Design, UI, UX, Insights, Web Development
Webflow Vs. Figma (2024 Comparison)
Let’s dig into the differences and similarities between Webflow and Figma in this detailed comparison review
Unlike traditional options like WordPress, Figma seamlessly fits into Webflow, making it a powerful duo for web design.
In short, Figma excels in UI/UX design and prototyping, while Webflow offers a low-code platform for web design and development. You can make great use of Figma for designing and prototyping, then seamlessly implement your designs in Webflow or work directly within Webflow’s environment.
This review is for web designers at any level, whether you’re just starting or a seasoned pro. We’ll dig into how to use each tool, whether you need to know any coding, and which one is best for beginners. Plus, we’ll explore whether Figma users should give Webflow a shot. And why.
We will break down each tool’s features, and user experiences, and outline the potential benefits of using both Figma and Webflow. The purpose of this review is to give you the knowledge you might need to expand your toolshed as a designer. You will learn how to design with each tool, coding requirements, suitability for beginners, and whether you should consider using Webflow as a Figma designer.
Article Overview:
Webflow Overview
What is Webflow?
Webflow is a web design and development platform that allows you to build responsive websites visually, without writing a single line of code. It comes with a full arsenal of tools for designing, prototyping, and publishing websites, including a visual editor, customizable layouts, and interactive elements. The platform’s unique selling point lies in its ability to generate clean, semantic HTML, CSS, and JS code automatically.
Additionally, Webflow has built-in support for responsive design.
What does designing in Webflow look like?
Designing in Webflow begins with either starting a new project or selecting an existing one. This project acts as your workspace where you’ll build and refine your website or web application.
- Once your project is set up, you’ll use Webflow’s visual editor to construct the layout of your website. This involves adding and arranging elements like sections, div blocks, and containers to establish the structure of your site.
- After you establish the layout, you can move to customizing the appearance of your website by styling individual elements. Webflow provides various styling options, including typography, colors, spacing, and effects. You can also start adding animations, transitions, and interactions, to make your website more dynamic.
Pros and Cons of using Webflow
Being a powerful platform for designing and building websites aside, Webflow has its own set of advantages and drawbacks. Here are the most noteworthy ones:
👍 Pros:
- Visual Interface and Drag-and-Drop Functionality: Ideal for users without coding experience.
- Affordable Pricing: With plans starting at $12 per month.
- Extensive tutorials and documentation resources.
- The platform translates designs directly into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without manual coding.
- Integrated CMS for managing website content without the need for a separate platform.
- E-commerce Functionality: Comprehensive tools for building and customizing online stores.
- Built-in SEO tools help improve search engine rankings.
- Websites created with Webflow are automatically responsive.
👎 Cons:
- Learning Curve: Mastering all features of Webflow can take time and may be overwhelming for beginners.
- Pricing: While it offers a free tier, advanced features, and hosting come at a higher price point compared to some competitors.
- Limited Template Choices: The variety of templates in Webflow is more limited compared to other platforms.
- Custom Code Restrictions: Although custom code can be added, there are limitations, requiring third-party integrations for advanced customization.
- No Mobile App: Webflow does not have a dedicated mobile app.
- Template Replacements: When changing an existing site or project, Webflow templates do not automatically replace the design and layout, requiring manual adjustments.
Figma Overview
What is Figma?
Figma is a cloud-based design tool that lets you create, collaborate on, and prototype digital designs. It has features for designing user interfaces, websites, and mobile applications for solo designers or design teams, such as real-time collaboration, prototyping, and design system management.
Since it’s cloud-based, it lets you access your designs across different devices and operating systems. Also, Figma has a huge plugin library for additional functionality and customizing your design workflow as you see fit.
What does designing in Figma look like?
Figma, known for its user-friendly interface and robust features, has become a top choice for designers. Its versatile toolkit can meet diverse design needs.
- Now, the design process typically starts with setting up artboards, which act as the foundation for your designs. These artboards serve as containers for different sections or elements within your project.
- Once the artboards are in place, you can begin designing elements using Figma’s intuitive interface. This involves using tools such as shapes, text, images, and icons to create your design. Figma also offers features like layer organization, making it easy to manage and manipulate different parts of your design efficiently.
- Additionally, the component feature allows you to create reusable design elements that can be easily replicated and edited across multiple artboards.
Pros and Cons of using Figma
Being a cloud-based design tool, Figma offers lots of advantages as well as some drawbacks worth considering. Here’s a breakdown of its strengths and weaknesses:
👍 Pros:
- Cloud-based Accessibility: You can access your designs from anywhere with an internet connection.
- Real-time Collaboration: Figma allows multiple users to work simultaneously on the same design.
- Prototyping and Testing: Integrated prototyping tools simplify the creation and testing of interactive designs.
