When Design Tools Become Presentation Tools
Figma built its reputation as the go-to interface design tool for product teams, but its recent push into slide decks has quietly repositioned it as a direct competitor to presentation-focused startups. The feature, which lets users build polished slide presentations inside the same environment where they already design products, is not a side experiment. It is a deliberate expansion into territory that Pitch – the Hamburg-based startup that raised over $135 million specifically to reinvent the slide deck – has been trying to own for years.
Pitch launched with a clear premise: PowerPoint and Google Slides were outdated, and design-forward teams deserved something better. For a while, that argument had real weight. But Figma’s slides feature hands the same audience a presentation tool that lives inside software they already pay for and already know how to use. The overlap is not incidental.
The Workflow Lock-In Problem
Product designers and startup teams already spend significant time inside Figma. Brand assets, UI components, color systems, and typography are all stored there. When a designer needs to build a pitch deck or a product update presentation, leaving Figma to open Pitch – or any other tool – means breaking that workflow, exporting assets, and rebuilding visual consistency from scratch. Figma’s slides feature eliminates that friction entirely by letting users pull from existing design files, shared libraries, and components without switching contexts.
This is the kind of advantage that does not show up in feature comparison charts but drives adoption quietly and consistently. Pitch can offer collaboration, beautiful templates, and video messaging inside decks. What it cannot offer is the fact that your design system is already sitting in the same app. For startups where designers double as deck builders, and where brand consistency matters intensely, that missing link becomes harder to ignore the longer Figma’s native solution improves.
What Pitch Is Actually Up Against
Pitch is not a weak product. Its template quality is genuinely strong, its collaboration layer is well built, and it has carved out a real user base among early-stage founders and marketing teams. The problem is not that Pitch built something bad – it is that Figma built something good enough inside a tool that already had the distribution.
This pattern has played out before in the productivity software space. When a well-funded platform with an existing user base adds a feature that covers 80 percent of what a focused competitor does, the focused competitor does not disappear overnight. But its growth ceiling compresses. New users who might have signed up for Pitch instead default to what is already in their stack. The startups evaluating tools ask a different question now: not “is Pitch better than Figma Slides” but “is Pitch different enough to justify another tool subscription.”
This dynamic mirrors what happened when Notion launched its Sites feature, pushing into Webflow’s space among smaller clients who were already living inside Notion for documentation. The mechanism is identical: a platform expands at the edges, and a focused competitor finds its addressable market quietly narrowing without a single dramatic announcement.
Pitch’s strongest differentiator going forward may be its video recording feature, which lets presenters record themselves alongside their slides directly inside the app. Figma does not currently offer that natively. But “we have one feature Figma does not” is a precarious place to build a growth strategy, particularly when Figma has both the engineering capacity and the incentive to close that gap.
The Pricing Pressure Is Real
Beyond workflow, there is a straightforward financial argument working against Pitch. Many design teams are already paying for Figma at a team or organization level. Adding Pitch on top means a second SaaS line item for a capability that increasingly lives in the tool they are already funding. For a startup watching its burn rate, the calculus tilts toward consolidation, not expansion.
Pitch has a free tier, which softens the cost argument somewhat. But free users do not sustain a startup that has raised nine figures. Converting free users to paid subscribers becomes harder when the paid alternative – Figma – is already on the company card and already being used daily by the exact people Pitch needs to convert.
Where Pitch Has to Go From Here
Competing with a platform on the platform’s own terms is rarely a winning strategy. Pitch’s most viable path is probably not to out-Figma Figma on design integration, but to go deeper on the use cases Figma has no particular interest in owning. Sales decks with CRM data integration, investor updates with live metrics pulled from financial tools, or presentation analytics that track who watched which slides for how long – these are directions that make Pitch genuinely complementary to a design workflow rather than redundant to it.
A few startups in the broader productivity space have survived platform encroachment by specializing aggressively. The ones that struggled most are those that tried to stay general while a platform feature covered their core use case adequately. Pitch has the product talent and the funding runway to specialize. Whether it moves fast enough in that direction before Figma’s slides feature becomes the default assumption for a design team building a deck is the more pressing question.
Right now, Figma Slides is not perfect. It lacks some of the polish and purpose-built presentation logic that Pitch has refined over several years. But product gaps close. The harder gap to close is the one between “a tool someone already uses every day” and “a tool someone has to consciously choose to open instead.”
Pitch still has paying customers, a strong brand among design-literate founders, and a product that genuinely does more in some areas than Figma’s slides feature currently does. But its next funding conversation will almost certainly include a question about Figma that did not exist two years ago, and the answer to that question is not obvious yet.
