Figma Review 2025: Is It Still the Best Design Tool?

If you work in product design right now, there is a good chance your entire professional world lives inside Figma. That is not an exaggeration. I open Figma before I open my email most mornings. My team does wireframing in Figma, visual design in Figma, prototyping in Figma, design reviews in Figma, brainstorming on FigJam, and developer handoff through Dev Mode. We even do presentations in Figma sometimes, which is either a testament to how versatile the tool is or a sign that we need to touch grass. Probably both.

Figma captured something like 70% of the UI design tool market by doing one thing no one else had managed: it made multiplayer design work. Not "export your file and email it to your colleague" multiplayer. Not "one person designs while others watch" multiplayer. ACTUAL real-time collaboration where three designers can work on the same page simultaneously, see each other's cursors, and never once deal with version conflicts. When you have experienced that, going back to a desktop design tool that saves to local files feels like going back to floppy disks.

The Adobe acquisition saga made the design community hold its collective breath for over a year. When regulators blocked the deal and Adobe paid Figma a billion-dollar breakup fee, the relief was palpable -- and Figma was suddenly sitting on a war chest with something to prove. The past year has been a flurry of feature releases. Variables. Enhanced Dev Mode. A rebuilt prototyping engine. The question everyone in the design world is asking is whether Figma has used its independence wisely.

After using it daily across four different product design projects over the past several months, I can share my answer. But instead of walking through features in a dry list, I want to show you how Figma actually fits into a real project workflow -- because that is where you see what it really does well and where it still falls short.

Starting a Project: Research and Ideation

Every project I work on starts messy. Stakeholder notes, user research highlights, competitor screenshots, rough sketches. Before Figma introduced FigJam, I used Miro for this phase. Now I use FigJam, and the reason is simple: it lives in the same ecosystem as my design files. I can start brainstorming on a FigJam board, create sticky notes and diagrams and user journey maps, and when I am ready to move to actual design, I can embed live Figma frames right into the board. The transition from thinking to designing happens without switching tools. Miro is still better for facilitating large workshops with non-designers, but for my design team's internal ideation, FigJam is plenty.

FigJam has gotten better fast -- it now has templates for retrospectives, sprint planning, and user story mapping, plus stamps, timers, and voting. We ran a design sprint with six people entirely in FigJam and it worked surprisingly well. It is not going to replace Miro for a 50-person all-hands brainstorm, but for teams of 3-10, it does the job without adding another tool to the stack.

Wireframing and Layout: Where Auto Layout Shines

When I move from FigJam to actual design, the first thing I do is set up frames and start wireframing. This is where Figma's Auto Layout really comes alive, and I need to gush about it for a moment because it is one of those features that at its core changed how I design.

Auto Layout is essentially CSS flexbox translated into a visual design tool. You set padding, gaps between elements, and alignment rules, and your design frame automatically rearranges and resizes as you add, remove, or modify content. A button with Auto Layout adjusts its width when you change the label text. A card component grows taller when you add more description text. A navigation bar rearranges when you add or remove items. The 2024 updates added wrap behavior and min/max constraints, which means you can now create designs that genuinely respond to content changes the way real web interfaces do.

If you are a designer who has not mastered Auto Layout yet -- learn it. Seriously. I resisted it for months because my old workflow of manually positioning everything was comfortable. When I finally forced myself to use it exclusively for a project, my productivity roughly doubled. I cannot go back. Designers who do not use Auto Layout are doing the equivalent of writing CSS with absolute positioning for everything. It works, technically. But you are working way too hard.

Visual Design: Components, Variants, and Variables

This is the phase where Figma's power really shows. I build everything from reusable components -- buttons, input fields, cards, modals, navigation elements -- and organize them into a shared team library. When I update the primary button component, every instance of that button across every page and every project that uses our library updates instantly. This sounds like a basic feature, but the execution matters enormously, and Figma's component system is the most polished implementation I have used.

Variants let me create multiple states of a single component. My button component has variants for state (default, hover, pressed, disabled, loading), size (small, medium, large), and style (primary, secondary, ghost, destructive). That is 60 different combinations, all organized in a single component set. A designer working on a page just picks a button, toggles the properties they need in the side panel, and they are done. No hunting through asset libraries. No duplicating components. It just works.

