook.
- Downloads: GitHub Releases show roughly 1M cumulative installer downloads. v0.15.0 (11-03) got 3k Windows msi and 39k macOS dmg within 17 days. Every release has similar numbers, so it's likely the ArtCraft Launcher's auto-update inflating the count (unverified). Still, it shows more than just starring; plenty of people actually installed it.
- In 15 days there were 16 releases (v0.2 → v0.15.1), roughly one a day.
2. Competitors
| Product | Where | Launched | Scale | How FigCraft differs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Figma | Web/desktop (big companies) | 2016 | Industry standard, with a free Starter tier | FigCraft is free of accounts, offline, native Rust and open-source; but .fig import is only "best effort", with no plugin ecosystem or team permissions |
| Penpot | Open source / web | Repo created 2015, 2.0 releases 2024-04 | 62,109 stars, +7 in the last 277 days (github library) | Penpot is browser + self-hosted, with accounts and teams; FigCraft is a native desktop app whose UI and interactions copy Figma one-to-one, which makes switching easier |
| open-pencil/open-pencil | Open source | 2026-02-27 | 9,634 stars, +201 in the last 7 days | Same positioning, "open-source Figma alternative + AI-native"; FigCraft doesn't sell on AI, it sells on feature coverage and its series brand |
| ZSeven-W/openpencil | Open source | 2026-02-17 | 7,079 stars, cooling off | Same as above |
| onlook-dev/onlook | Open source | 2024-06 | 27,121 stars | Onlook is a visual editor for code; FigCraft is a traditional design-file tool |
| Figma-ecosystem MCP tools (GLips/Figma-Context-MCP 16k, figma-console-mcp 3.1k) | Open source | 2025 | See left | Those let agents read and write Figma; FigCraft is itself an editor that agents can fully drive (400+ commands, callable via CLI or MCP) |
| Lunacy, Sketch, Framer, etc. | Desktop/web | Early on | Not checked | All closed-source or paid |
Bottom line: the "open-source Figma alternative" niche was already taken, and Penpot has been around for ten years. FigCraft isn't the first; its edge is a native desktop app, a one-to-one copy of Figma's UI, agent control, and a backing series from ArtCraft that's currently hot.
3. Where users came from (growth tactics)
- 系列余热(主因,确认)。ArtCraft 组织 9-30 一次发了 PhotoCraft、FilmCraft、PdfCraft、VectorCraft、LightCraft,10-07 又发了 WordCraft、GridCraft、CadCraft、DeckCraft、SoundCraft。PhotoCraft 10-09 单日 +26,462 星,现在 77k(github 库)。@Rainmaker1973 10-08 发帖「Software is over? Brandon Thomas…」(x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/2108189742219096223);HN「ArtCraft Apps – open-source Adobe compatible suite written in Rust」180 分、246 评论(10-04,news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958850);Phoronix、XDA、It's FOSS 都报道过整个系列。FigCraft 发布时,开发者大号的说法直接就是「the same guy who went viral for building open-source Adobe alternatives has now launched a Figma alternative」(@rammcodes,10-14,x.com/rammcodes/status/2110451134733402486)。
- Owned channels (confirmed). The official site getartcraft.com/apps is a unified app directory; craft-launcher (5,008 stars) installs the whole family; Discord; Reddit r/ArtCraftAI (the post "BT dropped FigCraft" has 50 upvotes and 27 comments). Every repo's README links to the other Crafting Apps at the bottom.
- Retweets from developers and designers on X (confirmed). Chad Moran (10-13), rammcodes (10-14), Japanese designer こぎそ @kgsi (10-14).
- YouTube review wave (confirmed). At least 8 videos since 10-16: "Figma Has a FREE Open Source Alternative?!", "I Tried FigCraft, the Free Figma Clone from ArtCraft", "FigCraft? Someone Vibe Coded a Free Figma Clone", plus Shorts. Designers on LinkedIn are sharing it too (Fatos Idrizi and others, 10-14).
- Tech media and SEO long tail (confirmed). XDA "I ditched Figma for a free open-source clone…" (11-01); Magica, pasqualepillitteri.it, jacar.es, dev.to, and articles in Russian, Italian, Spanish and Chinese (DongVPS). Many are AI-generated news sites.
- Reddit (confirmed). r/vibecoding "The ArtCraft team have now made an open source Figma" (written in a voice that reads like someone from ArtCraft); r/opensource has a skeptical thread, "Could ArtCraft apps just be decomps", and the controversy itself added heat.
- The HN-only post for FigCraft didn't take off. 10-13 That thread got just 3 points (hn.algolia), so HN wasn't what drove its traffic.
No evidence of paid ads found.
4. Why it took off
- Riding the afterglow of the brand. The curve is the evidence: FigCraft went from 10-15 to 10-18 at roughly 500 stars a day, right in the tail of PhotoCraft and WordCraft's heat. Media and big accounts all covered it as a "new release from the series."
- "Free Figma" is instantly understood. Designers resent subscriptions and account lock-in (the XDA piece opens by complaining that Figma ties you to an account and locks features behind a subscription). "Open source + one-to-one copy of Figma's UI + offline" hits exactly that.
