Figma is a free-to-use design application, but it also offers added features for paying subscribers. Let’s take a look at the differences between Figma’s three pricing tiers.
Note: this is part of our regularly updated learning guide The Designer’s Guide to Figma.
Figma’s Three Pricing Tiers
These are the tiers on offer:
- Free
- Professional ($12 per editor/month, at time of writing)
- Organization ($45 per editor/month, at time of writing)
We’ll be looking primarily at the two paid tiers, so you can decide if you should be upgrading, and to what extent.
Let’s begin by saying that the actual hands-on use of Figma is the same whatever the pricing tier. The tiers don’t limit features in any way–where you can’t do certain things, or use particular tools if you don’t have sufficient membership. The free tier is fully functional. The differences in what’s on offer lie in how you and Figma might work with larger teams and larger businesses.
Which Tier You Should Choose? In a Nutshell
Use the free tier if you:
- are working solo
- are working with a partner
Use the professional tier if you:
- have three or more team members
- have a single team, or a low number of teams
Use the organization tier if you:
- have multiple teams
- want additional, organization-oriented features
Figma Professional Tier
The professional tier is $12 per editor (users), per month, at the time of writing. Whereas with the free tier of Figma you are limited to two users working on the same document, that becomes unlimited with the professional level.
You are also limited to three projects (not files) in the free tier, again something which is unlimited in the professional tier. Projects are ways to organize multiple files, and they’re really useful. They become particularly when your project has a specific common color-scheme, or shared UI elements, or project-specific user settings (more on that in a moment), and so on.
The professional tier also offers unlimited version history, so you can go back and walk through all the changes to have taken place on a file. The free version of Figma does offer versioning, though it only records the last thirty days.
As already mentioned, the pro tier also allows for project-specific permission settings. These allow you to manage who has access to each project, who can edit or view those projects, or even prevent certain users from accessing a project until it’s ready to be seen. You might also choose to make your shared assets readonly, so that they can be used within the project but not accidentally modified.
Team libraries are an extremely useful aspect of the pro tier. With libraries you can store components, color palettes, stroke styles, preset gradients, fonts, and so on.
Figma Organization Tier
If you’re working with a larger organization which comprises a lot of teams, you’re going to need more features to help keep everything organized properly. That’s where the organization tier comes in, the price of which is $45 per user, per month, at the time of writing.
This option gives you unlimited numbers of teams. In the same way that the professional tier gives you team libraries, allowing you to share design systems across teams, this tier allows you to do the same thing across as many teams as you need.
It also allows Figma to integrate with your organization’s own SSO (single sign on) system, so that everyone can login with their company credentials.
Speaking of security, this payment tier allows you to set team-wide permissions. So you can grant or deny access to projects for whole teams. And you can close teams to certain members, or have them request permission if they need access.
Finally, activity logs are a really useful aspect of the organization tier. With it, admins can track each and every change that’s happened to documents; when, and by whom.
The Choice is Yours!
So those are all the basic feature differences between the various tiers offered by Figma, hopefully you’ll have a better idea of what each one entails and be able to decide which level works best for you and your fellow designers.