Most design teams have one tool open all day. For the majority, that tool is Figma.
Figma is a browser-based UI/UX design platform built for real-time collaboration. No installs, no file versions lost in email threads, no “finalFINALv3″ chaos.
Since its public launch in 2016, it has taken over the product design workflow almost completely. 90% of professional designers use it as their primary tool today.
This article covers what Figma is, how it works, what its core features do, and where it fits inside a real product design workflow. You will also find an honest look at its limitations and how it compares to Sketch and Adobe XD.
What Is Figma?
Figma is a cloud-based UI/UX design tool that runs entirely in the browser. No installation required, no local files, no emailing designfinalv3_FINAL.sketch to anyone.
Co-founders Dylan Field and Evan Wallace started building it in 2012. It launched publicly on September 27, 2016, after a closed beta in 2015.
The core idea was simple but technically hard: use WebGL to run a full vector design tool inside a browser tab, with multiple people editing the same file at once. That bet paid off.
By 2023, 90% of professional designers used Figma as their primary tool, up from just 7% in 2017 (UX Tools Survey). Sketch, once the dominant tool at 45% adoption, now sits at under 5%.
Figma went public on the New York Stock Exchange in July 2025 under the ticker “FIG,” closing its first trading day at $115.50 against a $33 IPO price, a roughly 250% gain (Fortune). Revenue hit $1.056 billion in FY2025, a 41% increase year-over-year.
Nearly 95% of Fortune 500 companies now use Figma, according to SQ Magazine’s 2025 data.
Have you seen the latest Figma statistics?
Discover comprehensive Figma statistics including revenue growth, market share, user demographics, and funding data.
Check them out →| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2012 (Dylan Field and Evan Wallace) |
| Public Launch | September 27, 2016 |
| Monthly Active Users | 13 million (March 2025, SQ Magazine) |
| FY2025 Revenue | $1.056 billion |
| Market Share (UI Design Tools) | 40.65% (Cropink, 2024) |
How Does Figma Work?
Figma files live on Figma’s servers. When you open a file, you are connecting to that file, not downloading a copy of it. Every change you make is synced instantly.
This is what makes real-time multiplayer editing possible. When two designers open the same file, they see each other’s cursors moving in real time, watching edits appear without refreshing or merging.
How Figma Renders Designs in the Browser
When Figma launched in 2015, running a full design tool in a browser was not a common idea. Most rich design tools were desktop-only apps.
Figma bet on WebGL, a browser graphics API built for 3D applications, and adapted it for complex 2D vector work. Evan Wallace, who co-founded Figma, had already been experimenting with WebGL before the company started, which gave the team early confidence in the technology (Figma Blog, 2023).
In 2023, Figma began migrating its renderer to WebGPU, the successor to WebGL. WebGPU allows compute shaders to move rendering work from the CPU to the GPU for better parallel processing.
The core rendering pipeline is also partly written using WebAssembly (WASM). Code compiled to WASM runs in the browser at near-native speed, which is how Figma handles heavy vector calculations without lag.
How Real-Time Collaboration Works in Figma
Figma built its own multiplayer sync system from scratch rather than using Operational Transformation (OT), the algorithm behind Google Docs.
OT was overkill for design files. It creates a combinatorial explosion of possible states when multiple users edit simultaneously, which is hard to reason about and harder to debug (Figma Blog).
Instead, Figma uses a CRDT-based (Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types) approach that handles concurrent edits with eventual consistency. Two designers changing the same rectangle at the same time won’t lose either change.
Teams using Figma’s multiplayer editing report 35% faster project delivery compared to file-based workflows (Medium, 2024). The #DesignInFigma campaign in 2024 drove 8 million impressions and 400,000 new users in a single push.
Figma requires an active internet connection for most functions. Offline access is not fully supported, which is one of its known tradeoffs.
What Are the Core Features of Figma?
Figma’s feature set covers the full user-centered design workflow, from rough wireframe to production-ready mockup to developer handoff. Most of it works without installing anything.
Components and Variants
Components are reusable UI elements. Build a button once, use it across 200 screens. Update the source component, and every instance updates with it.