- AI-written code is the topic of the moment. "One person cloning all of Adobe / Office / Figma with Claude" is itself fodder for the "software is dead" debate, and both dev and AI circles share it. Reviewers even called FigCraft a "vibe coded Figma."
- Broad enough feature set to survive screenshot-based reviews. Auto layout, components and variants, vector networks, prototyping, Dev Mode with code output in 9 frameworks, multiplayer collaboration, self-hosted server, WebAssembly plugins, 15 interface languages. The README openly says it's about 49% complete and links a parity checklist. That's why reviews like XDA's could write that it covers everything they actually use.
- Agent-drivable. 400+ commands, with the UI, CLI, JSON control channel and MCP all sharing one command set; the sample designs in the README were all built through the command API. That's an extra hook for the AI developer crowd (lightscripts.com wrote a dedicated FigCraft MCP tutorial).
- Why it hasn't reached PhotoCraft's 70k stars: the novelty of the series is wearing off (docs, spreadsheets and CAD each got a few thousand stars), and designer users have a lower density of GitHub accounts than developers do.
5. Differentiation
Among open-source Figma alternatives, FigCraft stands out because it is a native Rust desktop app (not Electron, not a web app), copies Figma's UI one-to-one so there's nothing to relearn, needs no account, works offline, can be fully driven by agents, and sits under a brand that's currently hot as an "AI clones the whole suite" family. Penpot is web + self-hosted + team accounts; OpenPencil leads with AI-native design. But the differentiation is not the main reason it took off. The real drivers were the brand afterglow and the "one person with AI clones Figma" story; feature completeness is what let it hold up in reviews and kept contributors involved (135 contributors).
6. Visibility and copycats
- Widely discussed. XDA wrote about it, at least 8 YouTube reviews, developer accounts on X shared it, media in several languages covered it; the series has hit the HN front page (180 points) and Phoronix, and big accounts like Rainmaker1973 have written about it. It doesn't make money directly (it's open source); the parent company recoups costs through subscriptions to ArtCraft's AI image and video generation ($8–48/month, getartcraft.com/pricing; Rainmaker's post also mentions funding development by selling AI model tokens).
- Copycats and name-squatters are already everywhere: figcraft.net ("FigCraft Online" web version), figcraft.org, figcraft.rerivo.com, artcraft.tips, artcraft.run, artcrafttutorial.com, vectorcraft.app, photocrafteditor.com, gengrades.com/figcraft, craftsuite.net (an unofficial downloader that appeared on Show HN), filmcraft.tools / artcraft.tools (Show HN, 10-27); the @FigCraftai account on X is another name-trading product ("Canvas rooms"). Similar AI-clone plays include Mindscaper (Leo Wattenberg, Audacity direction).
7. What to borrow
- Serialized launches: attention earned by the first hit is passed along one product at a time with the "same person / same brand cloned X again" framing, and each new release comes with its own news hook.
- README as landing page: hero screenshot, "Made in X" showcases, an honest completion percentage, cross-links to the whole family, and a Discord entry point.
- Friendly to agent contributors: AGENTS.md plus shared house rules and a new version every day turns forks into real PRs; 135 contributors opened 4+ PRs in 1,000 weeks.
- Open source for traffic, AI subscriptions for revenue.
8. Still unclear
- Out of roughly 1M installer downloads, unknown how many come from the launcher's auto-update; real active users unknown.
- From 10-15 to 10-18 it gained about ~500 stars a day. Which specific post drove it wasn't broken down (no related tweets in the X corpus, and the Reddit original was blocked by 403, so vote counts and timing couldn't be read).
- Not verified how many of the PRs from non-core accounts are actually ArtCraft-internal or agent accounts.
- Unknown whether the copyright and "clean-room" controversy (the r/opensource skeptic thread) will draw legal attention from Figma.
Sources
- GitHub API: storytold/figcraft repo, PR search, contributors, releases (2026-11-06)
- Our GitHub database: repo_profile, repo_day (storytold/*, penpot, open-pencil, etc.)
- HN Algolia: item 50069000 (FigCraft, 3 points), 49958850 (ArtCraft Apps, 180 points), 50232682, 50010170, 50293586
- www.xda-developers.com/ditched-figma-for-free-open-source-cl… (2026-11-01)
- magica.com/news/artcraft-figcraft-0-7-figma-imports-preview-… (2026-10-18)
- reveneau.com/ainews/figcraft-open-source-figma-alternative-r… (2026-10-18)
- x.com/rammcodes/status/2110451134733402486, x.com/ChadMoran/status/2110033795789492551, x.com/kgsi/status/2110246441394610480, x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/2108189742219096223
- www.reddit.com/r/ArtCraftAI/comments/1x57yu1/, www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1x4r7xq/, www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1x5s550/
- YouTube: KB4SwHZRo0o, GViXkqTHVS8, pnA9fPYrlzU, DWjlRCJgjAM, EC-MZesm6tQ
- leo.wattenberg.dk/2026/artcraft-mindscaper-et-al-can-we-real…
- getartcraft.com/apps/figcraft, getartcraft.com/pricing