InVision vs Figma
This is the comparison almost every InVision team ended up making, usually after the service was already gone. It turns on one axis: Figma rebuilt InVision's workflow more completely than anything else, and it rebuilt InVision's dependency along with it. Both halves are worth knowing before you sign an annual invoice.
Pick Figma if you want the whole InVision workflow back with the fewest arguments, and buy the seat mix rather than a seat count: $16 Full for designers, $12 Dev for engineers, $3 Collab for everyone who only comments, billed annually. Pick something else if custody is your actual requirement, because a local .fig opens in nothing but Figma and Figma does not work offline.
Side by side
InVision vs Figma at a glance
| InVision | Figma | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | ✗ service ended 31 Dec 2024, 23:59 EST | ✓ active and shipping |
| Billing unit | Per user, one seat type | Per user, three seat types since the 2025 restructure |
| Entry paid tier | None: no longer sold | Professional: $16 Full, $12 Dev, $3 Collab, billed annually |
| Free tier | None | Starter: 3 design files, 3 FigJam files, unlimited drafts |
| Cost of a reviewer | ✓ free: anyone with the prototype link | $3 Collab seat, or free view-only access |
| Prototyping model | Static screens plus hotspots | ✓ live canvas, interactive components, smart animate |
| Developer handoff | Inspect, bundled | Dev Mode, requires a $12 Dev seat or better |
| Design system tooling | DSM, deleted with everything else | ✓ shared libraries, from Professional up |
| Whiteboard | Freehand, sold to Miro on 6 Nov 2023 | ✓ FigJam, included with a seat |
| Version history | Gone with the account | 30 days on Starter, unlimited on paid plans |
| Your files if the vendor vanished | ✗ nothing: all documents deleted | ✗ one proprietary .fig at a time, Figma-only |
| Works offline | ✗ no | ✗ no, by design |
| Self-host / licence | ✗ proprietary SaaS | ✗ proprietary SaaS |
| Import path between them | None in either direction: the source documents no longer exist | |
Sources: Figma pricing · Figma on local copies · Figma on offline use · Miro on the Freehand deal. Compiled August 2026.
Where Figma wins
It is the only option where the conventions come free
The strongest argument for Figma has nothing to do with its feature list: it is that everyone else already assumes it. Plugin authors, design-system tooling, agency deliverables, engineering handoff habits and job descriptions all default to Figma files, which means adopting it costs you no arguments and no glossary. Every other pick on this site is a better tool on at least one axis, and every one of them makes you explain your choice to the next contractor you hire.
The seat split answers InVision's best idea
InVision's quietly brilliant decision was that a reviewer did not need a licence. Figma's 2025 restructure is the closest thing to that made explicit: a Collab seat is $3 per month billed annually and covers commenting, FigJam and basic inspection, while a Dev seat is $12 and adds Dev Mode for engineers. Buy the mix rather than the count, and the invoice for a ten-designer, thirty-reviewer org looks nothing like the same headcount on Full seats.
Prototypes are now the same artefact as the design
InVision worked because the prototype was a separate deliverable you exported and uploaded, which is also why it drifted from the design the moment anything changed. Figma removes the export step entirely: interactive components and prototype flows live in the file they describe, so the reviewable thing and the designed thing cannot fall out of sync. That single structural difference is what killed the category InVision created.
FigJam and Dev Mode close the last two gaps
The two InVision pieces teams miss most, Freehand and Inspect, both have direct answers here: FigJam ships with any seat, and Dev Mode exposes measurements, tokens and code snippets to engineers on a Dev seat. Neither is a perfect replica, but they are in the same product as the design, which InVision's own equivalents increasingly were not.
Where InVision still wins, and what that tells you
Two things InVision did better have not been fully rebuilt anywhere. The first is genuine zero-friction review: a link that anyone could open, comment on and forget about, with no account, no seat and no admin deciding who counts as a collaborator. Figma's Collab seat is cheap, but it is still a seat someone has to provision and pay for, and view-only access is not the same as being able to leave a pinned comment. If your reviewers are executives, clients or lawyers rather than product people, that gap is felt weekly.
The second is that a static-screens model was lighter than a live multiplayer canvas, and lighter is sometimes correct. A team that ships one flow a quarter and needs three people to approve it was well served by InVision and is over-served by a design platform. That is the case where InVision's apparent disadvantage, not being a real-time editor, was actually the feature, and it is worth being honest that nobody currently sells exactly that product at that price.
The third thing, and the reason this site exists: on the custody row above, Figma is not better than InVision. It is the same architecture with a healthier vendor. File then Save local copy gives you a .fig that only Figma opens, one file per action, and Figma states plainly that it cannot be used offline. That is a fine trade if you make it deliberately. Making it by default is how the last decade ended.
Rebuilding InVision work in Figma
What this actually looks like, given there is nothing left to migrate:
1. Inventory the links, not the files. Grep your tickets, specs, Confluence pages and onboarding docs for invisionapp.com URLs. What you find is the true scope: the screens someone still points at. Everything else was already dead weight.
2. Rebuild from the product, not from memory. For each surviving reference, screenshot the shipped UI and rebuild that, rather than trying to reconstruct a two-year-old prototype. You will finish faster and the result will be accurate.
3. Buy the seat mix on day one. Decide who is a Full seat before anyone is invited. Retroactively downgrading colleagues from $16 to $3 is a social problem, not a billing one.
4. What does not move at all. Comment threads, approval history, DSM version history and every prototype URL pasted into a ticket are gone permanently. Redirect the important ones to a Figma file and accept the dead links on the rest; do not budget a project around recovering them.
Common questions
FAQ: InVision vs Figma
Can I import my old InVision prototypes into Figma?
No. There is no importer and there is nothing left to import: InVision deleted all documents on 31 December 2024 at 23:59 EST, so the source files no longer exist on any server. Plugins that once pulled InVision screens into Figma have nothing to connect to. In practice the work is an inventory job rather than a migration: find which prototype links are still referenced in tickets, specs and onboarding docs, then rebuild only those screens from the current product. Most teams discover that far less than half of what they lost was still in use.
What does Figma actually cost compared with an InVision seat?
Figma restructured its seats in 2025 into three types, which is why older price lists do not match. On Professional billed annually a Full seat is 16 dollars per month, a Dev seat 12 and a Collab seat 3. Organization raises those to 55, 25 and 5, and Enterprise to 90, 35 and 5. The useful comparison is not seat against seat but headcount mix: InVision let reviewers open a prototype link without a licence, so the equivalent in Figma is a 3 dollar Collab seat, and buying 16 dollar Full seats for people who only comment is the most common overspend.
Does saving a local .fig file protect me if Figma disappears?
Not really. File then Save local copy produces a .fig, but only Figma can open it, there is no bulk export so you do it one file at a time, and Figma cannot be used offline, so reopening the copy still requires the service to exist. Figma community threads also warn that older .fig files may fail to open in a current build. Treat it as a convenience for moving a file between accounts, not as an archive. If custody is the requirement, Penpot under MPL-2.0 or Sketch with its documented file format answer it structurally.