Figma vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Figma
Score 9.0 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
Visual Studio
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Visual Studio (now in the 2022 edition) is a 64-bit IDE that makes it easier to work with bigger projects and complex workloads, boasting a fluid and responsive experience for users. The IDE features IntelliCode, its automatic code completion tools that understand code context and that can complete up to a whole line at once to drive accurate and confident coding.
$45
per month
Pricing
FigmaMicrosoft Visual Studio
Editions & Modules
Professional
$144
per year
Organization
$540
per year
Starter
Free
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FigmaVisual Studio
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
Considered Both Products
Figma
Chose Figma
Much nicer to not have to open a million pages at once.
Much faster and embeds are good for Jira even if slow.
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
In theory it can do the all the things these other apps offer. And it does to a certain extend. if your prototypes are not too complex it can completely remove the need for other prototyping software. Through Figjam presentation and collaboration, alternatives provide no extra …
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 …
Visual Studio

No answer on this topic

Best Alternatives
FigmaMicrosoft Visual Studio
Small Businesses
OmniGraffle
OmniGraffle
Score 9.4 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
OmniGraffle
OmniGraffle
Score 9.4 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
OmniGraffle
OmniGraffle
Score 9.4 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
FigmaMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(206 ratings)
9.0
(105 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(7 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(39 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Availability
5.5
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
5.0
(17 ratings)
8.8
(15 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
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
It's useful for app development, debugging, and testing. I've been using it for two years and have seen it grow into a fantastic tool. All of the features, NuGet packages, and settings that enable different types of projects are fantastic. It also has a connection to Azure DevOps and Git. It's a fantastic product that's simple to use.
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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
  • Since Microsoft offers a free Community Edition of the IDE many of our new developers have used it at home or school and are very familiar with the user interface, requiring little training to move up to the paid, enterprise-friendly editions we use.
  • The online community support for Visual Studio is outstanding, as solid or better than any other commercial or open-source project software.
  • Microsoft continuously keeps the product up to date and has maintained a history of doing so. They use it internally for their own development so there is little chance it will ever fall out of favor and become unsupported.
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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.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Certain settings and features can sometimes be challenging to locate. The interface isn't always intuitive.
  • Sometimes there are too many ways to do the same thing. For example, users can quickly add a new workspace in Source Control Explorer when a local path shows as "Not Mapped," but it doesn't indicate that the user might want to check the dropdown list of workspaces. The shortcut of creating a new workspace by clicking on the "Not Mapped" link can lead to developers creating too many workspaces and causing workspace management to become unwieldy. If the shortcut link were removed, the user would be forced to use the Workspace dropdown. While it can add an extra step to the process, workspaces would be managed more easily, and this would enforce consistency. At the very least, there should be a high-level administrative setting to hide the shortcut link.
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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
VS is the best and is required for building Microsoft applications. The quality and usefulness of the product far out-weight the licensing costs associated with it.
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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
The thing I like the most is Visual Studio doesn't suffer from Microsoft's over eager marketing department who feel they need to redesign the UI (think Office and windows) which forces users to loose large amounts of productivity having to learn software that they had previously known.
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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
No answers on this topic
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
No answers on this topic
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
Between online forums like StackOverflow, online documentation, MSDN forums, and the customer support options, I find it very easy to get support for Visual Studio IDE when I need it. If desired, one can also download the MSDN documentation about the IDE and have it readily available for any support needs.
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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
I personally feel Visual Studio IDE has [a] better interface and [is more] user friendly than other IDEs. It has better code maintainability and intellisense. Its inbuilt team foundation server help coders to check on their code then and go. Better nugget package management, quality testing and gives features to extract TRX file as result of testing which includes all the summary of each test case.
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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
No answers on this topic
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
Read full review
Microsoft
  • We've had hundreds of hours saved by the rapid development that Visual Studio provides.
  • We've lost some time in the Xamarin updates. However, being cross platform, we ultimately saved tons of time not having to create separate apps for iOS and Android.
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ScreenShots