What Figma actually costs, and where the free plan stops

Starter is free and better than most free tiers: unlimited drafts, UI kits, and 150 AI credits a day up to 500 a month. For one person learning or working on personal projects, it is enough.

The wall is collaboration. Shared team files, unlimited version history and proper libraries sit on Professional, where a full seat is $16 a month, a dev seat $12 and a collab seat $3. Organisation moves that to $55, $25 and $5 for design-system controls and analytics.

A five-person product team on full seats is $960 a year. That is not outrageous for the tool the whole team lives in. It is worth checking, though, whether everyone needs a full seat: the split between full, dev and collab seats is the cheapest optimisation on this page and plenty of teams have never done it.

Figma alternatives compared

Cheapest paid tier and what the free tier really allows, checked against each vendor’s own page on 6 September 2026.

Why people search this now

Three reasons show up repeatedly, and only one is price.

Ownership. Figma is now a public company, and public companies answer to different pressures than the one you first adopted. People who watched Adobe’s pricing history are wary, whether or not that turns out to be fair.

Where the files live. Figma is cloud-first by design. If your organisation needs design files inside its own infrastructure, no plan solves that. Penpot does, because you can host it yourself.

Offline and Windows. Figma runs in a browser and its desktop app still expects a connection for most work. Lunacy is native, free and works on a train.

Open source here means two different things

Worth separating, because the label is doing a lot of work.

Penpot is open source in the way that matters for a company: you can run the whole thing on your own server, inspect it, and never be told the price has changed. It is a full design tool with real-time collaboration.

Excalidraw and Graphite are open source and free, but they are not Figma replacements. Excalidraw is for thinking out loud. Graphite is a vector and node-graph editor that overlaps more with Illustrator.

If someone tells you an open-source tool replaces Figma outright, ask whether their team ships design systems with it. Penpot is the only one on this page where the answer is regularly yes.

The thing worth more than the tool

Whichever you pick, the deciding factor in most design work is not the canvas. It is whether what you ship can be used by everyone.

The W3C’s accessibility guidelines set out contrast ratios, target sizes and focus behaviour in specific, checkable terms. Every tool here can hit them and every tool here will happily let you miss them. A free tool used with contrast checked beats an expensive one used without.

How we test and price these tools

Every price here was read from the vendor’s own pricing page in a browser on 6 September 2026, not copied from another round-up. Where a plan is billed yearly, or quoted in euros rather than dollars, we say so instead of converting it into a number nobody is charged.

For design tools we record three things that decide whether a switch survives contact with a team: whether files can be exported in a format another tool opens, whether developer handoff works without a plugin, and whether the tool runs offline. Collaboration features are compared on the free tier, because that is where they are usually removed.

We read current Reddit threads for each tool, so the picks include what people are actually using this year. No vendor pays for a place on this list.