Figma alternatives worth trying in 2025 — a working designer's review

by Nini Rashid·May 21, 2026

Figma's pricing changes have pushed a lot of small teams to explore alternatives. Here's what I've actually tested.

Penpot: Open source, self-hostable, free. The closest to Figma in terms of feature set. Not quite at parity yet, some component and variable features are still catching up. But for most UI design work, it does the job.

Whimsical: Great for wireframing and flow diagrams. Not a Figma replacement but excellent for early-stage design thinking.

Figma free tier: Still genuinely useful for solo designers or very small projects. The limits (3 projects) are workable for freelance work.

Canva Pro (surprisingly): For teams where designers need to collaborate with non-designers on templated work, Canva Pro is honestly more practical than Figma. Not a design tool, a collaboration tool.

My recommendation: Penpot for teams wanting to move away from Figma. It's not perfect but it's genuinely usable and getting better.

#Figma#design#tools#Penpot#alternatives

Comments (6)

Samantha Voon23

Kubernetes is the right answer for scale but the wrong answer for most Malaysian startups at series A or below. Don't over-engineer for a problem you don't have yet.

Fadzli Musa16

Serverless eliminated 80% of our infrastructure management overhead. Cold starts are still the nuisance they always were though.

Rina Azman12

Infrastructure as code with Terraform is not optional if you're managing cloud resources for more than one environment. Manual configuration is a liability.