Comparison
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7 min read
Figma Sites was the announcement every designer had been waiting for: design your website in the tool you already live in, hit publish, done. No handoff, no rebuild, no second tool. And for some projects, that promise genuinely holds up. But once you look past the demo, the two tools are solving different problems — and picking the wrong one costs you weeks.
Here’s the honest breakdown after building real sites in both.
What each tool actually is
Framer is a website builder that happens to feel like a design tool. It ships with everything a production site needs out of the box: a real CMS, localization, SEO controls, analytics, A/B testing, effects and interactions, form handling, and fast global hosting. The canvas is the editor — but underneath it behaves like a publishing platform.
Figma Sites is a publishing layer bolted onto the design tool you already use. Your existing frames, components, and styles become the website — which is magical for speed, and limiting the moment your site needs to be more than a designed page. It’s young, it’s improving fast, but it’s still primarily a design tool that publishes.
Where Figma Sites wins
Zero handoff. If the design already lives in Figma, publishing it is one click away. No rebuilding in another tool.
Your existing design system. Components, variables, and styles carry straight over. Teams with mature Figma libraries get consistency for free.
One subscription, one tool. For a team already paying for Figma, a simple marketing page costs nothing extra to ship.
Where Framer wins
A real CMS. Collections, detail pages, filtering, references. A blog, a job board, a template store — content that scales without duplicating frames.
Production-grade output. Semantic structure, responsive breakpoints, solid Lighthouse scores, and SEO controls that were built in from day one — not retrofitted onto a canvas.
Interactions and motion. Scroll effects, appear animations, hover states, and component variants that behave like a modern site should — without writing code.
A mature ecosystem. Templates, plugins, code components, localization, staging — years of platform depth that Figma Sites simply hasn’t had time to build.
Side by side
Criteria | Framer | Figma Sites |
|---|---|---|
CMS & dynamic content | Full CMS with collections and detail pages | Basic, still maturing |
Design freedom | Full visual canvas | Full — it is Figma |
Interactions & motion | Deep, no code needed | Limited presets |
SEO & performance | Strong, first-class controls | Improving, historically weak |
Templates & ecosystem | Large marketplace, plugins | Early days |
The verdict
If your website is a designed artifact — a portfolio piece, a launch teaser, a page that mostly needs to look exactly like the mockup — Figma Sites gets you there with the least friction, especially if the design already exists in Figma.
If your website is a living product — a business site with a blog, landing pages that change weekly, content someone non-technical needs to edit, and SEO that actually matters — Framer is the safer bet by a wide margin. You’re not just publishing a design; you’re running a site.
Rule of thumb: design in Figma, run your website on Framer. The tools are converging, but today they still meet different needs — and a good Framer template closes the gap between the two in an afternoon.