Figma vs InVision 2026: Which Design Tool Actually Wins?

TL;DR: Figma dominates for collaborative UI/UX design with its browser-based architecture and Dev Mode. InVision has pivoted hard into enterprise territory with its Freehand whiteboard and DSM tools, but it's fighting an uphill battle. For most teams in 2026, Figma is the default — InVision is only worth the conversation if your org is already locked into its enterprise workflow.

Introduction

Here's a bold claim: the Figma vs InVision debate is basically over — and has been for a while. If you've been in the design world for more than a hot minute, you've watched this rivalry play out in real time. It was the fight of the early 2020s. But the contenders have changed so dramatically that comparing them today is almost like comparing a Swiss Army knife to a really excellent whiteboard marker. Both useful. Very different jobs.

Figma survived Adobe's attempted acquisition drama, came out stronger, and now sits at the center of most modern design stacks. InVision, meanwhile, quietly shut down its legacy InVision Studio product (officially discontinued in early 2024) and doubled down on Freehand and enterprise workflow tools. Honestly, I think a lot of people still haven't caught up to how much InVision has changed — they're still imagining the click-through prototype tool from 2017.

So who is this comparison actually for? Designers evaluating tools for a new team, product managers trying to justify a software budget, or enterprise IT folks comparing licensing structures — this one's for you. We're going deep on specs, real feature behavior, integration depth, and honest pricing math.

Quick Comparison Table: Figma vs InVision 2026

Figma Overview

Try Figma

Figma's origin story is genuinely interesting — it bet everything on browser-based architecture at a time when everyone else was shipping desktop apps. That gamble paid off spectacularly. In 2026, Figma isn't just a design tool; it's the connective tissue between designers, engineers, and product managers in thousands of tech teams worldwide. Fun fact: it's also quietly become the default tool taught in most UX bootcamps, which means the talent pipeline already knows how to use it before they're hired.

Core Features

The engine here is Figma's vector editing environment, which runs in-browser using WebGL. Performance on complex files — we're talking 500+ frames, dense component libraries — is genuinely impressive, though you'll want a machine with at least 16GB RAM if you're pushing large design systems. (Ask me how I know. RIP my old 8GB MacBook Air.)

Prototyping has matured significantly. Figma now supports variables, conditional logic, and component-level interactions, meaning you can prototype dynamic UI states without reaching for a secondary tool. The introduction of Dev Mode — available on paid plans — was a genuine game-changer for handoff: engineers get direct CSS, iOS/Android code snippets, and a measured inspection view that doesn't require a separate export workflow.

FigJam, Figma's whiteboard product, ships with most plans and handles diagramming, retrospectives, and async design reviews comfortably. It's not trying to replace Miro for hardcore workshop facilitation, but for quick ideation? It's better than people give it credit for.

Pricing

One thing that's genuinely underrated: viewers are free on all paid plans. Most stakeholders don't need edit access anyway, which means you're not paying per-seat for every PM and exec who wants to look at a mockup.

What Figma Is Best For

Teams doing end-to-end product design: wireframes → high-fidelity mockups → interactive prototypes → dev handoff, all in one environment. Startups, mid-size product teams, and design agencies that need to move fast without juggling five different tools.

InVision Overview

Invision

InVision's story in 2026 is one of strategic reinvention. The original InVision — the click-through prototype tool that dominated around 2015-2018 — is largely gone. InVision Studio was shut down. What remains is Freehand (a collaborative whiteboard/canvas), the Design System Manager (DSM), and an enterprise platform built around workflow and collaboration rather than pixel-pushing design.

Honestly? It's a smart pivot. InVision couldn't beat Figma at design tooling, so it stopped trying — and I respect that more than I expected to. Too many companies die slowly trying to compete in a battle they've already lost.

Core Features

Freehand is InVision's flagship product now. It's a digital canvas that supports sticky notes, wireframe components, embedded media, and multiplayer editing. Think Miro with tighter enterprise integrations. Freehand is actually solid — the canvas performance is smooth, the template library covers probably 80% of common workshop and planning needs, and the enterprise governance features (audit logs, advanced permissions, data residency) are genuinely mature.

DSM lets teams manage and distribute design tokens, component documentation, and style guides across tools. Here's the deal: it integrates with Figma — yes, really, InVision plays nicely with its biggest competitor at the enterprise level — as well as Sketch and code repositories. The code snippet integration for design tokens is particularly useful for design engineering teams trying to keep their token documentation in sync.

The legacy prototype/inspect workflow technically still exists for older projects, but InVision actively steers new users toward Freehand. Don't go in expecting a Figma-style prototyping environment. That ship has sailed.