Variants group related component states under a single component set. A button component might have 4 states: default, hover, active, and disabled. All 4 live in one Variants panel, toggled by property.
This matters a lot in large products. Airbnb, Stripe, and GitHub all manage their design systems through Figma component libraries, where a single source component change propagates across thousands of design files instantly.
Auto Layout
Auto Layout makes frames behave like CSS flexbox. Elements inside an Auto Layout frame reposition and resize automatically as content changes.
- Add or remove list items without manually shifting everything below
- Text labels that grow with content without breaking the button frame
- Nested Auto Layout frames for complex responsive structures like cards or data tables
Auto Layout 5.0 (released at Config 2024) added min/max width controls and wrapping, which makes it closer to real CSS behavior than any previous version.
Prototyping and Dev Mode
Figma’s interactive prototyping connects frames with triggers, transitions, and smart animate. You can simulate navigation flows, hamburger menu behavior, scroll interactions, and component state changes without writing a line of code.
Dev Mode is a separate view for developers. It surfaces CSS, iOS, and Android code snippets alongside design specs, and shows exactly which variables, colors, and spacing values are in use. Developers inspect the design without editing it, keeping the source file clean.
Learn more about how to prototype in Figma and how to add animations to interactive flows.
What Is FigJam and How Does It Relate to Figma?
FigJam is Figma’s online whiteboard tool. It launched in April 2021 and uses the same real-time multiplayer infrastructure as Figma Design, but it is a separate product with a different canvas and different purpose.
FigJam is for before the design starts. Sticky notes, connectors, voting widgets, timers, and stamps for workshops. Figma Design is for when the actual UI design work begins.
Think of it this way: FigJam is where a product team aligns on what to build. Figma is where the designer builds it.
| Tool | Primary Use | Stage | Key Elements |
|---|---|---|---|
| FigJam | Brainstorming, workshops, and diagramming | Pre-design | Sticky notes, connectors, voting, and templates |
| Figma Design | UI design, prototyping, and developer handoff | Design and build | Frames, components, variables, and Dev Mode |
FigJam is available as a standalone product or bundled within Figma’s paid plans. Since Figma’s December 2024 pricing restructure, the Full Seat plan includes FigJam access, which removed the need for a separate FigJam subscription for most teams.
What Is the Figma Pricing Model?
Figma charges per editor seat. Viewer seats are free and unlimited on all paid plans. The cost difference between plans is significant, so it’s worth matching the plan to actual team needs rather than defaulting to Enterprise.
In December 2024, Figma announced its first major price increase in nearly 7 years, effective March 2025. The new structure bundles FigJam and Figma Slides into the Full Seat price, which reduced the effective increase for teams already paying for both (SaaS Price Pulse, 2026).
| Plan | Cost (Annual Billing) | Key Limit / Unlock |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | Free | 3 design files and 3 FigJam boards |
| Professional | $12/editor/month | Unlimited files, shared libraries, and version history |
| Organization | $45/editor/month | Organization-wide libraries, branching and merging, and analytics |
| Enterprise | $90/editor/month | SSO, advanced security, and guest access controls |
Dev seats on Professional cost $12/month. On Organization, $25/month. This is a meaningful saving for teams where developers only need to inspect designs, not edit them.
Most organizations start on Professional and upgrade to Organization only when they need org-wide shared libraries or design system analytics. Vendr data shows that multi-year contracts typically reduce per-seat pricing by 20-35%.
Who Uses Figma?
75% of product designers considered Figma their primary UI design tool in 2023 (CanvasBusinessModel). By 2025, that number had grown further, with 93% of organizations in the software design category using Figma as of December 2025 (Ramp).
The tool spans roles, not just designers.
- UI/UX designers: wireframing, high-fidelity UI, interactive prototypes, and design systems
- Product managers: reviewing flows, annotating requirements, aligning on scope before build
- Developers: inspecting specs, pulling code snippets, checking spacing and color tokens in Dev Mode
- Design system teams: managing shared component libraries published across multiple product teams
84% of designers collaborate with developers weekly (Xrilion, 2025). That overlap is exactly the workflow Figma was built to support.
