Introduction

Just a few weeks ago, during Config 2025, Figma finally announced the long-awaited publish button, enabling users to create fully functional websites directly within Figma.

While the product is still in beta, people have already started seeing its potential, and, as always, they have begun making bold claims on the internet to get more views.

On any platform you could see people either posting about “Framer is dead!!!” or “Figma has no chance of competing with Framer!!!”. These headlines are obviously made to drive engagement, so I figured the best thing to do would be to purchase Figma Pro and actually test the product out myself.

So, after getting some hands-on experience and watching way too many videos on the topic, here’s my full comparison between Framer and Figma sites as of June 2025.

I’ll try to make the comparison as objective as possible but, throughout the article, please keep in mind that Figma sites are still effectively on beta, so - by nature of things - Framer will prevail in most categories as it’s a much more mature product.

The point of the article is not to prove how superior Framer is but to show where Figma is headed, how it stacks against its most direct competitor, and also to provide some fresh air among the bold headlines.

Ready? Let’s get into it!

Takeaways

1. Even though Figma Sites are still in beta, the team managed to demo an impressive range of features during Config 2025.
   
   

2. Figma clearly put a lot of effort into ease of use and visual effects, but accessibility and SEO seem to have been left as an afterthought.
   
   

3. Figma Sites have the potential to compete with Framer for the same market segment, but as of June 2025, there's little reason to choose Figma over Framer for any kind of website.

Framer vs Figma Sites: features comparison

Onboarding

If you’re new to web development with a low-code or no-code tool, starting from a blank canvas can be daunting. You are not familiar with the interface, you are unsure of the best practices, and overall, you don’t know what you don’t know.

While both Figma and Framer give you a little head start, I believe that - even tho it’s still a product in beta - the onboarding flow of Figma sites is a bit superior. Here’s a little breakdown of how the onboarding flow looks like:

• Framer takes a “Product Education” approach, with a brief interactive app tour accompanied by a few videos that showcase the basics of the interface.
  
  

• Figma doesn’t do that yet, but instead presents you with 50ish pre-made templates you can add when creating a project [or a new page] and quite a few pre-made sections you can drag and drop into the canvas.

And here’s why I believe Figma’s approach is a bit superior:

1. Interface vs site

   → While it’s good to get to know the interface, that doesn’t really help beginners get a sense of how a well-structured project should look like
   
   

2. Pre-made templates

   → You can’t start with pre-made templates in Framer. You can remix some free templates from the marketplace and copy-paste them into your project, but the flow is much more clumsy and messy
   
   

3. Pre-made sections

   → Being able to drag-and-drop sections is a nice way for people to get the general structure of the site right off the bat. Framer used to allow for this, but this has recently been removed in favor of Wireframer - an AI tool that lets you generate the basic structure of a page starting from a prompt.

   → While this sounds good in theory, in practice it doesn’t work as well - and the community has been quite vocal about it. The main problem is that it’s nearly impossible to get something close to what you want, and it can only be used to create a new page, not add sections to an existing one.

You can argue this is a preference, but objectively, I think Figma sites give beginners a better way to deal with the complexities of making a website.

Editor

The experience in the editor is very similar between the two tools, as they both borrowed UX patterns from each other. As a more mature tool, Framer’s interface offers a wider range of options and features, but I feel that they are handled extremely well, and the UX doesn’t suffer as a result of more options.

One little thing that Figma does is allow you to see all your pages in a free-form canvas, which can help designers speed up the workflow. That said, I feel like this approach can also have some major downsides, mainly:

1. It works well with small sites, but I feel it can become messy for larger sites
   
   

2. I see how this can cause performance issues when trying to load a massive project

NOTE: As of June 2025, Figma doesn’t support folders for sites, meaning you can’t organize your site or have URLs that go beyond one folder level. This makes me assume Figma will target landing pages or very small marketing sites with the v1 of their product.

CMS

As of the time of writing [May 31, 2025], the CMS for Figma sites is still not available inside the product. We only got a sneak peek into the CMS close to the end of the Config 2025 presentation about Figma sites, which you can watch here.

From the sneak peek, it looks like the CMS will look very similar to both Framer’s and Webflow’s, but it’s hard to judge without being able to use it.

Accessibility

During the Config event, the team showcased a new “Accessibility” voice in the right-side menu but mentioned it still needed a lot of work. How much work tho? It turns out, a lot.

It didn’t take more than a day for people to notice how bad the accessibility features actually were. As it turns out, it’s much easier to add cool effects and flying objects than make your Figma site anywhere close accessible.