- Design System Management: Figma excels in creating and managing design systems, offering reusable components and styles for consistency.
- Cross-platform Accessibility: Its cloud-based nature ensures accessibility across various devices and operating systems.
- Extensive Plugin Library: Figma has a wide range of plugins for users to extend functionality and customization options.
👎 Cons:
- Performance with Large Files: Users may encounter slowdowns when working with very large and complex design files.
- Limited Offline Capability: Due to its primarily cloud-based nature, Figma’s offline functionality is restricted compared to desktop-based applications.
- Learning Curve for Advanced Features: While user-friendly, mastering all of Figma’s advanced features and plugins may require time and effort.
- No Native Print Design Features: Figma’s focus on digital and UI/UX design means it lacks built-in features for print design.
- Lack of Built-in CMS: Figma does not offer native CMS functionality, which means you will need to use third-party CMS solutions for website content management.
- Plan Limitations: To unlock additional projects or team members, users must upgrade to paid plans.
Webflow vs Figma Key Comparisons
Time for the actual review where we will compare Figma and Webflow based on several factors. These factors include ease of use, user interface, prototyping features, customization options, collaboration capabilities, integration possibilities, and more.
Each platform has its unique strengths and functionalities suitable for different aspects of the design and development process.
1. Ease of Use
When it comes to designing websites, the ease of use of design tools refers to a user-friendly interface, easy navigation, and accessible features. Let’s see how Figma and Webflow stack up in terms of ease of use.
🎓 Webflow’s Ease of Use
Webflow strikes a good balance between power and user-friendliness, thanks to its visual interface. This means you can create professional-looking websites without touching a line of code. But beware, the learning curve can be steep for beginners, especially if you’re not well-versed in web design principles. Still, with the right resources and dedication, mastering Webflow is within reach.
🎓 Figma’s Ease of Use
Figma is popular for its intuitive interface, making it a top choice among UI/UX designers. It’s designed to be easy to pick up, especially if you’re already familiar with other design software. However, things can get messy when multiple users collaborate in real time.
Fortunately, Figma offers plenty of tutorials and resources to help new users get started smoothly.
2. Prototyping Features and Design Components
Both Figma and Webflow have a lot to offer when it comes to prototyping.
🛠️ Prototyping in Webflow
Webflow primarily focuses on web design but provides tools for prototyping and customization. Its features include responsive design tools, visual CSS styling, advanced layout capabilities, and rich animations.
Webflow’s prototyping features include the following:
- Drag-and-Drop: Webflow’s Drag-and-Drop Builder allows designers to easily position and rearrange elements within the design canvas, eliminating the need for manual coding.
- CSS Properties: For designers looking to create visually appealing layouts, Webflow offers a set of CSS Properties. These properties enable designers to visually define CSS grid layouts, providing control over grid columns, rows, gaps, and alignment directly within the Webflow interface.
- Responsive Images and Templates: These features allow designers to build websites that dynamically adjust to various viewport sizes, ensuring consistent presentation across devices.
- CSS3 Flexible Boxes: With CSS3 Flexible Boxes, designers can define flexible containers and control the distribution, alignment, and order of elements within them. This capability enables the creation of dynamic and responsive layouts that adapt to changing content and screen dimensions.
- UI Animations: Webflow offers a range of pre-built animations and transitions from subtle hover effects to complex scroll animations.
- Typography Control: This feature enables adjustments to font properties such as size, weight, style, and spacing, enhancing readability and visual hierarchy.
🛠️ Prototyping in Figma
Figma is well-regarded for its versatility and collaborative design capabilities, particularly in UI/UX design. While it’s known for website design, its features extend to various design tasks. Figma offers tools for vector graphics editing, interactive prototyping, auto layout for resizing and alignment, and support for design systems with reusable components. Real-time collaboration allows multiple designers to work together, while a vast library of plugins further extends Figma’s capabilities.
Some key prototyping features in Figma include:
- Region Tools: These tools consist of Frames, Sections, and Slices. Frames serve as containers for holding multiple elements, providing structure and organization to design layouts. Sections offer a way to organize files and ideas on the canvas, facilitating collaboration and indicating sections ready for development. Slices are powerful for exporting designs, allowing users to create slices around specific elements and export them in various formats and sizes.
- Grids: Essential for creating layouts with precision in Figma. They enable designers to align and organize design elements accurately on the canvas, ensuring consistency and visual harmony in the final design.
- Shape Tools: Default shapes for quick design iterations. These include shapes like rectangles, lines, arrows, ellipses, polygons, stars, and the ability to place images or videos directly onto the canvas. Additionally, Figma provides Creation Tools such as the Pen and Pencil, allowing users to draw custom vector shapes and lines with precision or freehand drawing for more organic designs.
- Prototype Tool: This tool helps you define flow starting points, add interactions, specify scroll behavior, and adjust prototype settings to simulate user experiences and test design functionality seamlessly.
