Figma vs. Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Figma
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Figma, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their collaborative design and prototyping application to support digital product and UI development.
$15
per month per editor
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft offers Visual Studio Code, an open source text editor that supports code editing, debugging, IntelliSense syntax highlighting, and other features.
$0
Pricing
FigmaMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
Editions & Modules
Professional
$144
per year
Organization
$540
per year
Starter
Free
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FigmaMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
FigmaMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
Considered Both Products
Figma
Chose Figma
In Figma I can make websites and apps. With Miro I can brainstorm about how I want the app to be and what my ideas are.
Chose Figma
Better performance or Multiplatform availability when compared to competition.
Also easiness of use.
Chose Figma
Compared to Sketch and AdobeXD, the Figma app was more flexible as Sketch only supported mac and not windows, while AdobeXD had some key bindings and features that were quite different from both Sketch and Figma. Overall I have been using Figma for several years and gotten …
Chose Figma
Figma has better design tools than Adobe XD and you don't need to purchase the whole adobe suite to use it. The collaboration and cloud based storage is better that Sketch. Sketch has great design capabilities but it's much harder to have multiple people working on one file …
Chose Figma
Figma and Adobe XD both are used for design UI but Adobe XD is paid and Figma is free to us and also for me Figma is more flexible and easy to use than Adobe XD that's why I prefer Figma over Adobe XD.
Chose Figma
Figma can be accessed on all the platforms. Be it Windows, Mac or Linux, or whatever as it can be accessed via web browser so it was a very useful feature for collaboration. While it's the competition like Sketch is only available on Mac and Adobe XD is available on Windows and …
Chose Figma
Figma provides a much better collaborating experience. For example, Adobe XD does not support simultaneous editing, and this is such a pain when teams are working together.
Chose Figma
Adobe XD is also a similar product to Figma developed by Adobe Inc. To use Adobe XD and to get most of it we need to purchase Adobe Suite, which is not cost-effective. Both Adobe XD and Figma offers basic functionalities that most design tools have. But, Figma posses much more …
Chose Figma
Figma compares to these other software packages as it seems to combine the best aspects of each, whilst simplifying its own interface to make usage more intuitive.
Although Illustrator is still excellent for vector illustration work, and Sketch does appear visually fairly …
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
1. More features compared to Notepad++ 2. fast performance compare to Android Studio 3.More and usefull extensions then other two 4. Easy to use and everyone can start using it instantly 5. Version Control system is top notch 6.If you start using it , you will forget other ides …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
In all honesty, I've not even looked back at any of these alternatives since switching to Microsoft Visual Studio Code a few years ago, there simply isn't the need. For all I know they're all absolutely fantastic, but at the time of switching (and consistently since) Microsoft …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Microsoft Visual Studio Code has surpassed its predecessors such as Sublime Text and Atom. The community support and developers behind this IDE make it hard to compete with. With the ongoing updates and improvements with each keep up with the ever changing web development arena.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
While Sublime Text, another free alternative, is faster and snappier than Code, the extensions that are available on it are sub-par (it doesn't even have an official extension store). This makes using it for any serious work unpleasant, at least to me.

IntelliJ's dedicated IDEs …
Best Alternatives
FigmaMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
Small Businesses
OmniGraffle
OmniGraffle
Score 9.7 out of 10
BBEdit
BBEdit
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
OmniGraffle
OmniGraffle
Score 9.7 out of 10
Vim
Vim
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
OmniGraffle
OmniGraffle
Score 9.7 out of 10
Vim
Vim
Score 9.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
FigmaMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(205 ratings)
8.7
(91 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(7 ratings)
9.4
(2 ratings)
Usability
8.1
(40 ratings)
9.1
(8 ratings)
Availability
5.5
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
5.1
(17 ratings)
9.7
(23 ratings)
In-Person Training
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
FigmaMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
Likelihood to Recommend
Figma
I would recommend if you need to start from scratch a product UI or any customer journey that you need to implement that requires designing and visualizing different steps to complete a process. I would recommend that any design/UI/UX team brainstorm and make proposals that they can compare and discuss in a visual way.
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Microsoft
As a general workhorse IDE, Microsoft Visual Studio Codee is unmatched. Building on the early success of applications such as Atom, it has long been the standard for electron based IDEs. It can be outshone using IDEs that are dedicated to particular platforms, such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code for .net and the Jetbrains IDEs for Java, Python and others. For remote collaborative development, something like Zed is ahead of VSCode live share, which can be quite flakey.
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Pros
Figma
  • Figma allows us to create universal content. This means that if multiple designers want to re-use a piece of content, and if everyone's content should be dynamically updated from time to time, we can easily accomplish this by turning design elements into a universal instance. Then, if an update is needed, we can push the change out to all assets at once. It's very efficient and ensures we're all updating content accordingly.
  • Figma also allows us to set parameters for the company's brand guide and share them across various designers. This way, we can easily pull from approved brand fonts, colors, and more, which allows our assets to remain unified across multiple touchpoints.
  • Figma also allowed us to create and install our own plugin, which we use to export every slide we have in a frame at one time, versus the default export feature, which limits you to one slice at a time. This is particularly useful for us when we're working on email templates, since we tend to have a ton of slices in any given series.
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Microsoft
  • Integrate with the git repository very well.
  • Integrated copilot chat is very helpful to write code snippets and helps beginners to start with coding and development.
  • Great library of available extensions is one of the best features in Microsoft Visual Studio Code.