Variables were introduced in 2023 and have been expanded significantly since. They let you define design tokens -- colors, spacing values, border radii, even strings and booleans -- as named variables that you apply across your designs. The killer feature is modes: I have a variable collection with a "Light" mode and a "Dark" mode, and I can switch my entire design between them with a single click. We also use variables for brand theming -- one set of variables for Brand A, another for Brand B, same design, different visual identity. If you are building a design system, variables are not optional. They are the bridge between what designers specify and what developers implement, and they make that bridge actually functional instead of a polite fiction.

Prototyping and Testing: Good Enough for Most Things

Figma's prototyping has come a long way. You connect frames with interaction wires, specify trigger types (click, hover, drag, keyboard shortcut), choose transition animations (dissolve, slide, smart animate), and create multi-step flows with variables-driven logic. Smart Animate is particularly impressive -- it automatically tweens between two frames that share similarly named layers, creating smooth transitions that feel like a real app. I built a prototype for a mobile banking app that included animated tab switching, a pulldown-to-refresh interaction, and a slide-to-confirm payment flow, all within Figma's prototyping system.

Is it as powerful as dedicated prototyping tools like ProtoPie or Principle? No. You will hit walls with complex gesture-based interactions, physics-based animations, or multi-device prototyping. But for the vast majority of product design work -- presenting click-through flows to stakeholders, testing information architecture with users, demonstrating interactions to developers -- Figma's built-in prototyping covers maybe 90% of what you need. That remaining 10% is when you export to ProtoPie. For most of us, that situation comes up maybe once or twice a year.

Collaboration and Handoff: The Stuff That Actually Changed My Team

Real-time collaboration is still the thing that separates Figma from everything else. Let me give you a concrete example from last month. My PM wanted to review a set of screens. In the old Sketch days, I would have exported PNGs, uploaded them somewhere, and walked her through them on a call. In Figma, I sent her a link. She opened it in her browser with zero installation. She left comments directly on specific design elements -- "can we make this CTA more prominent?" pinned to the exact button she was talking about. My other designer jumped in while we were still discussing and started iterating on the feedback in real time, while the PM watched the changes appear live. The whole review-iterate-approve cycle happened in about 40 minutes. It used to take days of back-and-forth.

Dev Mode deserves specific attention because it is where Figma bridges the designer-developer gap. When a developer toggles Dev Mode, the interface transforms into an inspection-focused view. They can click any element and see CSS properties, measure spacing, copy code snippets in CSS, Swift, or Android XML, and read component documentation that designers have written. The VS Code extension lets developers inspect Figma files without leaving their editor. Ready-for-development markers let me flag which designs are finalized, and change summaries show devs exactly what changed since their last visit.

My developers told me Dev Mode reduced the number of "hey, what's the padding here?" Slack messages by about 80%. That alone justifies the investment. The remaining 20% are about animation timing and interaction nuances that Dev Mode does not fully capture, but that is a conversation that benefits from being a conversation rather than a spec.

The Plugin Ecosystem -- My Must-Haves

Figma has over a thousand community plugins, and a handful of them have become essential to my daily workflow. Stark checks accessibility contrast ratios and color blindness simulation. Content Reel populates my designs with realistic placeholder content -- names, addresses, avatars, text -- instead of "Lorem ipsum" everywhere. Iconify gives me instant access to over 150,000 icons from dozens of icon sets. Unsplash fills image placeholders with high-quality stock photos. AutoFlow generates user flow diagrams from my frames with a single click.

The plugin ecosystem is a big part of why switching away from Figma is hard. Sketch has plugins. Penpot is working on them. But the breadth and quality of Figma's plugin marketplace is years ahead of any competitor, and many designers (including me) have built workflows that depend on specific plugins being available and functional.

