Framer vs Figma Sites

For years, going from a Figma design to a real website meant a handoff: a designer finished the mockup, then a developer (or a different tool entirely) rebuilt it from scratch. Framer's whole pitch has always been closing that gap, design on a canvas that feels like Figma, publish a real site straight from it, no handoff required.

Now Figma has its own answer: Figma Sites, a website builder announced at Config 2025 and currently in open beta. Since I build Framer components and templates for a living, people keep asking me the same thing: does Figma's new tool make Framer obsolete? Here's the honest comparison, not the hype.

What Figma Sites Actually Is

Figma Sites lets you design in a Figma file the way you always have, then publish that same file as a live website. It lives inside the regular Figma app rather than being a separate product, and it's aimed squarely at the millions of people already using Figma for design who've never had a clean way to ship what they make.

That's a genuinely smart insight. Figma already owns the design workflow for a huge share of product and marketing teams. Whether Sites can turn that advantage into a real website builder is a different question, and right now, the answer is "not yet."

Getting Started

Framer's canvas is purpose-built for the web from the ground up. Every panel, every property, every default is there because it maps to something a real website needs, breakpoints, SEO fields, animation timing, a live preview that is the actual site. It takes a bit longer to feel fluent in than a drag-and-drop builder, but that's because it's doing more.

Figma Sites has the opposite tradeoff. If you already know Figma, you already know how to use it, there's essentially no learning curve. The cost is that the interface wasn't designed for shipping websites in the first place, so the web-specific pieces (SEO fields, a CMS, real breakpoints) feel bolted on rather than native, because right now, several of them simply aren't there yet.

Design Freedom and Templates

Framer's template library is one of its biggest advantages, thousands of professionally built, fully animated templates across nearly every niche, each one a real, responsive site you can customize down to the smallest detail. That's the entire reason a component and template library like this one can exist on top of Framer: the platform is mature enough to support a real ecosystem around it.

Figma Sites launched with a template library, but the templates are static in the way a Figma file is static. You won't get the built-in responsiveness, animation, or interaction depth a Framer template ships with by default, you're starting from a well-designed picture of a site rather than a working one.

Performance and SEO

This is the category that actually matters most if the site needs to do a job, not just look good.

Framer has spent years optimizing this: fast page loads, automatic image optimization, clean output, and real SEO tooling, custom meta tags, automatic sitemaps, schema support, all built in.

Figma Sites, being a beta product, is behind here. Early independent testing has found weaker performance scores and rendering inconsistencies (particularly in Safari), along with thin SEO support, basic meta tags, no schema markup, and accessibility that needs manual work rather than coming standard. None of that is surprising for a beta, but it matters if you're publishing something real today.

Content Management

If a site needs to update regularly, blog posts, case studies, a portfolio, it needs a CMS. Framer's is built in and genuinely capable: custom content types, visual editing right on the canvas, and SEO that carries through to every generated page automatically.

Figma Sites doesn't have one yet. A CMS was previewed at Config 2025 but hasn't shipped, so for now, any site built on it is effectively static.

Where Figma Sites Wins

To be fair to Figma Sites, since it doesn't win on capability, it wins on fit for a specific situation. If a team already lives in Figma and just needs to get a simple landing page or prototype in front of people fast, publishing straight from a file they already have is genuinely the path of least resistance. And if that team is already paying for a Figma seat, Sites currently comes bundled in at no extra cost, which is hard to beat on price alone, at least until Figma's post-beta pricing settles.

A Quick Side-by-Side

So Which One Should You Pick?

If the goal is a real, professional website, one with content that needs to update, SEO that needs to actually work, and design that needs to feel finished rather than "good enough for a beta", Framer is the clear choice today, and it's not close.

If a team is deep in Figma already and just needs to publish something simple and temporary without leaving that workflow, Figma Sites is a reasonable shortcut for that one job, as long as the beta limitations are an acceptable tradeoff.

Figma Sites will likely close some of this gap over the next year or two. Competition between the two is good for everyone building on either platform. But for anything that needs to hold up as a real website today, that's exactly the gap a mature component and template ecosystem like this one is built to fill.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Figma Sites a replacement for Framer?

Not yet. Figma Sites is still in open beta and is missing a CMS, has weaker SEO and performance out of the box, and has a much smaller template library. It's a fast way to publish something simple from inside Figma, not a like-for-like replacement for a mature website builder.

Can I use my existing Figma designs in Figma Sites?

Yes, that's the entire premise, you design in a regular Figma file and publish it directly as a website. The tradeoff is that the file wasn't built with web-specific concerns (breakpoints, SEO, a CMS) in mind unless you design it with those in mind from the start.

Does Figma Sites have a CMS?

Not yet. One was previewed at Config 2025 but hadn't shipped as of this writing, so sites built on the platform are currently static rather than dynamically content-managed.

Is Framer harder to learn than Figma Sites?

It has a slightly steeper learning curve if you've never used a web-specific design tool before, but if you've used Figma, most of Framer's canvas will already feel familiar. The extra depth is there because it's built specifically for shipping real, production websites rather than just publishing a design file.