Figma

Figma moved interface design into the browser and, more importantly, made it multiplayer. Several people can be inside the same file at once, watching each other's cursors, which turned design review from a sequence of exported screenshots into a link anyone in the company can open. The product is now broader than design files. Prototypes handle interaction and flow, FigJam covers whiteboarding and workshops, Dev Mode gives engineers measurements, tokens and code snippets without a designer exporting anything, and components plus variables make design systems that stay in sync across hundreds of screens. For most product teams it is the shared source of truth about what the interface is supposed to look like. The honest tension is seat pricing. Figma restructured into differentiated seat types, so a team no longer buys one licence per person but decides, per person, whether they need to edit, inspect or merely comment. Monthly Professional pricing is 16 dollars for a full seat, 12 for a dev seat and 3 for a collab seat. Organization, billed annually, is 55, 25 and 5. Enterprise is 90, 35 and 5. The free Starter tier gives unlimited drafts, UI kits and templates, and 150 AI credits a day up to 500 a month. The model is fairer than a flat per-head charge, and it is also the single most common complaint: working out what a 30-person company will pay takes a spreadsheet. Other limits worth knowing: it is browser-based, so genuinely large files tax the machine and offline work is constrained; it is not an illustration tool at Illustrator's level; and everything living in one vendor's cloud is a real strategic dependency. Adobe's attempted acquisition collapsed on regulatory grounds in late 2023 and Figma has since gone public, which resolved the immediate ownership question but not the underlying one. The comparison set: Penpot is the open-source, self-hostable answer and the serious option if lock-in or licence cost is the deciding factor; Sketch remains macOS-native with a different pricing shape; Adobe XD is effectively finished; Framer overlaps at the design-to-live-site end; Excalidraw and Miro compete with FigJam rather than with Figma; and Canva serves an entirely different audience that mostly is not building software. Choose Figma when more than one person touches the design, which is almost always the moment a company hires its second person who cares what the product looks like.