Framer vs Figma Sites: Which Should You Choose in 2026?

Figma enters the website game

In late 2024, Figma launched Figma Sites, turning the world's most popular design tool into a website builder. It was not a surprise. Designers had been using Figma to design websites for years, and the gap between "design a website" and "publish a website" was always the obvious next step. What was surprising was how directly it positioned against Framer.

Framer had carved out a clear niche: a design tool that publishes real websites. No code required. CMS included. Hosting bundled. For years, the workflow was "design in Figma, build in Framer." With Figma Sites, Figma is saying: skip the second step entirely.

That question captures the tension perfectly. Designers who were paying for both Figma and Framer are now wondering if they can consolidate. Agencies that had built workflows around the Figma-to-Framer pipeline are reconsidering. And developers are watching both tools carefully, because the real question is not which tool is better. It is whether either tool should be your long-term hosting platform.

Design capabilities: head to head

Both tools are excellent for visual design, but they come from different directions. Framer was built from the ground up as a web publishing tool. Figma Sites is a publishing layer added on top of a collaborative design tool. That distinction shows up in what each does best.

Where Framer leads

• Animation system: Framer's animation capabilities are significantly more mature. Scroll-based animations, hover effects, page transitions, and component-level interactions are all built into the editor with fine-grained control.
• Built-in CMS: Framer includes a content management system for blogs, portfolios, and dynamic pages. It is not as powerful as WordPress or a headless CMS, but it is integrated directly into the design tool.
• Responsive design controls: Framer gives you breakpoint-level control with per-device overrides. You can adjust layouts, hide elements, and change spacing at each breakpoint individually.
• Component library maturity: After years as a web-first tool, Framer has a deeper library of web-ready components, including forms, navigation menus, and interactive elements.

Where Figma Sites leads

• Design ecosystem: Figma has the largest design community in the world. Thousands of plugins, UI kits, and templates are available, and they all work with Figma Sites since it builds on the same canvas.
• Auto-responsive layouts: Figma Sites uses auto layout to generate responsive websites. If you have already designed with auto layout (and most Figma users have), the transition to a published site is nearly seamless.
• Dev Mode integration: Figma's Dev Mode lets developers inspect designs, copy CSS, and understand spacing and hierarchy. While this is not a full code export, it bridges the design-to-development handoff better than Framer does.
• Collaboration at scale: Figma's real-time collaboration, commenting, and version history are more robust than Framer's, especially for larger teams.

Pricing comparison

Pricing is where both tools get complicated. Neither is free for production use, and both have costs that are not obvious until you are committed. For a detailed breakdown of Framer's pricing tiers and hidden costs, see our Framer pricing analysis.

The key insight: if your team already pays for Figma (and most design teams do), Figma Sites can feel like a free add-on. But if you are a solo designer or small team choosing between the two from scratch, the costs are comparable. Neither tool is free for real production websites with custom domains and professional features.

What both tools have in common: ongoing monthly costs for hosting what is essentially a static website. A site you export and self-host costs $0/month on platforms like Netlify, Vercel, or GitHub Pages.

The code export question

This is where both tools fall short in the same way, and it is the most important section of this comparison.

Framer: No code export. Your site lives on Framer's servers. You cannot download your website as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. If you stop paying, your site goes offline. There is no built-in way to take your work with you.

Figma Sites: Figma's Dev Mode shows CSS properties, spacing values, and component hierarchy. Developers can inspect and copy code snippets. But this is design inspection, not a deployable export. You cannot download a working website package from Figma Sites any more than you can from Framer.

For a portfolio site or a landing page you plan to redesign in six months, platform lock-in may not matter. But for a business website, a product site, or anything you expect to maintain long-term, not owning your code is a significant risk. Platforms change pricing. They deprecate features. They get acquired. Your website should not depend on any single company staying exactly the way it is today.

This is a pattern we see across the no-code space. Our piece on why code is the new no-code explores why more teams are moving toward code ownership even when they start with visual tools.

SEO and performance

For any site that depends on organic traffic, SEO and performance are not optional. Here is how the two tools compare.

Framer SEO

• Custom meta titles and descriptions per page
• Automatic sitemap generation (limited customization)
• No built-in JSON-LD structured data
• No custom robots.txt control
• No hreflang tag support for multilingual sites
• Known indexing and favicon issues reported by the community

Figma Sites SEO

• Basic meta tag support
• Automatic sitemap generation
• Limited structured data options
• Still maturing as a platform (launched recently)
• Less community documentation on SEO edge cases
• Performance depends on how Figma renders and serves pages

Both tools handle the basics: meta tags, sitemaps, and clean URLs. Neither gives you the level of control that competitive SEO requires. Custom schema markup, granular sitemap priorities, server-level redirects, crawl budget management, and hreflang tags are either absent or severely limited in both tools.

On performance, both platforms generate reasonably fast pages for simple sites. But you have limited ability to optimize. You cannot lazy-load images with custom strategies, defer scripts selectively, or fine-tune Core Web Vitals at the code level. If your site has speed problems, your options within either platform are limited to simplifying your design.

With self-hosted code, every optimization is available to you: image compression, code splitting, CDN configuration, caching headers, and everything else that moves the needle on page speed and search rankings.

The third option: design in either, export to code

The Framer vs Figma Sites debate assumes you have to choose one platform and live on it. But there is a third option that gives you the best of both worlds: use whichever design tool you prefer, then export to code for production hosting.

Here is what that workflow looks like:

1. Design your site in Framer or Figma. Use the tool where you are most productive. Take advantage of the animations, components, and design systems each tool offers.
2. Export to code. For Framer sites, tools like FramerExport generate clean HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from your published Framer site. For a detailed walkthrough, see our export guide.
3. Host anywhere. Deploy your exported code to Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, or any hosting provider. Cost: $0/month for most sites.
4. Full control. Add structured data, customize your robots.txt, optimize images, set up redirects, and do everything that the hosted platforms restrict.

This approach decouples the design tool from the hosting platform. You are no longer locked into Framer's pricing or Figma's publishing infrastructure. You get the visual design experience of a no-code tool and the control of custom code. When you want to redesign, go back to whichever tool you prefer and re-export.

The design tool does not matter as much as code ownership. Whether you pick Framer or Figma Sites for design is a matter of preference. What matters is that your production website is code you own, hosted on infrastructure you control. That is the real answer to this comparison. To understand when this transition makes sense, read our guide on signs you have outgrown Framer.

For a broader look at alternatives beyond both tools, our Framer alternatives guide covers the full landscape, and our analysis of whether Framer is worth it in 2026 can help you decide if you even need a visual builder at this point.