Claude Design vs Figma Make: Which Prompt-to-Prototype Tool?

Use Figma Make if your team's source of truth is a Figma file and someone maintains a React design system you can publish as an npm package. Use Claude Design if you already pay for Claude and the output is a prototype, deck, or one-pager that has to look like your product and then get built by Claude Code. They overlap on prompt-to-prototype and diverge on almost everything else: what they make, who is allowed to use them, how the design system gets in, and where the work goes next. The wider stack is in the best AI tools for designers in 2026, and the Claude Design guide is the pillar behind this comparison.

The short answer

• A clickable prototype using your real components: Figma Make, with a Make kit.
• A deck, a one-pager, or a landing page on brand: Claude Design.
• A prototype that has to sit next to the design file: Figma Make.
• You are on a paid Claude plan and not a paid Figma plan: Claude Design, and vice versa.
• The next step is production code in your repo: Claude Design's handoff bundle, or Figma Make's GitHub push, depending on which repo you mean.

Dimension by dimension

	Claude Design	Figma Make
What it makes	Prototypes, wireframes, mockups, decks, one-pagers, landing pages, documents	Functional prototypes, web apps, interactive UI
Where it runs	claude.ai/design and Claude Desktop	Inside Figma
Who can use it	Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise, included with the plan	Full seats on paid Figma plans; restricted trial on Starter
Design system in	GitHub repo, design files, raw uploads, local codebase	Make kit: React design system from npm, plus written guidelines
Refinement	Chat, inline comments, direct canvas editing, generated sliders	Chat, plan mode, editing the generated code
Publish	Org-scoped link, PPTX, PDF, standalone HTML, Send to Canva	Public URL with custom domains, Figma Community, embeds
Handoff to code	Bundle for Claude Code	One-way push to a GitHub repository
Back into design	Not a Figma file	Copy the preview into Figma Design as layers

What each one makes

Figma's help center defines Make as a prompt-to-app tool for turning ideas and existing Figma designs into functional prototypes, web apps, and interactive UI. Figma says Make works with any web framework, with React, Vue, and Svelte verified. The output is an app you can open, click through, and read the code of.

Claude Design covers that ground and keeps going into the artifacts around it: wireframes and mockups for a feature flow, pitch decks, marketing collateral, landing pages, dashboards, forms, and one-pagers, exported as PPTX, PDF, or standalone HTML. It launched from Anthropic Labs as a research preview on April 17, 2026 and is in beta as of September 2026. If half of what you produce is presentation material rather than interface, that difference decides it. Both belong to the generative UI category, where the model builds the interface rather than a component you then arrange.

Who is allowed to use it

This is where teams get surprised. Figma lists Make on Professional, Organization, and Enterprise plans, Full seats only. Dev, Collab, and View seats can create and try Make in drafts, but cannot share or publish. The free Starter plan gets a trial that cannot use team libraries for style context and can only publish to the web by also publishing to the Figma Community. So a developer or a PM on a Dev or Collab seat cannot run the prototype loop for you.

Claude Design is in beta on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise and is included with the subscription rather than sold as a seat, though Enterprise organizations need an admin to enable it. It draws on the same usage pool as chat, Claude Code, and Cowork, so heavy Design sessions eat into your other Claude work. Which plan makes sense is covered in which Claude plan for designers.

Getting the design system in

Figma Make's answer is Make kits. You publish your production React design system as a package to the public npm registry or to your organization's private registry, then add guidelines: Markdown files covering components, styles, tokens, and general rules, which Make can draft by analyzing your packages and library styles. Figma is explicit that Make kits currently support only codebases written in React, and that any Make user on a paid plan can publish private packages while anyone on any plan can use public ones. When it works, the prototype is built from the same code as production.

Claude Design imports from GitHub repositories, design files, raw uploads, or a local codebase, builds a design system during onboarding, and then uses those colors, typography, and components automatically on later projects, validating output against the system before showing it to you. Team and Enterprise admins can approve and lock a standard system. It is the looser route, and the one that works when your components are not a published npm package, or not React at all. The design tokens entry covers what to standardize first either way.

How you refine, and where the work goes

Claude Design's editing model is visual: talk to it for structural changes, leave an inline comment on one component, drag and resize directly on the canvas, or ask for a slider on the parameter you want to explore, then screenshot the states. Figma Make's is developer-shaped: iterate in conversation, use plan mode, and edit the generated code when the conversation stops being precise enough.

Handoff diverges the same way. Figma Make publishes to a public URL with custom domains, embeds a prototype in a slide deck or design file, copies its preview back into Figma Design as editable layers, and pushes code to a GitHub repository it creates for the file. That push is one way: edits made in GitHub do not come back and get overwritten on the next push. Claude Design packages a handoff bundle you pass to Claude Code with a single instruction, which is the better fit when the destination is an existing codebase with its own conventions. For the third route, where the design stays in Figma and an agent reads it, see Figma MCP and Figma to code with Claude.

Which to choose

Choose Figma Make when the team already pays for Figma Full seats, the design system is React and publishable, and the prototype needs to live beside the file everyone reviews. Choose Claude Design when you are already paying for Claude, when decks and one-pagers are half the job, or when the handoff target is a codebase Claude Code already knows. If you can run both, use Claude Design for exploration and the presentation layer, and Figma Make for the prototype that has to be built out of the real components.