Framer vs Figma Sites: Our Verdict
One is a mature no-code website builder that happens to have a Figma-like canvas. The other is a design tool that finally learned to publish. We tested both to decide which one working designers should actually ship on.
We recommend Framer. It wins on the strength of a production-grade CMS, real animation control, and predictable publishing, and it's the right pick for designers who need a live, editable marketing site this month. Figma Sites earns a narrower recommendation, and only for teams already deep in Figma who want to publish a portfolio or a one-off landing page without changing tools.
These two products are converging on the same job from opposite directions. Framer began as a prototyping tool in 2014 and pivoted around 2022 into a no-code website builder that publishes live, hosted sites from a Figma-like canvas. Figma Sites moves the other way: it's a publishing surface bolted onto the design tool most product teams already live in, announced at Config 2025 and still labeled an open beta in July 2026.
We tested both on the same working brief: build and publish a small marketing site with a blog, custom domain, real animations, and a form. Each round below names a winner and states the concrete procedure we used to decide it.
Framer is built for live deployment. Hosting is included on every paid plan, the platform generates real React code in the background, and pages are served through a global CDN. Figma Sites publishes too, but only from a Full seat on a paid plan, and it's still an open beta with no code export. You're entirely dependent on Figma's hosting. Version rollback exists on both; Framer's staging environment on the Pro plan is the more mature production workflow.
How we tested itWe took the same five-page marketing site into each tool, connected a custom domain, and pushed it live. We recorded whether hosting was included, whether the workflow required leaving the tool, and what guardrails existed for rollback and staging.
Framer's CMS is production-grade. The Pro plan supports multiple collections, staging, and a dedicated $10/month Content Editor seat that gives writers CMS access without touching the design canvas. Figma Sites shipped its CMS in public beta on November 20, 2025 with collections, CMS pages, and CMS lists, but it still doesn't support nested URL structures, API access, content staging, or granular editor permissions. It's enough for a portfolio or a simple blog. It isn't enough for a content-heavy marketing site.
How we tested itWe built the same blog on each platform: a collection with categories, author metadata, and dynamic URLs. We noted collection limits, whether the CMS supported nested URLs and API access, and how content editors were separated from designers.
Framer's interactions are production animations built on its Motion library and rendered as real HTML and CSS on the published site. Figma Sites offers presets for parallax, custom cursors, and hover states, and Figma Motion moved into open beta on June 24, 2026, but the animation depth is narrower and the platform is still catching up to what Framer ships by default.
How we tested itWe rebuilt the same set of interactions in each tool, a scroll-triggered hero, a hover-driven card, a marquee, and a parallax section, and checked whether the result shipped as production behavior or as a demo-only prototype.
For a designer already inside Figma, Sites is the shortest path we tested. You design a component, toggle to the Sites view, and the page is ready to publish. Framer's canvas is familiar but its CMS, breakpoints, and publishing model require a real adjustment period. For a one-to-five-page site shipped this week by a Figma-native team, Sites wins on speed.
How we tested itWe handed each tool to a designer already fluent in Figma and timed how long it took to get from a blank file to a published one-page site on a custom domain, with no prior training in the publishing tool.
Framer's Basic plan is $10/month billed annually and its Pro plan is $30/month. Both include hosting, a free custom domain in the first year, and (as of May 2026) $20/month editor seats across every plan plus a $10/month Content Editor role. Figma Sites is included in Figma's Professional plan at $16/month for a Full seat billed annually, and publishing requires a Full seat. That's cheap for a lone designer, but a team that needs to add writers is paying Figma's seat prices rather than Framer's content-editor rate.
How we tested itWe priced a solo designer publishing one commercial site with a blog and a custom domain on each platform's cheapest workable paid tier, then re-priced a small team of one designer plus two content editors.
Framer's AI Wireframer generates multi-page sites from a prompt with a consistent design system applied throughout, and the result lands directly on an editable, publishable canvas. Figma's design agent is more powerful as a design assistant. It can pull live web context, generate motion, and write to the canvas via MCP, but the output is still a design file first. For the specific task of going from prompt to live page, Framer's AI is closer to the finish line.
How we tested itWe generated the same brief ("a landing page for a small architecture studio") in each tool's AI feature and judged the result on layout quality, editability, and how close it came to a shippable page without a second pass.
Where the verdict turned
Framer and Figma Sites are not interchangeable, and the rounds that decided this comparison were the ones that separate a design surface from a website platform: CMS depth, publishing infrastructure, and animation that ships. Framer took all three. It generates real, semantic React code in the background as you design, and hosting runs on AWS CloudFront, so the “publish” button is the whole point of the tool rather than a late addition.
Figma Sites took the round that most Figma-native designers will care about: the speed from a blank file to a live URL. The workflow is genuinely seamless. Design a component, toggle to the Sites view, and your page is ready to publish. For a designer shipping a portfolio or landing page, this is the fastest path from idea to live site we’ve seen. That’s a real advantage, and it’s why we recommend Sites narrowly rather than dismiss it.
What changed in the last eight months
Anyone weighing these tools today is weighing them across a live product transition on both sides. On Figma’s side, Figma Sites launched a CMS in public beta in November 2025, closing one of its biggest gaps with Webflow. It supports collections, CMS pages, and CMS lists, but lacks nested URL structures, an API, and content staging. At Config 2026, Figma also moved deeper into the design canvas itself. Figma Motion is rolling out gradually from June 24, 2026 and is available on all plans in open beta, and web search is now available in the Figma design agent, so it can pull in live web context and populate designs with real-world content instead of placeholders. These are meaningful upgrades, but they upgrade the design experience, not the publishing platform.
On Framer’s side, the change is billing rather than capability. Editor seats are $20/month on every plan (down from $40 on Pro and Scale in May 2026), with a new $10/month Content Editor seat for CMS-only access. All prices are per month on annual billing. The tier prices themselves didn’t move. Free is still free, Basic is still $10/mo, Pro is still $30/mo, and Scale is still $100/mo. Framer’s Basic plan now includes 50GB of bandwidth, up from the previous 10GB, at the same $10/mo price, and the CMS collections limit increased from 1 to 2. The practical effect is that Framer got measurably cheaper for small teams over the last two months.
Who should buy which
Buy Framer if you’re shipping a real marketing site, an agency client site, or any project that will outlive a single campaign. The CMS is deep enough for a blog and a case-study index, the animations are production-ready rather than demo-only, and the publishing story (hosting, staging, a custom domain, editor roles) is complete. It’s the right tool for landing pages, marketing sites, portfolios, and agency work where visual fidelity and load speed both have to hold up. The $10 Basic tier is a serious entry point for a one-site freelancer, and Pro at $30 is the plan most working teams should budget for.
Buy Figma Sites if your team already lives in Figma, your site is small (one to five pages), and the alternative is asking a developer to rebuild what you already designed. It handles a portfolio, a launch page, or a project showcase well. It is not yet the right tool for a site that needs a real CMS, an API, or a content editor who isn’t paying for a Figma Full seat.
For most working designers reading this in mid-2026, we recommend Framer. For a designer who has never worked outside Figma and doesn’t want to, Figma Sites is a defensible, narrower choice, and it will get closer to Framer with every beta release. It isn’t there yet.