Notable companies using Figma include Microsoft, Dropbox, Stripe, Slack, GitHub, Mailchimp, Rakuten, and X (Twitter). Nearly 95% of Fortune 500 companies have Figma in their design stack (SQ Magazine, 2025).
Students and educators get Figma free through the Education plan, which is a big part of why 91% of new designers entering the field choose Figma as their first design tool (Ramp, 2025). They learn it in school, then bring it into the companies they join.
What Is the Figma Community?
The Figma Community is a public platform where designers publish and share files for others to use. Any Figma user can duplicate a community file directly into their own drafts and start working from it immediately.
Over 1 million community resources were published as of 2023, spanning UI kits, icon sets, design system templates, wireframe libraries, and presentation files.
Plugins
Plugins extend what Figma does natively. The community has built over 1,500 plugins that integrate with Figma’s canvas directly.
- Unsplash: insert real photos without leaving Figma
- Content Reel: populate designs with real names, avatars, and text automatically
- Stark: check color contrast and web accessibility compliance without switching tools
- Lottie Files: add Lottie animations to prototypes and export-ready screens
Plugin activity drives roughly 50% of user engagement on the platform (Medium, 2024). That number says a lot about how deeply the community has extended Figma’s core product.
Widgets
Widgets add interactive elements to Figma and FigJam canvases. Voting widgets for workshops, sticky note organizers, Jira ticket trackers, and kanban boards that live directly inside a design file.
Unlike plugins, widgets stay visible and interactive for all users in the file, not just the person who installed them. A project manager can use a voting widget in a FigJam session without installing anything themselves.
Google publishes its Material Design system, and Atlassian publishes its Atlassian Design System, both as free Figma Community files that any designer can copy and build on.
How Does Figma Compare to Sketch and Adobe XD?
Figma holds 83% of professional UI designers as their primary tool as of 2024, with Sketch at 7% and Adobe XD effectively retired at 3% (UX Tools 2024 Survey, n=4,300+ designers).
The tool debate is largely settled. But understanding why each one sits where it does is useful, especially if you’re inheriting a team workflow that isn’t Figma-first.
| Tool | Platform | Collaboration | Status (2024) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Figma | Web, Mac, Windows, Linux | Native real-time multiplayer | Industry standard |
| Sketch | Mac only | Requires third-party tools | Niche, primarily solo designers |
| Adobe XD | Mac, Windows | Limited collaboration features | Active development discontinued in 2023 |
Figma vs. Sketch
Sketch has over 1 million users (Contrary Research, 2024), with clients including Netflix, Boeing, and Google. But it runs on Mac only, stores files locally, and has no native multiplayer editing.
Real-time collaboration in Sketch requires Zeplin or Abstract as third-party additions. In Figma, it is built into the product at the infrastructure level.
For solo Mac designers who work in isolation, Sketch still holds up. For any team with more than one person touching a file, the workflow friction adds up fast.
Figma vs. Adobe XD
Adobe XD lost $25 million in the year before its acquisition attempt (Reuters). Adobe discontinued active development of XD in 2023 after the Figma deal collapsed.
XD users are now largely migrating to Figma. Adobe has not replaced XD with a direct competitor. The remaining 3% of designers still listing XD as their primary tool in the 2024 survey are mostly those locked into Adobe Creative Cloud enterprise contracts.
Figma’s cross-platform support (Windows, Mac, Linux, browser) is the other decisive difference. XD required Mac or Windows. Figma runs anywhere with a browser.
What Happened with Adobe’s Attempted Acquisition of Figma?
Adobe announced the acquisition of Figma for $20 billion in September 2022, the largest SaaS acquisition in history at the time (CNBC). Half cash, half stock.
The deal drew antitrust scrutiny from the European Commission, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), and the US Department of Justice simultaneously.
The UK CMA concluded in November 2023 that the deal would harm innovation in professional design software and reduce competition, since Figma was a growing rival to Adobe’s own tools. The European Commission reached the same conclusion.
