Full disclosure, we sell a competing thing. Semplice deserves its reputation though. It came out of a designer's own frustration, it has real opinions about layout, and the portfolios built on it consistently look sharp.

It also asks for something most people don't price in when they buy it.

The sticker price isn't the price

Semplice licenses are one time, which is genuinely nice in a subscription world. At the time of writing they list Single at $119, Studio at $168, and Business at $699 for ten licenses. Single and Studio are each good for one domain.

But Semplice is a system built on top of self-hosted WordPress. Not WordPress.com, the real thing, installed on a server you rent. Their own requirements list WordPress 6.7 or newer, PHP 7.4 or newer, MySQL, and mod_rewrite.

So the actual cost is the license plus hosting plus your domain, forever. And the actual job is the license plus keeping WordPress patched, keeping PHP current, keeping backups, and dealing with it the week something breaks and your portfolio is down while a recruiter is looking at it.

Some designers are completely fine with that. Others bought Semplice to make a portfolio and accidentally became a sysadmin.

Stay with Semplice if

You want to own the code and files on a server you control, and you actually like that. That's a legitimate preference and Semplice serves it better than any hosted builder will.

Stay if you want WordPress underneath for a real blog, plugins, or anything you plan to extend. Figment has no CMS, so a content-heavy site is not our territory.

Stay too if you've already got the hosting running smoothly and the thing just works. Don't fix that.

What Figment is instead

You design the portfolio in Figma. A plugin publishes your frames as a live site on your domain, in under a minute. No server, no WordPress, no PHP version to worry about, nothing to patch.

Updating a case study later is opening the Figma file, changing it, and publishing again. That's the whole workflow.

The relevant part for designers specifically: there's no second copy of the design. With most portfolio systems you design the layout somewhere and then rebuild it in the tool's editor. Those two versions drift the moment you touch either one. Here the Figma file is the website, so there's nothing to keep in sync.

What you get that Semplice doesn't give you

You own the Figma file outright, so the design is portable to anywhere, anytime. No drift between your design file and what's live. Updates are design edits rather than editor work. Publishing takes under a minute with no deploy step. The canvas stays open in a format AI can operate on. And we've been running since 2021, with 31,402 sites built and 20,048 published.

What you give up: the WordPress layer underneath, and the ownership of actual server files that comes with self-hosting. If that's why you chose Semplice, we're not a replacement.

On price, be clear eyed. Semplice is one time and we're a subscription: $29/mo Pro, $89/mo Team, with a 30-day trial and a free tier that publishes to a subdomain with a "Built with Figment.so" badge. Over five years Semplice plus cheap hosting is probably less money. You're paying us to make the hosting, the maintenance and the rebuild step disappear.

Moving a Semplice portfolio

Nothing imports, so treat it as a rebuild. Screenshot every page full height, download your project images from the WordPress media library, and trace the layouts into Figma frames. Desktop and mobile frame per page.

Tracing your own portfolio is fast because the hard decisions are already made. Then install the Figment plugin, publish, review the URL, and only then point your domain. Keep the WordPress install up until the new site answers on your domain, then wind down the hosting.

Where AI comes in

Our AI website builder operates on your Figma canvas rather than inside a locked editor, and it's in early access rather than generally available. To see Figment and get on the early access list, request a demo.

Weighing it up? Ask on Discord and I'll tell you honestly whether staying on Semplice makes more sense.