Figma’s cloud-first nature never also sat well with me… I still have the source PSD files for my earliest works from 25 years ago, which can still be viewed and edited perfectly. Will that be true of my Figma documents in 25 years? It’s not even a question with Sketch.
Their highlighted metrics page: $821M LTM revenue, 46% YoY revenue growth, 18% non-GAAP operating margin, 91% gross margin.
It's an incredible success story, and the engineering they did upfront (primarily led by co-founder Evan Wallace) that set the stage for their success is the stuff of legends. https://madebyevan.com/figma/ has links to numerous blog posts breaking it down, but here are some choice quotes:
> [Evan] developed the hybrid C++/JavaScript architecture for Figma's editor that made it possible to build a best-in-class design tool in the browser. The document representation and canvas area is in C++ while the UI around the canvas is in JavaScript (the team eventually settled on TypeScript + React for this). This let us heavily optimize the document representation to reduce memory usage and improve editing speed while still using modern UI technologies for fast iteration on our UI. C++ development was done using Xcode (not in the browser) to provide a better debugging environment.
> Even though the contents of Figma documents are similar to what HTML can display, Figma actually does all of its own document rendering for cross-browser consistency and performance. Figma uses WebGL for rendering which bypasses most of the browser's HTML rendering pipeline and lets the app work closely with the graphics card. The rendering engine handles curve rendering, images, blurs, masking, blending, and opacity groups, and optimizes for high visual fidelity.
> [Evan] developed Figma's multiplayer syncing protocol, worked on the initial version of the multiplayer live collaboration service (a kind of specialized real-time database), and added multiplayer syncing support to Figma's existing editing application. The initial version was written in TypeScript but [he] later ported it to Rust for improved performance and stability.
It's a great reminder that it's not premature optimization if your UI's fluidity is your distinctive feature and your calling card! And the business acumen to turn this into such a wildly successful product in the context of competitors with kitchen-sink feature lists can't be understated, either. I have an incredible amount of respect for this team, and they should inspire all of us to tackle ambitious projects.
The brilliance of the system he built was that it allowed for real time collaboration. Which was god send from the Sketch -> Zeplin -> Invision -> Avocode (version management) ‘stack’ that lost Enterprise design orgs were using.
Which was already a large leap from what Adobe was expecting us to do with Photoshop/Illustrator (after they depreciated Fireworks).
Figma made handoff much easier. Made version control dead simple. Made my life as a UX leader much much better. I remembered talking to a few now-Gigantic companies back then and we all plotted the move together
It wasn’t lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother with its usage of Mac OS’s native shape rendering. It’s just that the benefits far outweighed the small drop in snappiness.
And for anyone who’s going to say “Sketch was Mac only that’s why it failed!” I assure you that had nothing to do with it. For the same reasons an entire generation of UX/UI designers stopped using Axure. But we would need to start talking about Invision 7 and Invision Studio if you wanted to get into the nitty gritty.
> It wasn’t lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother with its usage of Mac OS’s native shape rendering. It’s just that the benefits far outweighed the small drop in snappiness.
Figma just has to jack up the price in order to appease Wall Street quarterly.
Business wise it's got a great margin, but the avaricious nature of Wall St. will force them to enshittify the entire product, the engineering doesn't matter unless Wall St. is satisfied.
Aren't designers mad at Adobe for doing exactly this?
There are several things designers need that Figma has dragged their feet on for years, and when they do release them, they’re usually behind the enterprise paywall. Or they don’t release them at all, instead opting to build some horizontal product like Slides because their investors want a bigger TAM.
Figma has the power of the network effect at present, but you can only charge people to use variables for so long before they look for an alternative.
And thats how you get designers whining that their design looks great in figma but not in a real webpage
I’ve been thinking about a box-first approach to design tooling. The overall layout workflow would consist only of adding boxes (block-level elements) to a blank web page, or inside other boxes. Boxes could also contain other elements like inputs, buttons, images, etc.
I work on a large web based application, with designers, who use Figma. It's just too easy to lose the plot and come up with things that don't work well. Not because of Figma. Something about the balance between the software stack(s), the domain, the focus of designers today, the front end engineering, and product management is broken. It's interesting that Figma did (IMO) a great job at addressing the stack so they can build a product that does what they want it and then is used by so many to build products that don't always do what their customers want. Asking Figma to use the wrong stack for their product (which is what I'm reading between the lines) is not really the right answer...