While I’m no accessibility expert myself, by just playing around with the interface, I could notice stuff like:

1. Accessibility options are, by default, hidden; you have to go out of your way to open the accessibility menu and add basic settings.
   
   

2. Figma sites suffer from the old “divception” disease, where every element defaults to a <div>, and each element adds a long inception of <div>s to work.
   
   

3. Keyword accessibility appears to be missing altogether.

Again, I’m no expert myself, so this list just scratches the surface. I’ll leave a few links below for further reading:

• Emily Lawes’ LinkedIn post

• Figma Sites: when accessibility is an afterthought

• Do Not Publish Your Designs on the Web with Figma Sites…

SEO [Search Engine Optimisation]

Are Figma sites good for SEO? While they help you cover the basics, the tool still lacks many essential tools necessary for great technical SEO.

A few I noticed are:

• Figma auto-generates a sitemap for your site, but I couldn’t find a robots.txt file for it.

• No self-referencing canonical tag for pages and no way of setting one.

• Not-so-lean HTML output.

• Limited control over URLs [no way to add folders].

• No way of adding schema markup.

• No way to set up any type of redirect.

Again, we have to remember that the tool is still in beta; however, objectively, as it stands today, Figma has a long way to go to fully support good technical SEO.

Loading speed

If you read any of my other comparison articles, you know that for performance I prefer real-world data over lab data, and reports over anecdotal evidence. That’s why I usually refer back to the Core Web Vitals Technology Report by http archive, which provides an overview of how a large pool of real-world websites perform on various technologies.

With Figma sites being so new, however, I unfortunately cannot rely on the data from the report as, well, Figma just isn’t there. So, for now, the only thing I can do is look at specific examples and use lab data with tools like webpagetest.org or pagespeed.web.dev.

After analyzing a couple of Figma sites, I must admit I haven’t found anything that really stands out. Yes, these sites are quite basic, but I really like the fact that Figma is building on solid foundations.

I was also pleasantly surprised to notice that Figma serves static assets from the same origin as the web page, which gives it a slight edge over Framer sites - as Framer currently uses framerusercontent.com as the domain from where they serve static assets, which results in slightly higher network overhead.

Publish button

When talking about Framer, you cannot forget to mention the publish button. Framer was the first no-code website builder to enable instant publishing, allowing users to see their site live while it optimizes in the background.

Unfortunately, with Figma, that is currently not the case and publishing can take up to a few minutes to be done [from my tests, it never took more than around 20 to 30 seconds, but the site was never more than 10 pages].

Effects

If you watched the Config event, you’d agree that one of the points the team tried to emphasize was the presence of a lot of nice built-in effects, animations, and interactions. Think appear effects, custom cursors, parallax, scroll transforms, etc.

After looking into them for a bit, I really can’t argue with that. While they lack the customizability and depth compared to Framer, what the team has pulled off for a product that is still in beta is truly remarkable.

Custom code

No-code tools are great, but inevitably, they will sometimes fall short, so having the ability to easily add some custom code is always a must-have.

Framer lets you add custom code in multiple different ways:

1. Code components

2. Code overrides

3. Custom code in the <head> and <body> of each page

4. Embeds

What about Figma? Well, during Config, the Figma team introduced something called code layers [powered by Figma Make], which basically allows you to turn any component into a code layer and edit any of its properties using code. [watch the recording here]

The concept is a mixture of code components and overrides in Framer, and that’s really nice! Figma also introduced an embed component, which is basically identical to Framer’s, so again, Figma is keeping the pace here.

The only aspect where Figma falls short is adding custom code to the <head> or <body> of your site for two main reasons:

1. You can only do that on a site level, not specifically for each page.
   
   

2. During the event, the team warned against using custom code in this manner, as it’s highly fragile and, as it stands today, can easily break the site.
   
   

Once they solve this issue, I would say that’ll unlock quite some potential!

Notable mentions

• Figma sites lack education material on how to use them.
  
  

• The beta didn’t mention features like localization, forms, password protection, etc.

Conclusion

Config 2025 brought a lot of updates to the Figma ecosystem, and Figma sites are definitely among the most exciting.

While the team was able to put together quite an astonishing number of features for the beta, the tool still lacks a lot of what one would define as “essentials” on a website - things like accessibility and SEO features, forms, CMS, etc.

And while I do see [and I’m excited about] a future where Figma will be a strong competitor of Framer for the same market portion, as of now, I don’t see any reason to use Figma over Framer.

Thanks for reading!

- Luca