Stiffened plates found wider application in many branches of civil and structural engineering such as retaining walls, storage tanks, railway cars, large transportation carrier panels, steel lock gates, slender ship hulls, box girder bridges, bridge decks, offshore oil platforms and helidecks in which high strength to weight ratio is important. The main objective of this study was to determine the ultimate load of stiffened plates with initial imperfections using finite element analysis that were tested under axial compression. The analysis was done using ANSYS, the finite element software by considering both material and geometric nonlinearities. The geometric initial imperfections in the plate in between the stiffeners and in the stiffeners were measured after fabrication and that were modeled in the analysis using shell elements. The ultimate load of stiffened plates was also calculated using semi-empirical solutions. The analytical results obtained from the finite element analysis and semi-empirical solutions were compared with the experimental data. It was found that the proposed method underestimated the ultimate load while ANSYS overestimating.