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Figma AI (Make / First Draft) vs Base44
A plain-English comparison to help you choose between them.
A designer's accelerant and a non-technical builder's whole factory: Figma's AI drafts screens and prototypes inside a design system, Base44 generates running full-stack apps with the backend hidden. Pick Figma AI when the team designs professionally and fidelity matters, First Draft on your own components, Make prototypes for testing, output accumulating in real Figma files engineering can work from. Pick Base44 when there is no design team and no wish to meet a backend, a described app arriving with database, authentication, storage and hosting built in, refined visually afterwards.
Side by side
- Summary
Figma's AI turns the design tool into a generator: First Draft produces editable screens from a prompt on your own design system, Make converts designs and descriptions into interactive prototypes and working front-end code, and smaller assists handle content replacement, image cleanup and smart search across files.
- Best for
- Editable first-draft screens generated on your design system
- Prompts to interactive prototypes without leaving Figma
- Design-to-code handoff as an engineering starting point
- Cost
- Freemium (Free tier + paid plans)
- Ease
- Openness
- Hosted service
- Data
- Designs and prompts stay within Figma's platform terms, with admin controls on AI features for enterprise plans. Make output is a prototype starting point, not production code, so review before anything ships.
- Summary
Base44 is an AI app builder that generates full-stack applications from plain-language prompts.
- Best for
- Non-technical builders who never want to meet a backend
- Full-stack apps generated from plain-language prompts
- Built-in database, authentication, file storage and hosting
- Cost
- Freemium (Free tier + paid plans)
- Ease
- Openness
- Hosted service
- Data
- The backend, authentication, data and business logic live on Base44's servers behind its SDK, and export is frontend-only, with ZIP or GitHub export itself a paid-tier feature. Treat the platform as where the application and its data live, and weigh that against any obligation to hold data elsewhere. Base44 has been acquired by Wix.
Common questions
Prototype or product: which does each yield?
Figma Make yields prototypes deliberately, no real backend, data persistence or auth, ideal for user feedback and stakeholder walkthroughs but graduating to a full-stack tool when data must persist. Base44 yields the running product itself, people can log in and exercise real flows, at the price of the app living on Base44's platform rather than in a portable codebase.
What does each hand a future engineer?
Figma hands design truth: real files, tokens and components, with generated code as a starting point that needs engineering review. Base44 hands markedly less, by honest design: export is frontend-only, the backend, data and logic staying behind its SDK on its servers, so a prototype meant to graduate into a maintained product will need rebuilding. Choose with the hand-off in mind.
Which fits a non-designer founder validating an idea?
Base44, usually: it assumes no technical or design literacy and produces something stakeholders can genuinely use, which beats a static mock for validation. Figma's generation leans on an existing design system and rewards people who already think in design tools. The reverse holds once a designer joins, because accumulated Figma files compound and platform-bound apps do not.
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Tool facts last checked July 2026