On December 18, 2023, Adobe and Figma terminated the agreement. Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion termination fee within three business days (Adobe regulatory filing). For context, that $1 billion was nearly triple the total capital Figma had raised across its entire lifetime (Wing Venture Capital, 2024).
Figma resumed its standalone product roadmap under Dylan Field. Revenue grew from $505 million in 2023 to $749 million in 2024, a 48% increase (Contrary Research). The company went public on the NYSE in July 2025 under ticker “FIG,” closing its first trading day at approximately 250% above its IPO price (Fortune).
What Are Figma’s Known Limitations?
No tool is perfect. Figma has real constraints that matter depending on your team size, file complexity, and work environment.
Memory and Performance Ceiling
Figma is browser-based, which means it operates under each browser’s active memory limit of approximately 2GB per tab (Figma Help Center). This applies to the desktop app too, since it runs on browser technologies internally.
Hit that ceiling and Figma shows a red alert in the sidebar. At 100%, it locks the file entirely.
Common causes:
- Large files with hundreds of high-resolution images
- Component sets with 1,000+ variants loaded simultaneously
- Multiple pages with dense auto-layout structures
The fix is splitting large files into smaller ones, which most large design teams do anyway as a standard practice.
Offline Access
Figma has no dedicated offline mode. Figma’s own troubleshooting documentation states that the platform requires a reliable, stable internet connection for full functionality (Figma Help Center, 2024).
Teams working in low-connectivity environments (travel, on-site visits, some enterprise networks) run into this wall. It is not a workaround-able limitation. It is a fundamental architecture tradeoff made when building a cloud-native product.
Print and Motion Design Gaps
Figma was built for UI design and screen-based UX design. It does not handle print production or complex motion work well.
Variable font support is limited compared to Adobe Illustrator or InDesign. Teams doing both digital product design and print collateral typically run Figma alongside a separate tool, rather than replacing both with Figma alone.
How Do Design Systems Work in Figma?
A design system in Figma is a published shared library: a file containing components, styles, and variables that other team files can pull from. Change a component in the source library, and every file using it gets an update notification.
Design systems analytics (available on the Organization plan) let admins track component usage, detached instances, and adoption rates across an entire organization.
Shared Libraries and Component Publishing
Publishing a library makes its components available to every file in a team or organization. Editors can insert library components without copying them, keeping a live link to the source.
Approved libraries get a checkmark in the Figma Libraries panel, signaling to teams that they are officially maintained and safe to use (Figma Help Center). Organizations can also set libraries as default, so they load automatically in every new file.
Experian’s design team uses Figma for component-level design communication and Jira for higher-level feature discussions, treating the two tools as separate layers of the same workflow (Figma Blog, 2024).
Variables and Design Tokens in Figma
Variables, introduced in 2023 and expanded at Config 2024, store design token values: color, spacing, border radius, and typography. One variable can reference multiple modes, so switching from light to dark mode becomes a single click across an entire file.
- Color variables: store hex or rgba values, swap modes with one toggle
- Spacing variables: consistent padding and gap values tied to a single source
- Typography variables: font size and weight tokens that cascade across text styles
Google’s Material Design 3 and the Atlassian Design System are both published as Figma Community files using this variable system. Any team can duplicate them and build on top of a production-grade token architecture from day one.
Learn more about how to create a design system in Figma and how to use components inside shared libraries.
What Is Figma’s Role in the Product Design Workflow?
Figma sits between discovery and development. It is where a product goes from aligned idea to buildable specification.
Design teams reporting 40% faster design cycles use Figma’s full collaboration stack, connecting FigJam for ideation, Figma Design for production screens, and Dev Mode for handoff (Medium, 2024).
Where Figma Fits in the Build Cycle
Typical tool stack around Figma:
- Before Figma: FigJam or Miro for wireframing sessions, user flow mapping, and workshop alignment
- In Figma: mockup production, component building, interactive prototypes, design system management
- Out of Figma: Jira or Linear for task tracking, GitHub for code, Storybook for component documentation
Figma is not a project management tool or a code repository. It is the single source of design truth that everything else references.
