InVision, a UX trailblazer, is shutting down in the era of Figma

UX design company InVision has announced plans to discontinue its design collaboration services at the end of 2024.

In a blog post on the company’s site, CEO Michael Shenkman announced the impending shutdown, while simultaneously ensuring users that nothing will be changing about the service over the next few months.

Shenkman said the company acknowledges that since the end of its design collaboration services will impact its customers’ creative processes and workflows, it wanted to give them “ample notice” so users can plan accordingly and a transition can be made as smoothly as possible.

The company’s sales team will be helping Enterprise customers with the transition. Self-serve customers will be able to continue to use the service just as they have been until the end of 2024, with the caveat that they’ll now have to purchase monthly rather than an annual plan.

On Reddit, users identifying as current InVision customers and former employees offered opinions on what might have caused the company’s decline, with many noting that it once owned the market and was used by a large number of designers. InVision raised money quickly, possibly with the hope of an acquisition from competitor Adobe, which never happened. But some argued that instead of growing its products, the company allowed those products to get stagnant and failed to react to the market around it. (Adobe did, however, attempt to acquire the company’s rival, Figma, which was launched in 2016, years after InVision.)

Users on Y Combinator’s Hacker News forum echoed those Reddit users, with one user commenting: “[InVision was] way ahead of the curve when [it] began and simply never did anything useful beyond that.”

InVision was founded in 2011 and was valued at nearly $2 billion during the height of its success, Silicon Republic notes. The company launched with $1.5 million in capital in its first year, and then received $45 million in funding four years later and another $100 million in 2017, pushing the company into unicorn status with a valuation of $1 billion. That valuation was doubled the following year.

InVision’s visual collaboration product, Freehand, was acquired by Miro in the fall of 2023. The current version of the tool is expected to wind down at the end of the year as well; however, there are plans to bring some elements of Freehand to Miro, and to allow Freehand users to access Miro at no additional cost. Migration services will also likely be offered to help users bring things from InVision into Miro.

InVision users are encouraged to begin the process of retrieving their work and shutting down their accounts as soon as possible. All account assets are expected to be deleted shortly after the company’s shutdown at the end of the year.