- Team Library: The centralized repository for design assets, accessible to the entire design team. This feature helps consistency in design styles across projects.
- Dev Mode: For developers, Dev Mode serves as a dedicated space with developer-focused features for translating Figma web designs into fully functional websites.
3. Customization Options
Figma and Webflow both offer customization tools for designers to personalize their projects, although they may differ in focus and depth.
🎨 Customization in Webflow
Webflow, on the other hand, offers a user-friendly editor, pre-designed templates, custom code integration, and integrations with third-party tools.
- User-Friendly Editor: Webflow’s intuitive editor allows designers to customize layouts, add elements, and adjust styles effortlessly.
- Pre-designed Templates: Designers can start their projects with professionally designed templates, providing a solid foundation for customization.
- Custom Code Editor: It enables users to write and integrate custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code.
- Integrations: Webflow integrates with third-party tools, expanding customization possibilities.
Webflow offers a broader range of customization options in comparison, including robust web development capabilities. As a downside, its learning curve may be steeper for designers primarily focused on visual design.
🎨 Customization in Figma
Figma offers a rich set of customization tools as designers can work with vector graphics, text tools, and component libraries to create visually appealing interfaces. However, Figma’s customization is primarily geared towards design elements rather than the intricate web development aspects.
- Vector Graphics Editing: Figma enables designers to create and manipulate vector graphics.
- Text Tools: Designers can customize text styles, fonts, sizes, and alignments.
- Component Libraries: Figma’s component libraries help designers create design systems for consistency across projects.
- Real-time Collaboration: Multiple designers can work simultaneously on the same file.
To sum up, Figma excels in design-oriented customization. However, it may not offer the same depth of customization in web development aspects such as custom code integration and layout control.
4. Collaboration Features
Figma and Webflow both offer a suite of collaboration features to support real-time collaboration, feedback sharing, and version management.
🤝 Collaboration in Webflow
Webflow offers multi-access collaboration capabilities, so multiple users can collaborate on web designs and layouts in real-time. In addition, the Webflow Designer provides tools for assigning roles and permissions, ensuring smooth project management and collaboration.
- Multi-access Collaboration: Webflow’s Designer allows multiple users to collaborate on web designs simultaneously, with changes visible in real-time.
- Real-time Updates: Changes made by team members are instantly visible to others.
- Varied Access Levels: Admins can assign different roles and permissions to team members, controlling their level of access to design files and resources.
- Commenting and Feedback: While not built-in, Webflow supports commenting and feedback exchange through third-party integrations.
- Version Control: Webflow automatically saves backup versions of the website, allowing designers to revert to previous iterations if needed.
- Shared Asset Library: Teams can share and reuse assets across projects.
- Page Branching: Webflow’s page branching feature enables multiple designers to work on separate pages simultaneously.
🤝 Collaboration in Figma
Figma sets the bar high for real-time collaboration, allowing multiple designers to work together on the same file simultaneously. This creates a dynamic environment where teams can collaborate in real-time.
- Real-time Collaboration: Figma enables multiple designers to work simultaneously on the same file, with changes reflected instantly for all collaborators.
- Commenting System: Team members and stakeholders can leave comments directly on specific parts of the design files.
- Version History: Figma records file versions, enabling designers to track changes over time and revert to previous versions if necessary.
- Shared Libraries: Teams can create and share libraries of design components and styles.
- Team Spaces: Figma allows projects and files to be organized within team spaces.
- Access Controls and Permissions: Admins can set different access levels for team members, controlling who can view or edit files.
- Live Share and Prototyping: Teams can present and share prototypes live for immediate feedback and interactive demonstrations for stakeholders.
Figma also supports the sharing and usage of plugins that streamline workflows, automate tasks, or introduce new functionalities.
While Figma excels in real-time collaboration and shared libraries, Webflow offers comprehensive collaboration tools suitable for web design teams with varied access requirements.
5. Integrations
While both platforms support integrations, they serve different purposes. Figma focuses more on design-related tools, while Webflow offers a broader range of integrations catering to web development, marketing, and analytics needs.
➕ Webflow Integrations
Webflow offers integrations that cover various aspects of website creation, management, and optimization, including e-commerce, content management, analytics, and marketing.
While Webflow doesn’t have as many design tool integrations as Figma, it excels in supporting web development-related services. Notable integrations include Zapier, Airtable, Google Analytics, Shopify, Mailchimp, and Stripe. Webflow also provides a Figma plugin, enabling users to convert Figma designs into responsive Webflow sites seamlessly.
➕ Figma Integrations
Figma’s integrations are focused on enhancing collaboration, design-to-code workflows, and project management.
Figma integrates well with popular design platforms like Sketch, Adobe XD, and InVision, with smoother transitions between them.
