Pros & Cons
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- Real-time collaboration
- Works with vector files
- Robust third-party integration options
- Good font tools
- Allows code handoff to developers
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- Limited offline capabilities
- No CMYK color support for print-destined designs
Figma Specs
| Data-Driven Charts | |
| Edits Vector Graphics | |
| Pricing Model | Subscription |
| Pro-Level Typography | |
| Touch Interface Support |
Figma helps you build creative and professional design projects independently or with a team. The cross-platform app supports real-time collaboration across all design stages, from brainstorming to deployment, in an interface that's easy to grasp. Comprehensive font and third-party integration support make it extremely flexible, while convenient coding handoff tools allow developers to quickly move projects to production. We wish it had better offline functionality, but Figma earns our Editors' Choice award for graphic design software thanks to its advanced capabilities, superb coworking features, and top-notch user experience.
What Can Figma Do and What's New?
As a soon-to-be former user of Adobe XD, I’ve been excited to try Figma, especially since colleagues and clients have increasingly drifted to the platform (note that Adobe tried to acquire Figma back in 2022). The Figma name stems from the phrase "figment of your imagination."
(Credit: Figma/PCMag)With Figma, you can design interfaces for everything from web and desktop apps to mobile apps to portfolio sites. But you can also use Figma for all the non-design steps within that process, including brainstorming with colleagues and presenting your ideas. For reference, the Figma platform has four related modules: FigJam, Figma Slides, Dev Mode, and Figma Design. I focus on Figma Design here since that's what you use to create and prototype designs, but it's worth knowing how the other components fit into the experience.
FigJam is a collaborative whiteboard where you can brainstorm, mind map, or sketch a design roadmap. It even lets you create a Gantt-style project timeline. The FigJam AI can help you summarize and organize information here, too. Typing in the prompt, “Make a mindmap that categorizes major tech review magazines,” yielded satisfactory results. Slides is for creating or co-creating interactive presentations. Here, FigJam AI can adjust the tone of your content and generate slides based on a FigJam board. Both FigJam and Slides support hundreds of Figma- and community-made templates.
Dev Mode is a feature set within Figma Design that lets you inspect and annotate your projects to ensure they are ready for developers. It can also help you manage the handoff process to the coders so they can do their work. This streamlines iteration cycles between design, development, and engineering teams.
Here are some of the latest updates to the platform:
- FigJam's diagramming tools benefit from movable connector labels, a new Shapes Sidebar, and more shapes for developers.
- Slides supports plug-ins that let you add items like a timer, import a PDF as an image, integrate a data feed, make a mesh gradient, and use Lottie animations (lightweight, vector-based files that some websites and apps use)
- Keyboard shortcuts are now available to speed up Boolean operations of overlapping polygons (difference, intersect, subtract, and union).
Figma is available on the web, as well as a desktop (macOS and Windows) and mobile (Android and iOS) app. You can find all of the integrations it supports here. Dozens of options are available across the communication, development, productivity, and user testing categories.
How Much Does Figma Cost?
Figma has four pricing tiers: Starter, Professional, Organization, and Enterprise. The free Starter plan gets you access to all the main features of the FigJam, Slides, and Figma Design modules, but not Dev Mode. You can access UI kits and templates, create an unlimited number of draft designs, and use third-party integrations at this level. Students and educators can use a more complete version of Figma for free.
The Professional, Organization, and Enterprise tiers split module access into separate 'seats.' Collab seats can use FigJam and Slides, Dev seats add Dev Mode, and Full seats include Figma Design, with pricing increasing at each level. The Professional, Organization, and Enterprise plans, respectively, cost $16, $55, and $90 per user per month (billed annually) at the Full seat level. Of course, not everyone on your team needs access to every component. View seats, which allow viewing and commenting, are free across the board.
Choose the Professional tier if you want to create an unlimited number of projects and files for a single small team, use team libraries, access Dev Mode, password-protect files, and access unlimited version history. The Organization team adds support for an unlimited number of teams, shared fonts, custom templates, and single-sign-on (SSO). The Enterprise tier goes deeper into administration features and allows you to create custom workspaces that mirror your company's structure.