The Design-to-Development Handoff
Dev Mode is how Figma closes the gap between design and front-end development. Developers open a file in Dev Mode, click any element, and see CSS, iOS, or Android code alongside spacing values, color tokens, and exportable assets.
Storybook Connect for Figma links design components to their implemented Storybook stories. During handoff, a developer can click “Open story in browser” from the Figma sidebar to jump directly into the Storybook environment with API docs and tests (Storybook Blog, 2024). This removes the back-and-forth of verifying which design version matches the current build.
The Figma for Jira integration lets designers create Jira issues directly from Figma and mark designs as “Ready for Dev” inside Dev Mode. That status syncs to the linked Jira issue automatically, so developers always know when a design is final without asking (Atlassian, 2024).
Design-to-code tools like Anima and Builder.io go one step further, converting Figma frames into working HTML, React, or Vue code. Useful for landing page builds where speed matters more than custom implementation. Not a replacement for a proper backend or production-ready component architecture.
Want to get started? See how to design a website in Figma or explore how to move a Figma design into Webflow for a no-code handoff path.
FAQ on What Is Figma
What is Figma used for?
Figma is used for UI/UX design, wireframing, prototyping, and developer handoff. Product teams use it to design interfaces, build component libraries, run design systems, and collaborate on screen-based digital products from a single shared file.
Is Figma free to use?
Yes. The Starter plan is free and includes 3 Figma design files and 3 FigJam boards with unlimited viewers. Paid plans start at $12 per editor per month, billed annually, and unlock unlimited files and shared libraries.
Is Figma only for designers?
No. Product managers, developers, and stakeholders all use Figma. Developers inspect specs and pull code snippets in Dev Mode. Product managers review flows and annotate requirements. Viewers access files for free on any paid plan.
Does Figma work offline?
Not fully. Figma requires a stable internet connection for most functions. It has no dedicated offline mode. Teams in low-connectivity environments will hit functional limits, as the platform is built on a cloud-based architecture by design.
What is the difference between Figma and FigJam?
Figma Design is for UI production, components, and prototyping. FigJam is a separate whiteboard tool for brainstorming, diagrams, and team workshops. FigJam sits at the ideation stage. Figma Design starts when actual screen design begins.
How does Figma compare to Sketch?
Figma runs on any platform and supports native real-time collaboration. Sketch is Mac-only with local files and no built-in multiplayer editing. By 2024, Figma held 83% of professional designer adoption versus Sketch’s 7% (UX Tools Survey).
What happened with the Adobe and Figma deal?
Adobe announced a $20 billion acquisition of Figma in September 2022. Regulators in the EU and UK blocked it on antitrust grounds. The deal collapsed in December 2023. Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion termination fee.
What is Dev Mode in Figma?
Dev Mode is a developer-focused view inside Figma. It surfaces CSS, iOS, and Android code snippets, spacing values, color tokens, and exportable assets alongside design specs. Developers inspect files without editing them, keeping the source file clean.
Can Figma be used for design systems?
Yes. Figma supports full design system management through shared component libraries, variables, and design tokens. Teams publish a library file and all connected files update automatically when source components change. Google and Atlassian both publish their systems in Figma.
What is Figma’s market share?
Figma holds 40.65% of the UI design tools market and 83% adoption among professional designers as of 2024 (Cropink, UX Tools Survey). Nearly 95% of Fortune 500 companies use Figma, and monthly active users reached 13 million in March 2025.
Conclusion
This conclusion is for an article presenting what is Figma as more than just a design tool. It is the standard infrastructure for modern product design workflows.
From shared component libraries and design tokens to real-time multiplayer editing and Dev Mode handoff, Figma covers the full cycle from wireframe to production spec.
Its 40.65% market share, 13 million monthly active users, and near-universal adoption among Fortune 500 companies reflect a tool that solved a real problem well.
The limitations are real too. Browser memory ceilings and no offline mode matter on large teams.
But for cross-functional product teams building digital interfaces, nothing else comes close to matching Figma’s combination of collaborative design, prototyping, and developer handoff in one place.
