Figma expands beyond design with AI website and app builders

For years, the most frustrating part of product design was watching a pixel-perfect mockup get lost in translation on its way to production.

Figma rolled out a sweeping set of AI-powered tools designed to make sure work never leaves its canvas. The flagship additions are Figma Sites, which lets users generate and directly publish responsive websites, and Figma Make, an AI workspace built for spinning up interactive web app prototypes. Alongside them come Figma Buzz for marketing teams and an upgraded illustration toolkit dubbed Figma Draw.

To get the rest of the company on board, Figma also introduced a new content seat priced at $8 per month, giving non-designers access to Buzz, Slides, FigJam, and the upcoming Sites CMS.

From static mockups to live software

Figma Sites takes the core canvas and turns it into a full publishing engine. Instead of handing off mockups to developers or rebuilding them in WordPress, teams can generate a layout with AI, tweak elements directly in an on-canvas editor without typing prompts, and push it live.

The tool handles responsive breakpoints, scroll effects, and animations right out of the box. Figma is also building a full CMS into the product, allowing content teams to draft blog posts, configure slugs, and upload thumbnails directly on the live page. If you need complex widgets like a live stock ticker, you can write custom code or let AI write it for you.

Meanwhile, Figma Make tackles functional prototyping. You feed it a prompt, and it generates a working web application prototype where team members can collaborate live. Designers can ask the AI assistant to swap out components, while developers can dive straight into the underlying code to fine-tune logic. Yamashita noted that small interactive elements built in Make can even be embedded directly into pages published with Sites.

This marks Figma’s second run at AI generation. Last year, the company had to pull its Make Design feature after users pointed out that its outputs looked strikingly similar to existing apps, sparking backlash over training data. This time, the focus has shifted from copying layouts to building working logic.

Taking on Adobe and Canva from both sides

Beyond web building, Figma is reaching further into adjacent marketing and creative workflows.

Figma Buzz is aimed squarely at growth and marketing teams. Designers create locked brand templates, and marketers can pipe in spreadsheet data to generate assets in bulk, swap backgrounds, or insert AI-generated imagery. It sounds remarkably close to Canva’s core playbook.

At the same time, Figma Draw patches longstanding gaps in vector manipulation. Designers previously had to hop into Adobe Illustrator for complex vector work. Figma Draw introduces path text, pattern fills, noise textures, brushes, and lasso selection right on the native board.

While Figma Chief Product Officer Yuhki Yamashita downplayed direct competition with creative suites by pointing out that a third of Figma’s users are developers, the expansion puts Figma in direct contention with everyone from Wix and Squarespace to Replit and Adobe.

Why it matters

We think Figma is making an aggressive push to turn itself from a UI design tool into an all-in-one product factory.

For everyday teams, this removes immense friction. Designers can stop acting as full-time asset generators for marketing squads, and growth teams can launch campaign landing pages without waiting for an engineering sprint. At $8 a month for a content seat, it is cheap enough for most companies to test out immediately.

The potential catch lies in production depth. Spinning up a clean landing page is one thing, but running a production-grade site with heavy SEO demands, deep integrations, and enterprise-grade performance is an entirely different beast. We think Figma Sites will easily displace lightweight Wix or Webflow projects, but it will take time before engineering teams trust it with mission-critical applications.

For the broader industry, this tightens the squeeze on standalone AI coding wrappers and design utilities. When the tool where products are designed can also deploy them to production, the fragmented middle layer of the software development stack suddenly looks very vulnerable.