Pricing

InVision's pricing for Freehand is actually competitive — it undercuts both FigJam and Miro at the per-user level. The enterprise tier is where costs climb, but you're getting a serious governance stack for the money.

What InVision Is Best For

Large enterprises that need whiteboarding + design system management + compliance features, particularly teams that already have InVision embedded in their workflows. Also genuinely useful as a complementary tool for teams using Figma for design but needing enterprise-grade whiteboard collaboration on top of it.

Feature-by-Feature Breakdown: Figma vs InVision 2026

User Interface & Ease of Use

Figma's UI has a real learning curve — there's a lot going on. But the muscle memory builds fast, and there's a reason millions of designers use it daily without complaining. The component system, auto layout, and variables panel are powerful once you're past the initial ramp. New team members coming from a design background can typically get productive within a week; non-designers take longer, but the viewer experience is fairly intuitive.

InVision Freehand is much simpler. If you've ever used any whiteboard tool, you're productive in about 20 minutes flat. That simplicity is both its strength and its ceiling.

Winner: Figma for design depth; InVision for onboarding speed.

Core Features

Look, this is where the comparison becomes almost apples-to-oranges. Figma's core is vector design + prototyping + dev handoff. InVision's core is now whiteboarding + design system management. They're solving genuinely different problems in 2026.

If you need to design and prototype UI, Figma wins — it's not close. If you need enterprise-grade collaborative whiteboarding with design system governance, InVision is a legitimate contender, though Miro Miro and Notion Try Notion are also in that conversation and worth evaluating.

Winner: Figma for UI design. InVision for whiteboard-centric workflows.

Integrations

Figma integrates with Jira, Slack, GitHub, Storybook, Zeplin (though Zeplin's relevance has dropped significantly since Dev Mode launched — honestly, Zeplin as a standalone product feels increasingly hard to justify), and hundreds of community plugins. The plugin ecosystem, built on a JavaScript API, is enormous. There are plugins for everything from automated accessibility checks to Lottie animation export to AI-assisted component generation.

InVision Freehand integrates with Jira, Confluence, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, and interestingly, Figma itself — you can embed Figma files directly in Freehand boards. The integration depth is solid for enterprise productivity suites, but there's no plugin ecosystem in the same sense. What you see is largely what you get.

Winner: Figma — the plugin ecosystem alone puts it ahead by a significant margin.

Pricing & Value

For pure design tooling, Figma at $15/editor/month is competitive, especially since viewers are free. The Professional plan covers most small-to-mid teams comfortably without forcing you into the $45/editor Organization tier unless you genuinely need centralized admin.

InVision Freehand at ~$4.95/user/month is genuinely affordable for what it does. The catch? You'd likely be running it alongside Figma, not instead of it — which means your total design stack cost goes up. Budget accordingly.

Winner: InVision on per-seat cost for its specific use case; Figma on overall value for design teams.

Customer Support

Figma's support at the Professional tier is... fine. Email-based, usually responds within a business day. The community forum and documentation are excellent though — often faster to self-serve than waiting for a support ticket. Organization and Enterprise tiers get dedicated CSMs and priority support, which meaningfully changes the experience.

InVision's enterprise support reputation has improved since the company streamlined its product focus. Enterprise customers report solid SLA adherence. Smaller plan users get standard support, which can be slow.

Winner: Roughly even at equivalent tiers — both have the same "it's great at enterprise, fine at mid-tier" pattern.

Mobile App

Figma's mobile app (iOS and Android) functions primarily as a mirror and viewer — you can review designs, play prototypes, and leave comments. Serious editing on mobile isn't really possible. That's a deliberate call, and honestly the right one. Precision vector editing on a phone is nobody's favorite experience, and I'd be suspicious of any design tool that claimed otherwise.

InVision Freehand has a more capable mobile experience for its use case — you can actually contribute to boards, add stickies, and participate in sessions from a tablet reasonably well. For cross-functional meetings on the go, that matters.

Winner: InVision for mobile usability; Figma if mirroring prototypes on device is your priority.

Security & Compliance

Both tools are SOC 2 Type II certified. Figma's Enterprise tier includes SSO/SAML, advanced admin controls, audit logging, and data residency options — EU data residency is available, which matters more than people expect for teams with international compliance requirements. Guest access controls and branch permissions are granular enough to satisfy most enterprise IT requirements.

InVision Enterprise matches most of these: SSO, audit logs, advanced permissions, and data residency. Given InVision's laser focus on enterprise, compliance features are clearly a priority — and it shows in the implementation detail.

Winner: Tie at enterprise tier. InVision's compliance focus is arguably slightly more mature for heavily regulated industries, but it's close.

