Figma

What it is

Figma is where interfaces get designed, and increasingly where brand and marketing assets get made too. It runs in a browser, several people can work on the same file at once, and the file is the source of truth rather than a version emailed around.

Its pricing reflects how teams actually use it: a full seat for people who design, a cheaper dev seat for people who inspect and build from designs, and a very cheap collab seat for people who only comment. AI features run on credits per seat, and newer capabilities include Figma Make for generating from a prompt and Figma Buzz for on-canvas generation.

Who it's for (and who it isn't)

It fits any business that builds a product or a website with more than one person involved, and any team where a designer hands work to a developer. The seat split means a five-person team with one designer does not pay five design licences.

It is a weaker fit for making a social post or a flyer, where template-driven design tools are faster for non-designers, and for editing photos or video, which is a different category entirely. It also rewards someone who knows design: a powerful tool in untrained hands produces worse results than a constrained one.

Pricing

Figma is freemium. Starter is free with unlimited drafts, access to UI kits and templates and 150 AI credits per day up to 500 per month. Professional is $16 per month for a full seat with 3,000 AI credits per month, $12 for a dev seat with 500 credits and $3 for a collab seat with 500. Organization is billed annually at $55 per full seat, $25 per dev seat and $5 per collab seat. Enterprise is billed annually at $90, $35 and $5 respectively.

Count seat types before comparing headline prices. The difference between paying $16 and $3 per person is a question about who genuinely edits, and getting that allocation right is most of the cost control available here.

Set it up

Official guide: FD4B: Create your first design file

1. Create a Figma account on the Starter plan, which is free. Starter includes unlimited drafts (files that sit in your own space), so you can learn on a real project without paying. You now have a free Figma account.
2. In the left sidebar, click "Drafts". Open the file options menu and choose "Design". You can also type figma.new in your browser's address bar to get the same result. You now see a new, empty file open in the Figma Design editor.
3. Turn on the Frame tool. In the right sidebar, expand the "Desktop" section and click the Desktop preset. A frame is a container that holds your shapes, images and text, like one screen of your design. Rename the frame after the screen it shows. You now see a desktop-sized frame with that name on the canvas.
4. Select the "Text" tool in the toolbar, or press T. Click on your frame and type a headline. With the text selected, open the "Typography" section in the right sidebar and set the font size. You now see your headline on the frame.
5. Open the file and click "Share". Enter the email addresses of the people you work with, separated by commas, adjust each person's permissions, and click "Send invite". Each person you invited now has an email and a notification in the file browser.

When this works, you have a design file with one screen in it, and a colleague has an invitation to open it.

On Professional ($16/mo per full seat): 3,000 AI credits. A seat is one person's paid place in Figma, and AI credits are the allowance for its AI features. Starter gives you 150 AI credits a day, up to 500 a month.

Strengths and limitations

The strength is collaboration in one place. Design, comment and handover happen against the same file, which removes an entire category of version confusion, and the seat model keeps the cost proportionate to who actually designs.

The limitations are the learning curve and the credit meter. Figma expects design knowledge, so a business without it may produce something worse than a template would have. AI credits are allocated per seat and per month, so generative features are an allowance rather than an open capability. And browser-based work depends on a connection, which is worth knowing before a workshop in a bad venue.