Nothing else on the market quite matches up with Figma. My former go-to prototyping app, Adobe XD, is currently in maintenance mode, which means no ongoing development of new features. InVision Studio discontinued its prototyping and collaboration services at the end of 2024. It didn't keep up with the times and lacked significant features compared with Figma. The Apple-centric Sketch app requires add-ons to compete with Figma’s capabilities and doesn't have apps for Android or Windows. Miro is an excellent, web-based brainstorming and collaboration platform, but it lacks a dedicated design tool like Figma’s. Finally, the pro-level Framer is primarily suitable for web designers.
Getting Started With Figma
Before you sign up for the platform, I recommend watching the fabulously animated introduction video. After I created an account, Figma sent me an onboarding email.
Once in Figma, I opted to explore the starter array of templates with annotated instructions for a mini guided practice. I initially learned how to make a basic frame, add text layers, and change formatting. The latter is easy thanks to a contextual sidebar menu with all the options you might expect: effects, font, hover and click state palettes, line height and letter spacing, opacity, position and alignment, and more. Then, Figma walked me through how to adjust the frame's properties, including corner radii, fill, size, and stroke, to name a few. The last step pointed out the availability of UI kits for quickly spinning up a design. I opted to keep Labels (contextual pop-up helpers) active throughout testing since I'm new to the platform.
(Credit: Figma/PCMag)Of the three included UI kits, the 245-component Material 3 Design Kit (Google’s latest open-source design system) caught my eye. Starting with premade assets saves learning time and work hours if you don’t need to create a bespoke interface.
From this starting point (a detailed view of a mobile app template), you can change palettes, populate fields with custom copy, swap out images, and so forth. Components within the Material 3 Design Kit include checkboxes, date and time pickers, a pop-up keyboard, progress indicators, sliders, and switches. The other two main UI kits are Apple's 156-component iOS 18 + iPad OS 18 Kit and Figma's 372-component Simple Design System.
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Help and learning tools are readily available. Beginning with Figma Learn, you can access YouTube videos on Figma’s dedicated channel, take courses, and read clear documentation with bulleted information that hyperlinks to additional information. If that’s not enough, the Figma Community enthusiastically provides design resources, no-cost templates, sound advice, plug-ins, and more. Finally, Figma's resource library invites you to explore and learn how to apply various design techniques.
Figma is an online-first platform, meaning that offline functionality isn't a strength. If you lose and then regain your connection, Figma will re-sync any changes you make from any pages that you had loaded while you still had a connection. However, if you navigate away from those pages, you can't get back to them in most cases until you have internet again. The Figma desktop apps let you save a file locally, but you lose the version history and any associated comments upon re-importing them.
What's It Like to Use Figma?
As mentioned, Figma covers an extensive number of use cases. I highlight just some of its main features and my impressions of them below:
User Interface and Experience Design
Examples of user interface and experience design are in your eyeballs nearly every moment of the day, and every detail matters (including both the elements that are there and not). Let’s quickly review best practices:
- Keep it simple
- Make it intuitively easy to use
- Prioritize your users
- Make navigation clear and obvious
- Keep text and images legible
- Make sure it’s responsive to all screen sizes
- Reward users with instant visual or haptic feedback
- Keep every last thing on brand using a design system
- Make it load fast
- Test, test, test, and then improve
Figma helps keep you and your design team on task with seamless real-time collaboration. Having extra eyes and test subjects right there to comment on a fresh design is critical for a successful user experience that obeys those rules. When you are working hard and fast on a project, inherent assumptions and biases can lead to bad design decisions. With team members who are all on the same page, you can identify and solve most problems early.
Figma also offers specific related design features, such as Auto Layout, which helps you create flexible and responsive elements that auto-adjust based on content and variable screen sizes. If you want to add text to a button, for example, this dynamic resizing tool lets it expand automatically without breaking the design. Additionally, Figma maintains consistent padding and spacing between elements and stacked items like lists, grids, and navigation buttons.
