Figma, Stitch or Claude Design: which AI design tool for your business

In under four months, three launches have changed who can design a company’s website or prototype without a technical team: Figma brought AI agents and code layers into its canvas at Config 2026, Google turned Stitch into a free editor that generates full interfaces from a description, and Anthropic shipped Claude Design, which turns a prompt into a clickable, exportable mockup. For a retail or hospitality SME that needs a website or an online catalog now, the question isn’t whether it can use AI to design anymore — it’s how far to take it before it needs real custom software. At Evicron, an AI and custom software studio based in Barcelona with 200+ projects across 12 industries, we use these same tools every week to prototype fast — and we know exactly where they stop being enough.

What each tool actually brings

Figma Config 2026: code and agents on the same canvas

At its annual conference (San Francisco, June 23-25), Figma introduced code layers, generative plugins and visual effects (Motion, Shaders) built directly into the canvas, alongside Weave, its new AI workflow layer for orchestrating design tasks with agents. The core idea: code becomes just another design material, editable in the same place you build the mockup.

Google Stitch: free design by voice or by text

Stitch, from Google Labs, runs on Gemini 2.5 Pro and generates full, navigable screens from a written or spoken description, or a reference image, with an infinite canvas and export to Figma or React code. It’s free, with 350 generations a month, making it the most accessible way to test an idea with no budget at all.

Claude Design: from a prompt to a mockup with a code handoff

Anthropic launched Claude Design on April 17, 2026, powered by Claude Opus 4.7. You can start from a prompt, upload documents (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX), or point it at an existing codebase, then edit inline with comments and live spacing/color controls, and export to Canva, PDF, PPTX or standalone HTML. What sets it apart from Figma and Stitch is the handoff: it packages the design ready to hand to Claude Code and generate the real implementation with a single instruction.

What they’re genuinely good for

All three tools solve one concrete problem well: exploring and validating an idea before you invest. A retail business that wants to see how its online catalog would look, or a restaurant that needs a first version of its booking site to show a partner, can have something clickable in minutes instead of waiting weeks. They’re also useful for generating quick variations of a landing page or campaign, or giving a team without a dedicated designer a decent starting point instead of a generic template.

Where they fall short for a real business

That’s where what they solve well ends. None of the three generates real business logic: a booking engine with deposits and payments, an admin backoffice, integrations with your POS, ERP or CRM, or an invoicing flow. At Plata Garage, a premium used-car dealership in Sabadell, a good-looking website wasn’t enough — it needed online booking with a deposit, a management backoffice and cookieless analytics. None of that comes out of a prompt, however good the model behind it is.

They also don’t solve performance, technical SEO or regulatory compliance. Code exported from these tools usually needs rewriting to load fast, be accessible and index well; and none of them guarantees your site complies with the EU AI Act if you run a chatbot, or with GDPR if you collect customer data. There’s also a less visible but equally real problem: lock-in. Designing and prototyping inside a vendor’s platform is fine while you’re exploring; building your final product there means depending on their limits, pricing and roadmap forever.

How we use this at Evicron

In our projects, we use Figma, Stitch or Claude Design during discovery: they’re perfect for reaching the first clickable demo by week 2 of our four-phase, weekly-sprint process. From there, development moves to the client’s own code, with no lock-in, plus the business logic, integrations and technical SEO a prototype can’t give you. It’s the same principle behind our SEO and AI-optimized websites and custom software services: AI speeds up exploration, but the final product still needs engineering.

How to decide for your business

Before commissioning — or prototyping yourself — your business’s website or app, ask three questions:

1. Are you validating an idea or shipping a product? For the former, any of the three tools works today.
2. Does your site need its own logic (bookings, payments, a backoffice, integrations)? If so, an AI prototype is the starting point, not the solution.
3. How much does vendor independence matter to you? If the answer is “a lot,” the final code needs to be yours.

If you’d like help deciding where the prototype ends and the real product begins, get in touch: the first consultation is free, and within 24 hours you’ll get a concrete diagnosis, not a generic tool list.

Sources: Anthropic’s official Claude Design announcement, TechCrunch’s coverage of Claude Design, and the official Figma Config 2026 page.