I'll call Google and I'm sure they'll get right on aligning their browser's rendering engine with figma's
What about other browsers? Versions? Platforms? OS? Resolution/screen size? My huge frontend team can't handle this, even before we used Figma.
Isn't the problem trying to get this "web platform" do something it was never meant to do? How would this be solved by Figma using a rendering engine that would grind their product to a halt?
I'm old enough to have done a lot of native platform UI work, the web stack in many ways was a step backwards. It has obviously a lot of advantages (run anywhere) but in some ways it's more like IBM terminals on a mainframe vs. a native UI where you have full control. I (obviously) use and make web apps all the time, but they often suck, and this isn't Figma's fault.
I'm sure there's something fundamentally wrong with the font files. In both cases, they're not standard, widely available fonts. With that said, browsers render the fonts consistently with each other, but not Figma.
There's also a lot of ways that figma can lead designers down the unhappy path. They'll put together two different screens that look great, wave their hands around the idea of "just make it responsive" and when you go in and look, there's nonsensical crap like absolute positioning on elements, or arrangements that don't work with block layouts and force you into convoluted grid stuff.
Figma is clearly built to be useful for web development. It has tons of gaps that lead designers off the happy path. Take out all the "browsers / versions / os / screen size" differences from the argument; my points above would apply to any design tool built for any product. If it doesn't accurately reflect what is possible or how something is done, it's not a perfect fit.
PS: I prefer figma over pretty much every other tool I've used. With that said, there's no pretending that it is perfect, nor any reason to deflect accurate criticism elsewhere.
One example of that is something like he adapted a shader we use internally to render font glyphs, which no one has touched ever since. The engineer who told me this had spent a few days trying to understand it and said (after having worked in this area for years) was stumped by it.
Any code that involves parsing old school binary file formats is going to look ugly to modern day developers who are used to JSON everything, even if the code is actually very well structured.
But there are plenty of Hard Problems out there, for which no sufficient code could be called “simple.” Plenty of aspects of font rendering fall within this bucket. It’s notoriously difficult.
yikes
I wouldn't glorify "brilliant code" that much though because code should be made to be changed. If it isn't, it's a fragility trait, not a positive trait. Code that no one knows how to change is opportunity lost.
I do understand that it may be hard to create stuff for others when you're alone and going very fast but I don't think praising it is the right idea.
Code that doesn't need to change is a really good sign that you've got something good.
I worked extensively in the parts of the Figma where Evan wrote a lot of foundational code, and have also worked directly with him on building the plugin API.
One of Evan's strong points as a CTO is that he was very pragmatic and that was reflected in his code. Things that could be simple were simple, things that needed complexity did not shy away from it.
While all codebases have early decisions that later get changed, I'd say that largely speaking, Figma's editor codebase was built upon foundations that stood the test of time. This includes choices such as the APIs used to build product code, interact with multiplayer, the balance between using OOP v.s. more functional or JS-like patterns, the balance between writing code in C++/WASM v.s. JS, etc. Many of these choices can be credited to Evan directly or his influence.
Subsequent engineers that joined were able to build upon the product without causing a spiraling mess of complexity thanks to those good decisions made early on. In my opinion, this is why Figma was able to ship complex new features without being bogged down by exploding tech debt, and a major contributing factor to the business's success as a whole.
I think that Evan generally wrote code that was as simple as possible — there was no unnecessary complexity. In this case there indeed is some inherent, unavoidable complexity due to the math involved and the performance requirements, but otherwise I found our text rendering pipeline very understandable.
Evan actually wrote about it if you're curious to learn more: https://medium.com/@evanwallace/easy-scalable-text-rendering...
I cannot believe Figma hired engineers who could not follow along already-tread footsteps. That’s a nonsensical assertion. Novel code may be inscrutable but the problem-solving and techniques should have been clear and repeatable by those who follow, even if they require adaptation.
How the legends have fallen
With all the AI tools, the market is in a transition period.
Those transitions are crucial for a product's success or failure. For example, the transition from web to mobile with the iPhone, along with the growing pains of using Photoshop and Illustrator for mockups, opened the door to Sketch. Then, the evolution of web apps, like Google Docs, opened the door to Figma (while other products like InVision had a drastic fall). What they accomplished in a web app is an impressive engineering feat, so they have an excellent engineering team.
