Fair warning before anything else: we make Figment, and Figment is a Figma plugin. Figma shipping Figma Sites means our platform shipped a competitor to us. So read this knowing exactly who's writing it.

I'm going to try to be genuinely useful anyway, because the alternative is writing something you'd see through in a paragraph.

What they have in common

Both let you build a website in Figma and publish it without touching code. Both keep you in one tool instead of handing a design to a developer or rebuilding it in Webflow. If that's the whole job, either one does it.

Where Figma Sites is the better answer

Let me get this out of the way, because it's most of the cases.

You're already paying for Figma. Figma Sites comes with a Full seat on a paid plan, starting around $16/month at the time of writing. If you already have that seat for design work, publishing costs you nothing extra. Figment is a separate subscription.

You want a CMS. Figma Sites has one. It went into public beta in November 2025, with collections, dynamic pages and repeating lists. Figment has no CMS at all. If your site has a blog or a product catalog, this isn't close.

You want interactions and animation. Sites inherits Figma's prototyping model and added Code Layers in August 2025 for custom interactive elements. Figment publishes what you designed, and that's the extent of it.

You want the thing that's obviously going to keep getting built. Figma has a large team pointed at this. We're small. That's not false modesty, it's a real factor in a five-year decision.

Where Figment fits

Price at the low end. Figment's free tier publishes to a subdomain with our badge on it. If you design on a free Figma account and just want something live, that's the gap we sit in.

You want the published output to stand alone. Figment publishes a static bundle sitting in storage, served independently. Nothing in your live site phones home to a design tool. Some people care about that and some really don't.

Age, for whatever it's worth. Figment has been publishing sites since 2021, and there are about 20,000 published sites on it. Figma Sites is newer and still carries beta rough edges that people write forum posts about. Older isn't better by default. It does mean the failure modes are known.

The part where I'll criticize my own product

If SEO matters to you, look closely at both, including ours.

Figma Sites has documented gaps here. Reviewers consistently report limited control over head tags, no straightforward 301 redirects, no schema markup, and pages that render as deeply nested generic containers rather than proper heading and section structure.

Figment is worse on this today. Sites we publish paint their content with JavaScript, so the HTML a crawler receives first is essentially an empty page, with your text sitting in a data blob rather than in headings and paragraphs. Google runs JavaScript and does index these sites, but it's a handicap and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. We're fixing it. It isn't fixed yet.

So if your website's entire job is ranking in Google, neither of these is what I'd reach for right now. Use something that emits real server-rendered HTML, and come back to us when we've shipped the fix. That advice costs us signups and it's still the right advice.

How I'd actually decide

Paying for Figma already, and want a CMS or animation? Figma Sites. It's the default for a reason and the integration is deeper than anything a plugin can do.

Want a design online for free, or want the output to be a standalone bundle you can point a domain at? Try Figment. Publishing takes about a minute, so the evaluation is cheap.

Building something where search traffic is the point? Be skeptical of both of us for now.

About the AI part

We're building an AI website builder on top of the Figma publishing engine. It's in early access, not generally available, and I'd rather say that plainly than imply you can go use it today. The bet behind it is that AI edits are only as good as the canvas underneath, and a design file you own is a better canvas than a closed template system. Figma is making a version of that bet too, from a considerably stronger position.

If you want to see where we've got to, ask for a demo and I'll show you honestly, including the parts that aren't done.