  • Dedicated Testing option to configure pytest and others are quite handy to use.
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Cons
Figma
  • It will be great if Figma will consider having the Pages where interactions can be stitched together among the Pages and not just one page with so many Frames to create the stand-alone clickable prototype that can be used to simulate the intended UX
  • Bring back the Inspect Mode tab right on the right-side panel of the main workspace instead of hiding behind the Dev Mode.
  • Figma Slides feature could be improved quite a bit more in order to be easier to assemble slides into a presentation deck and having pre-built templates for slides can be useful too.
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Microsoft
  • The customization of key combinations should be more accessible and easier to change
  • The auxiliary panels could be minimized or as floating tabs which are displayed when you click on them
  • A monitoring panel of resources used by Microsoft Visual Studio Code or plugins and extensions would help a lot to be able to detect any malfunction of these
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Likelihood to Renew
Figma
Figma is a pretty cool tool in many areas. My team almost uses it on daily basis, such as, brainstorming on product/design topics, discussing prototypes created by designers. We even use it for retrospectives, which is super convenient and naturally keeps records of what the team discusses every month. Furthermore, I do see the potential of the product - currently we mainly use it for design topics, but it seems it is also a good fit for tech diagrams, which we probably will explore further in the future.
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Microsoft
Solid tool that provides everything you need to develop most types of applications. The only reason not a 10 is that if you are doing large distributed teams on Enterprise level, Professional does provide more tools to support that and would be worth the cost.
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Usability
Figma
There's a bit of a learning curve, but generally I think it's both more powerful and intuitive that other UX design tools. Most of what I need to do as a designer can be done in this platform, from basic wireframes to creating a design system, to creating pixel perfect designs, to prototyping to dev handoff.
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Microsoft
Microsoft Visual Studio Code earns a 10 for its exceptional balance of power and simplicity. Its intuitive interface, robust extension ecosystem, and integrated terminal streamline development. With seamless Git integration and highly customizable settings, it adapts perfectly to any workflow, making complex coding tasks feel effortless for beginners and experts alike.
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Reliability and Availability
Figma
The only regret I have is, its not available when there is no internet
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Microsoft
Overall, Microsoft Visual Studio Code is pretty reliable. Every so often, though, the app will experience an unexplained crash. Since it is a stand-alone app, connectivity or service issues don't occur in my experience. Restarting the app seems to always get around the problem, but I do make sure to save and backup current work.
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Performance
Figma
I think its great, As there are many other software or systems which can be integrated with it as plugins or API's
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Microsoft
Microsoft Visual Studio Code is pretty snappy in performance terms. It launches quickly, and tasks are performed quickly. I don't have a lot of integrations other than CoPilot, but I suspect that if the integration partner is provisioned appropriately that any performance impact would be pretty minimal. It doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles (unless you start adding plugins left and right).
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Support Rating
Figma
I haven't used their support lately but in the past, they had a chat that I used often. They often responded in a few hours and were able to give a satisfactory solution. I would imagine it's less personal now but the community has expanded drastically so there are more resources out there to self serve with a bit of Google magic.
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Microsoft
Active development means filing a bug on the GitHub repo typically gets you a response within 4 days. There are plugins for almost everything you need, whether it be linting, Vim emulation, even language servers (which I use to code in Scala). There is well-maintained official documentation. The only thing missing is forums. The closest thing is GitHub issues, which typically has the answers but is hard to sift through -- there are currently 78k issues.
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In-Person Training
Figma
In-person training has its own benefits - 1. It helps in resolving queries then and there during the training. 2. I find classroom or in-person training more interactive. 3. Classroom or in-person training could be more practical in nature where participants can have an hands on experience with tools and clarify their doubts with the trainer.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Figma
Online training has its own merits and demerits - 1. Sometimes we may face issues with connectivity or the training content 2. The way training is being delivered becomes very important because not everyone is comfortable taking online training and learning by themselves. 3. With the advancement of technology online training has become popular but there is a segment of people who still prefer class-room training over online one.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Figma
Miro is more user-friendly than Figma, but is less robust in terms of web prototyping and graphic design. While Figma isn't made to be used as a design tool, our team has taken to using it as such because it's richer in functions and personalizations compared to Miro and Figma.
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Microsoft
Visual Studio Code stacks up nicely against Visual Studio because of the price and because it can be installed without admin rights. We don't exclusively use Visual Studio Code, but rather use Visual Studio and Visual Studio code depending on the project and which version of source control the given project is wired up to.
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Scalability
Figma
I think this is great and as I mentioned at ADP we use Figma extensively whether by designers, researchers or content writers
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Microsoft
It is easily deployed with our Jamf Pro instance. There is actually very little setup involved in getting the app deployed, and it is fairly well self-contained and does not deploy a large amount of associated files. However, it is not particularly conducive to large project, multi-developer/department projects that involve some form of central integration.
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Return on Investment
Figma
  • Allows us to get funding for further phases of the project (which is uncountable)
  • Well, it lets us show off when needed due to well suited UI-oriented character
  • Easily approachable by anyone (browser use)
  • User friendly interface
  • More advanced cooperation requires some of the users to have a license
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Microsoft
  • Saves money by replacing suites of tools such as Visual Studio, IntelliJ, etc.
  • Speeds development time and developer environment setup time
  • Strengthens code quality with integrated autoformatting and linting
  • Strengths Git practices by keeping version control tightly connected with the code
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ScreenShots