Pros and Cons

Figma

InVision

Who Should Choose Figma?

• Product design teams building SaaS products, mobile apps, or any UI-heavy product
• Design agencies needing a single tool for client work from wireframe to handoff
• Engineers who want clean handoff — Dev Mode is legitimately useful and cuts down on the "wait, what's the padding on this?" back-and-forth
• Startups on a budget who need the free tier to actually work for longer than a trial period
• Teams running design systems who want library management baked into their primary design tool rather than bolted on separately
• Any team where designers and non-designers need to collaborate on the same files in real time

Look, if you're building product UI in 2026 and you're not using Figma, you need a really specific reason why not. I'm not saying it's perfect — it's not — but the gap between Figma and everything else has only grown.

Who Should Choose InVision?

• Enterprise teams already embedded in InVision's workflow and actively using DSM for design token management across codebases
• Teams that need whiteboarding alongside Figma — Freehand as a complement to Figma is actually a sensible stack and more common than you'd think
• Design ops teams managing large-scale design systems across multiple tools and frameworks simultaneously
• Organizations in regulated industries that need mature compliance and data residency controls at the enterprise tier
• Non-designer stakeholders who need a low-friction way to participate in design reviews without climbing Figma's learning curve

Here's my hot take: the best argument for InVision in 2026 isn't "instead of Figma" — it's "alongside Figma for whiteboard collaboration and design system governance at enterprise scale." Any vendor or article still framing this as a head-to-head replacement decision is working from outdated assumptions.

Verdict: Figma vs InVision 2026

For the majority of teams: Figma wins. It's not even a close call for anyone doing UI/UX design work. The prototyping depth, Dev Mode, plugin ecosystem, and collaborative editing are unmatched. The pricing is reasonable when you factor in that viewers are free — for many teams, only 2-4 people actually need edit seats anyway.

InVision isn't a loser — it's just operating in a different lane now. If your team needs enterprise whiteboarding with serious compliance features, and you're already running Figma for design, InVision Freehand as a secondary tool makes genuine sense. The DSM product is valuable for large organizations managing design tokens across multiple codebases and frameworks.

The scenario where InVision replaces Figma? That essentially doesn't exist in 2026. The scenario where they coexist productively in an enterprise stack? More common than you'd think.

Default recommendation: Start with Figma (Try Figma). Evaluate InVision (Invision) separately if you have specific whiteboarding or enterprise design system needs that FigJam and Figma's native library tools aren't covering.

FAQ: Figma vs InVision 2026

Is InVision still relevant in 2026?

Yes, but in a narrower scope than before. InVision has pivoted from being a direct Figma competitor into an enterprise whiteboarding and design system management platform. Freehand is its main product now, and it's solid for that use case — just don't expect it to replace Figma for UI design work. Think of it as a different tool category entirely.

Can Figma replace InVision completely?

For most teams, yes. Figma's prototyping covers what legacy InVision did for click-through prototypes, Dev Mode handles handoff, and FigJam handles basic whiteboarding. The only area where InVision still meaningfully differentiates is enterprise-grade design system management via DSM and the specific compliance and governance features in InVision Enterprise. If you don't need those, Figma alone is probably enough.

What happened to InVision Studio?

InVision Studio — the standalone design and animation tool positioned to compete directly with Figma — was officially discontinued in early 2024. InVision had actually stopped active development even earlier than that, which tells you everything you need to know. It's no longer viable for new projects, and InVision itself recommends migrating those workflows to Figma or similar tools.

Is Figma free to use in 2026?

Figma's free Starter plan includes 3 design projects and up to 2 editors. Honestly, it's usable — not a crippled trial, but an actual functional tier for freelancers or very small teams. FigJam is also included on free plans with some limitations. When you're ready to scale, paid plans start at $15/editor/month.

Which tool is better for design system management?

It depends on scale, and I think this answer gets oversimplified a lot. For most teams — say, under 50 designers — Figma's built-in library management and variable system handle design tokens well enough. For large enterprises managing design systems across multiple tools, frameworks, and teams, InVision's DSM adds governance layers around versioning, documentation, and cross-tool distribution that Figma doesn't natively provide. If you're in that second camp, DSM is worth a serious look.

How do Figma and InVision compare for remote teams?

Both support real-time collaboration, but Figma's multiplayer editing is more deeply integrated into the core design workflow — it feels seamless rather than bolted on. InVision Freehand is excellent for async whiteboard sessions and is arguably better for non-design stakeholders participating in remote workshops and planning sessions. A lot of distributed teams have landed on using both: Figma for design work, Freehand for cross-functional planning. It's not the cheapest stack, but for larger orgs, it covers the full collaboration surface pretty well.