The good: Figma is implementing multiple product updates to capitalize on the "AI wave". The Figma Make in beta is very similar to Vercel's v0 (and others). Still, the tight integration with Figma could help them leverage their current subscriptions and attract designers, PMs, and developers. Recently, they released an MCP server in beta that enables AI coding tools to obtain information from designs. While many designers may disagree with me, I believe that at least they are trying to maintain a leading position in a rapidly shifting market.
The bad: They are diversifying their product offering too much, trying to compete on many fronts. Figma Site competes with Framer and Webflow, and Figma Buzz aims at digital marketing, which is usually covered by many tools (including Canva). Figma Slides is ideal for designers who use Figma daily, but it may not be as user-friendly for those transitioning from PowerPoint or Keynote. They switched the focus from the Design->Dev process that made them successful. The dev mode still doesn't resolve many issues, such as versioning, and the variable features seem half-baked; component handling needs more love, and the prototyping options are still limited.
The future... is hard to tell. In terms of UI design tools, they are the leaders. Penpot is far from being stable; Sketch is similar, but their web experience is not as good as Figma. Unless a new player enters the market, their biggest threat is a significant disruption caused by AI tools... but the tools I've seen so far are not different from Figma Make.
I know of excalidraw and perhaps penpot are there anymore?
Going public makes their shares liquid. It's (probably) not reasonable for the company to repurchase that equity or to pay employees pure cash comp.
Now prepare for price increases, lock-ins and many threads of people looking for Figma alternatives.
The ones cheering already have stock ready to dump it on the public markets on retail.
That said, today it's an incredibly good design tool - worth checking out before shareholders start the enshittification process. Congrats to the devs / founders for making it all the way to an IPO!
But Figma itself is excellent at what it does.
FY Ended December 31, in millions except percentage
| 2023 | 2024 | YoY
---------------|--------|--------|-------
revenue | $505 | $749 | 48%
gross profit | $460 | $661 | 44%
op ex | $534 | $1,539 | 118%
net income | $738 | $(732) | (199)%
free cash flow | $1,041 | $68 | (93)% FY Ended December 31, in millions except percentage
| 2023 | 2024 | YoY
---------------------------|------|------|------
research and development | $165 | $751 | 356%
sales and marketing | $201 | $472 | 134%
general and administrative | $168 | $316 | 88%
| 2024
---------------------------|------
cost of revenue | $25
research and development | $463
sales and marketing | $187
general and administrative | $184
total | $858
| 2023 | 2024 (adj.) | YoY
---------------------------|------|-------------|------
research and development | $165 | $288 | 75%
sales and marketing | $201 | $285 | 42%
general and administrative | $168 | $132 | (21)%
total | $534 | $705 | 32%Then that AI feature they highlighted was pulled off production because it was cloning iOS.
The AI heavy product dump we just got are lessons from that time.
From an accounting perspective, it was an $800 million stock-based compensation expense, though it didn't really cost Figma anything.
"Immediately following the completion of this offering, and assuming no exercise of the underwriters’ over-allotment option, Dylan Field, our Chair of our Board of Directors, Chief Executive Officer, and President will hold or have the ability to control approximately % of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock, including % of the voting power pursuant to the Wallace Proxy. As a result, following this offering, Mr. Field will have the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of our directors and the approval of any change of control transaction."
There's a good reason public shareholders historically demanded accountability - maybe it's fine for now, but all it takes is some management that you can't kick out, paying themselves extortionate salaries and driving the company into the ground at the same time to recognise the problems with "owning" a company you have no right to actually control (via replacing management and so on)
A board of directors can screw shareholders even without one controlling director.
The protections for minority shareholder are seperate.
Also the news of malpractice by directors like you mention leads to SEC investigations and stocks come crashing down before they can sell it (as they must declare their stock sales a few days before doing it)
It's going to be a lot harder to protect your rights, especially around the margins, if you agree to terms like the above.
Anyway, congratulations to everyone at Figma and good luck.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/15/figma-sent-a-cease-and-des...
They got a huge influx of users when image editing AI started to be a thing, I'm not quite sure that they haven't already conquered most of new users that could join them.
Is this an IPO where participants (public) will make long term money of it’s already at the top and this is the final stage of “finding someone to hold the bag” and in this case eventually — the public i.e the retail trader, mostly?
$300k/DAY AWS bill. I wonder what the "non-cancellable" savings is.
pm90•8h ago
nipponese•5h ago