Composa vs Knak: Which Enterprise Email Template Builder Is Right for Your Team?

If you're evaluating enterprise email creation platforms, there's a good chance Knak is on your shortlist. They've built a strong product and established themselves as one of the leading no-code email builders for Marketo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud users.

But if your design team works in Figma — and your biggest frustration is the disconnect between what gets designed and what actually gets built — you should understand a fundamental architectural difference before signing a contract.

This isn't a hit piece. Knak is a solid platform. But Composa and Knak take fundamentally different approaches to the same problem, and which one is right for you depends on where your pain actually lives.

The Core Difference

Here's the simplest way to understand it:

Knak treats Figma as a starting point. You can use their Figma plugin to import a design, but once it's in Knak, the connection to Figma is severed. The design becomes a separate asset inside Knak's proprietary builder. From that point forward, you're maintaining two systems — your Figma design files and your Knak templates.

Composa treats Figma as the source of truth. Your Figma components power the Composa plugin and the Composa browser editor. When a designer updates a component in Figma, that change automatically flows through to every email that uses it — in the plugin and in the editor. There's one design system, not two.

This distinction sounds subtle, but in practice it changes everything about how your team works.

What Happens When You Update a Component

This is where the architectural difference becomes painfully real. Let's say your brand team updates your primary CTA button — new border radius, new padding, slightly different colour.

In Knak:

Your designer updates the button component in Figma. They then re-sync the design to Knak via the Figma plugin. Knak creates a "net new asset" — the updated button exists as a new component. Every email you've already built in Knak still has the old button. Your team has to manually open each affected email and swap in the new component. If you have 50 active templates, that's 50 manual updates.

In Composa:

Your designer updates the button component in Figma. That's it. Every email in Composa that uses that button automatically reflects the change. Your marketer opens a campaign they built last month and the new button is already there. No re-syncing. No manual updates. No "net new" assets to manage.

For teams maintaining a handful of templates, the Knak approach is manageable. For enterprise teams running dozens of templates across multiple brands and regions, the manual update cycle becomes a significant operational burden.

Figma Feature Support

How well each platform translates Figma designs into email code matters enormously. If your designers have to work around limitations — flattening layers, avoiding auto-layout, manually exporting assets — the "Figma integration" creates as many problems as it solves.

Auto-Layout is the big one. It's fundamental to how modern Figma design systems work. Composa supports auto-layout natively, mapping it directly to MJML structures. Knak's documentation warns users to "avoid" or "flatten" auto-layout, which essentially means your designers have to dumb down their Figma files before syncing.

Composa also supports nested auto-layout, Figma variants, variables, gap features, opacity and blending modes, and native SVGs. Several of these are either unsupported or require manual workarounds in Knak.

This matters because the whole point of a Figma integration is to let designers work naturally. If they have to maintain a separate, simplified version of their design system just for the email plugin, you've traded one rebuild problem for another.

The Marketer Experience

Both Composa and Knak give marketers a browser-based editor with drag-and-drop functionality and brand guardrails. On the surface, these editors look similar — marketers can assemble emails from pre-built components, edit content, and export to their ESP.

The difference is what powers those components.

In Knak, the components in the marketer editor are Knak's own proprietary components. They may have been initially inspired by a Figma import, but they live and are maintained inside Knak.

In Composa, the components in the marketer editor are powered directly by the Figma design system. They're the same components, maintained in one place. When a designer updates the master component in Figma, the marketer's editor updates automatically.

For marketers, the day-to-day editing experience is comparable. The operational difference shows up over time — in how much maintenance your team needs to do, how quickly brand updates roll out, and how confident you can be that every email matches the current design system.

ESP Integrations

Both platforms export to major ESPs. Knak has particularly strong native integrations with Marketo and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which is where much of their customer base lives.

Composa exports clean, responsive HTML that works across Braze, Iterable, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Marketo, HubSpot, Klaviyo, and any other platform that accepts HTML templates. The MJML-based architecture produces minified output — typically around 240 lines of clean code compared to the 800+ lines of table-heavy HTML that many builders produce. This helps with deliverability and keeps you well under Gmail's 102KB clipping threshold.

If Marketo or SFMC is your primary platform and deep native integration matters more than Figma connectivity, Knak's ESP integrations are mature and well-tested. If you're on Braze, Iterable, or run a multi-ESP environment, Composa's platform-agnostic approach gives you more flexibility.

Where Knak Wins

To be fair about this, there are scenarios where Knak is the stronger choice:

You don't use Figma. Composa's entire architecture is built around Figma as the design source of truth. If your team doesn't design in Figma, Composa isn't the right fit. Knak's standalone builder works independently of any design tool.

You're deeply embedded in Marketo or SFMC. Knak's native integrations with these platforms are mature and purpose-built. If your workflow is tightly coupled to one of these ESPs and you want the deepest possible integration, Knak has had years to refine this.

You need a solution today. Knak is an established platform with a large customer base. Composa is onboarding teams now. If you need to be fully deployed next month, Knak can deliver on that timeline.

Your design team isn't a bottleneck. If your pain is primarily about marketer autonomy and you're less concerned about design-to-production fidelity, Knak's self-contained builder solves that problem without requiring Figma involvement.

Where Composa Wins

Composa is the stronger choice when:

Figma is your design team's home. If your designers maintain an email design system in Figma and you want that to be the single source of truth for everything — from design to production to deployment — Composa's architecture is purpose-built for this.

Brand consistency is non-negotiable. If you operate across multiple brands, regions, or teams and you need absolute confidence that every email reflects the current design system, Composa's automatic component updates eliminate the drift that comes from maintaining separate systems.

You're tired of the rebuild tax. If your team spends hours (or days) rebuilding emails that already exist in Figma, or manually propagating design updates across dozens of templates, Composa eliminates that entire workflow.

You want to avoid ESP lock-in. Because Composa's templates are powered by Figma rather than a proprietary builder, switching ESPs doesn't mean rebuilding your template library. Your design system travels with you.

You value clean, lightweight code. Composa's MJML-based output is significantly lighter than most enterprise builders, which matters for deliverability and Gmail clipping.

Comparison Summary

Capability	Composa	Knak
Figma as source of truth	Live component link	One-time snapshot
Auto-update on Figma change	Automatic everywhere	Net-new asset required
Auto-layout support	Native MJML mapping	"Avoid/Flatten" warnings
Figma variants support	Full support	Visual only
Figma variables support	Supported	Not supported
Marketer browser editor	Yes	Yes
Design system location	In Figma (single source)	Split: Figma + Knak
Component update cascade	All emails auto-update	Manual per-email update
ESP integrations	All major ESPs via HTML	Strong Marketo/SFMC native
Code output	MJML-based, ~240 lines	Proprietary, heavier output
Market maturity	Beta (onboarding now)	Established

Making Your Decision

The honest question to ask yourself is: where does your pain actually live?

If your biggest problem is that marketers can't build emails without developer help, and you want a standalone builder that works independently of your design workflow — Knak solves that well.

If your biggest problem is that your Figma designs and your production emails are two separate systems that constantly drift apart, and you're spending significant time rebuilding and manually propagating updates — that's the exact problem Composa was built to eliminate.

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Design in Figma. Build in Composa. Deploy anywhere.