Competitors: Where They Stand in 2025

Sketch was the king before Figma dethroned it, and I still hear from designers who prefer it. The macOS-native performance is genuinely smoother than Figma in a browser -- I will give it that. But Sketch's collaboration story is an afterthought compared to Figma's, it only runs on Mac, and its plugin ecosystem has been slowly declining as developers shift their attention to Figma. If you are a solo Mac designer who prefers native performance and does not need real-time collaboration, Sketch is still viable. For teams, it is not a serious option anymore.

Adobe XD is basically done. Adobe is pointing XD users toward Figma, which tells you everything you need to know about who won that fight.

Penpot is the open-source, self-hostable alternative that I want to love but cannot recommend yet for professional work. The concept is great -- a Figma-like tool that you can run on your own servers with no vendor lock-in. But the feature gap is significant. No auto layout equivalent (yet), limited component system, basic prototyping, and a smaller plugin ecosystem. If you are philosophically committed to open source or have strict data sovereignty requirements, keep an eye on Penpot. It is getting better fast. But for production design work today, it is not ready.

Framer has pivoted away from being a Figma competitor and into being a website builder, which is actually a smart move. Design in Figma, build the marketing site in Framer. They are complementary now rather than competitive.

What Costs What

Figma charges per editor seat. Viewers -- the PMs, developers, stakeholders, and clients who open your files to comment and inspect -- are free on every plan. This is enormously important and a big reason Figma spread so fast. The barrier to getting non-designers involved in the design process is literally zero.

The free Starter plan gives you 3 Figma design files and 3 FigJam files, which is enough to try the tool properly but not enough for real ongoing work. Professional at twelve dollars per editor per month unlocks unlimited files, team libraries, and advanced prototyping. Organization at forty-five dollars per editor per month adds design system analytics, branching and merging for libraries, centralized admin, and SSO. Enterprise at seventy-five dollars per editor per month adds advanced security controls, dedicated support, and guest access management.

Dev Mode seats are twenty-five dollars per seat per month as a separate add-on, though they are included with Professional and above. For most teams, the Professional plan at twelve dollars per editor hits the sweet spot. You only jump to Organization when you need design system governance features like branching or when your org gets big enough to need SSO and centralized admin.

The pricing feels fair for what you get. Twelve dollars a month for what is arguably the most important tool in a product designer's toolkit? That is less than I pay for Spotify. The Organization tier at forty-five dollars is where it gets pricey, and I think some of the features locked at that tier -- like design system analytics and branching -- should arguably be in the Professional plan. But I understand why Figma gates them: those are features that large organizations desperately need and will pay for without blinking.

What I Wish They Would Fix

Figma is the best design tool I have used. It is not perfect.

Performance on large files is still a problem. Our main product design file has grown to over 200 frames across multiple pages, and it noticeably lags in the browser. Chrome's memory usage when that file is open regularly exceeds 3 GB. The desktop app (which is just an Electron wrapper around the same browser engine) is marginally better but not by much. When I am working on a specific page, performance is fine. When I zoom out to see the whole file or run a search across all pages, I feel the slowdown. This is Figma's biggest weakness for large-scale design work.

Offline mode barely exists. Figma technically has offline support -- you can continue editing files that were already open when you lost connection, and changes sync when you reconnect. But you cannot open new files offline. You cannot browse your projects. You are working blind. For a tool that prides itself on working in the browser, this is an inherent trade-off, but it bites me at least once a month when I try to work on a train or a plane.

Variables are powerful but confusing. The UI for managing variables, modes, and collections is not intuitive, and the mental model required to use them effectively has a steep learning curve. I have been using Figma daily for years and I still sometimes get confused about variable scoping. New designers on my team take weeks to get comfortable with variables. Better documentation and a simplified UI would go a long way.

The prototyping system, while much improved, still feels like a bolt-on rather than a first-class feature. Managing complex prototypes with many interactions and conditions gets messy fast, and there is no good way to visualize or debug the logic of a multi-step prototype. I have built prototypes where an interaction stopped working and I spent 30 minutes hunting through connection wires trying to find the problem. A prototype logic view or debugger would be amazing.

And FigJam, while useful, still feels like it is fighting for attention against Miro and Whimsical. It needs better diagramming tools, more template variety, and better integration with the broader Figma ecosystem. Right now it is good enough. It should be great.