Interactive Prototyping
Creating a working prototype is almost magical—especially if you are an experienced UI/UX designer and remember the days of describing to clients how everything would animate, dim, blink, or move.
In a nutshell, the benefit of interactive prototyping is that stakeholders can use the interface as if it were live. That's a big improvement over looking at static screens with lots of arrows. Think of it as bringing a design to life with a clickable, functional mockup that allows users to experience how a product will look and work—before development begins. Further advantages to producing an interactive prototype include early user testing and validation, streamlining feedback loops with Figma’s inline comments, and improving communication with developers. This all saves money.
Team Collaboration
With Figma’s fast, real-time collaboration, multiple users and even stakeholders can design and offer feedback simultaneously. It may sound chaotic, but this approach works for most teams. Remember that live design collaboration suffered from maddening lag times and herky-jerky movements just a few short years ago. Because Figma (like Adobe’s Creative Cloud) is web-based, platform incompatibility, installation hiccups, and copying files onto a thumb drive are all things of the past. With Figma, you can still be a contributing member of your team whether you are in Kansas, Hong Kong, or in jammies on your couch.
Version Control
What’s worse than sending a document for review and finding out later that a colleague (or a client) changed some little or big thing and saved the file without amending the file name? Potential problems just multiply with more collaborators. Figma eliminates this frustration with its version history feature. It tracks changes and automatically records your project at 30-minute intervals. You can even add names and notes to specific versions, compare or restore previous versions, and pan through and see snapshots in time. Free Starter users have access to just 30 days of version history.
(Credit: Figma/PCMag)Design Systems
A thoughtful design system with well-crafted components is the best way for larger enterprises to ensure consistency across multiple creators working on materials.
Think of a design system as a single-source-of-truth toolbox for designers and developers that the design police create and maintain. Design systems contain premade, reusable design elements such as colorways, components, icons and assets, spacing and grid settings, and typography. They can also include sets of variant states that improve accessibility, interactivity, and usability. States are micro-interactions like active (currently selected or clicked), hover (mouse-over indication), loading (processing feedback), and unavailable (grayed out). It feels cohesive and efficient using Figma to help organize your treasure trove of design elements, and it eliminates some worry about inconsistent usage. Note that Figma doesn't natively support the CMYK color space, though some plug-ins are available to make sure your project is print-ready.
Typography
To the delight of typophiles, Figma lets you access OpenType Fonts (OTF) features of your pro typefaces (unlike in ordinary Microsoft and Google software). OTF is a newer format Adobe and Microsoft (that irony is not wasted on me) developed that gives you a greater level of control as you set type. Using advanced typographic features properly can raise the look of your designs from pretty good to stunning. Common to most OTFs are:
- Ligatures: Combining or adjusting two or more contiguous glyphs into a single one that is more legible and elegant
- Old Style and Lining Numerals: Numbers with case heights and numbers with widths that align in columns, respectively
- Real Small Caps: Not fake versions that use a skinnier and smaller letter rather than matching the weight of the letter
- Stylistic Sets: Alternate letterforms for customization to the look of a word
- Variable Optical Sizing: Auto-adjusts letter forms for different sizes, enhancing clarity at small and large scales
Developer Handoff
Gone are the days of back-and-forth emails, bungled action item delegations, and screen-sharing. Figma lets everyone see what‘s important to them. Figma provides Android, CSS, and iOS code snippets, and can download assets. With Dev Mode’s Inspect tool, developers can check design and object properties in advance of coding so they can raise questions before the design process is complete. And whenever they are ready to deploy a project, developers can access everything via a Figma link. The platform works with tools like GitHub, Jira, and Zeplin.
(Credit: Figma/PCMag)Final Thoughts
(Credit: Figma)
Figma
Figma is a potent tool for teams and individuals who want to explore ideas, get feedback, build prototypes, and streamline the development of standardized assets within corporate design systems.