Figma is an absolutely awful design tool that has great collaboration features.
For a UI/UX design tool it has terrible constraints, and basically no support for state changes. There's variances now, which came out really recently. Before that, it was even worse. People would have separate designs for each possible state.
Let alone how limited the possible actions are. It's just frames, boxes, and vector elements. And no, vector grids are not enough to make it special. It's almost the bare minimum in a design tool.
The only reason figma seems great is because the competition is somehow even worse. Sketch is by all accounts slower even though it's native, but I couldn't tell you because it's Mac exclusive, so it leaves me and lots of people like me in the dust. It's terrible for people like freelance designers that might want to share designs with prospective clients.
As a developer, I found Figma to be amazing, but that may be due to the designer I worked with.
At a previous job, I would just get PNGs or PDFs of some design, and I had to try to implement it. Often ended up with inflexible, hard-coded shit, guessing sizes ("8px padding? I think so??"), guessing colors, whatever.
At another job, the designer I worked with just gave me a link to a Figma file, and I had everything I needed. I could shit out front-end stuff quickly, without any issues.
I used to think I was just a bad at front-end, and therefore preferred the back-end. Turns out I'm just not that good a designer, and with a tool like Figma, building the actual designer's vision was easy and joyful.
I don't think Framer did as well as they were hoping.
The whole react component thing didn't turn out to be the killer feature collaboration was for figma. Framer has a lot of cool stuff, their plugin system is really powerful So you can have things like 3d elements which is super cool.
I am sure people use it, but it didn't grow in popularity like Figma did. I think with any kind of product, there's often a world of stuff happening under the surface that leads to success. I don't know why Framer hasn't been as successful. One guess would be that people just don't find writing react components and tying it to their design tool to be useful. Potentially too much friction, or that the people doing the designing don't often write react code. Or maybe they didn't market it well enough.
The question of components in design is really interesting but it's a whole other issue.
I do know that along with Adobe XD, Framer has had some issues with bugs. Figma, I would expect, is a lot more stable because they have their own custom renderer that's one canvas element whereas other tools use the DOM. It's one of the reasons why Figma is so feature-poor, they have implement a lot of behavior themselves.
For a UI/UX design tool it has terrible constraints, and basically no support for state changes. There's variances now, which came out really recently. Before that, it was even worse. People would have separate designs for each possible state.
Let alone how limited the possible actions are. It's just frames, boxes, and vector elements. And no, vector grids are not enough to make it special. It's almost the bare minimum in a design tool.
The only reason figma seems great is because the competition is somehow even worse. Sketch is by all accounts slower even though it's native, but I couldn't tell you because it's Mac exclusive, so it leaves me and lots of people like me in the dust. It's terrible for people like freelance designers that might want to share designs with prospective clients.