Additionally, Figma supports custom plugins and widgets, allowing users to automate tasks and create unique style guides. Notable integrations include Dropbox, Notion, and Google Sheets.
In summary, Figma’s integrations focus more on design-related needs, while Webflow offers a broader range of integrations tailored toward web development, marketing, and business management. Advanced users may prefer Figma for its customizable plugins, while less technical users might find Webflow’s integrations more user-friendly for website creation and management.
6. Support and Community
Figma and Webflow are dedicated to providing top-notch customer support and building thriving user communities. They offer various resources like help centers, FAQs, and live chat support to assist users with their platforms and technical issues.
☎️ Webflow Support
Webflow provides strong support through detailed articles and guides in their help center, along with direct support from their team. They foster a sense of community through user forums, local groups, and global events. Webflow University is a standout feature, offering video tutorials and courses for users of all levels.
Key support features and resources include:
- Detailed help center with troubleshooting guides
- Direct support from the Webflow team
- Active user forums and community events
- Webflow University with video tutorials and courses
In summary, both Figma and Webflow prioritize user support and community engagement, offering a range of resources to help users succeed on their platforms.
☎️ Figma Support
Figma has a solid support system, including a comprehensive help center and direct support from their team for specific questions. Their community is active, with forums, events, and discussions where users can share insights and connect. Figma also offers tutorials and guides for users at all skill levels.
Notable support features and resources include:
- Extensive help center and FAQs
- Direct support from the Figma team
- Vibrant community forums and events
- Educational resources such as tutorials and guides
7. Pricing
Getting a grasp of Figma and Webflow’s pricing structures is an important factor in selecting the best plan to fit your needs and budget.
💲 Webflow Pricing
Webflow also has a variety of pricing plans divided into three main categories:
- Free Plan: Upon joining Webflow, users automatically get access to this plan, which grants full control over website design and CMS. It also includes over 100 hours of tutorials.
- Site Plans: Starting at $14, these plans allow users to connect custom domains and are suitable for hosting personal sites, simple projects, or landing pages.
- Workspaces: Designed for in-house or freelance designer and developer teams, these plans are charged per account rather than per website. They cater to providing Webflow development services to clients or for internal use.
💲 Figma Pricing
Figma provides several pricing plans suitable for different user requirements:
- Free Plan: This plan suits individuals and small teams, although it comes with limitations like a 30-day version history.
- Figma Professional: Priced at $12 per month per user, this plan is great for professional designers and small to medium-sized teams.
- Figma Organization: At $45 per month per seat, this plan targets larger organizations or teams in need of advanced security and administrative features.
- Enterprise: Priced at $75 per month per seat, this plan is customized for very large organizations or enterprises with complex operational and security needs.
Using both Figma and Webflow
These tools complement each other pretty easily. Figma is typically used for creating early wireframes and prototypes due to its collaborative features and ease of iteration. Designers rely on Figma to present multiple versions of a prototype to clients, making feedback easier to manage.
Once a prototype is approved, it’s handed off to web developers who then bring it to life in Webflow. This collaborative process ensures a smooth transition from design to development.
Step 1: Designing Your Prototypes in Figma
From brainstorming ideas to wireframing and prototyping, Figma offers a comprehensive suite of features. Designers often start with FigJam for initial idea generation and user flow mapping. Additionally, Figma allows for the creation of style guides, wireframes, and high-fidelity website mockups. With its collaborative features, designers can gather feedback from clients and make revisions before finalizing the design.
Step 2: Bringing Your Figma Prototypes to Life in Webflow
After approval, the Figma prototype can be translated into a functional website using Webflow. Designers begin by establishing global styles and style guides within Webflow for consistency. Assets are exported from Figma and integrated into the Webflow project. Developers then replicate the layout and style of the Figma prototype using Webflow’s design tools, adding interactions as needed. The website undergoes testing before being published.
Alrighty, folks, that’s a wrap!
Before a website takes shape in Webflow’s intuitive development environment, designers first craft its blueprint in Figma. Figma excels in collaborative design, fostering seamless iteration and feedback. On the other hand, Webflow empowers developers with robust features for building responsive and interactive websites.
Figma’s strength lies in its collaborative design environment, enabling designers to work together in real-time, iterate swiftly, and gather feedback effortlessly. Webflow, on the other hand, shines in its powerful web development capabilities, offering designers the freedom to translate their visions into fully functional websites without writing code.
So why not simply use both?
If you use the creative potential of Figma and the development prowess of Webflow, you can bridge the gap between design and implementation. This combo allows for smoother transitions from design concepts to fully functional websites, making it a strategic choice for modern web design projects.
Hey, before you go, don’t forget to check out our other awesome articles on UI/UX design! We’ve got loads of tips and inspiration to help you create stunning designs that will blow your mind.