Figma is an interface design tool that runs in the browser, which sounds like a technical detail and turned out to be the entire product strategy. Because the file lives on a server rather than a laptop, there is one version of the design, several people can be in it simultaneously, and anyone with a link can open it without installing anything or owning a licence. Handing a design to a developer stopped being an export and became a URL.
The design side covers what you would expect: vector editing, auto layout that behaves like flexbox so components resize sensibly, components and variants for reusable elements, styles and variables for colour, type and spacing tokens. Variables are the piece that turned Figma into a design system tool rather than a drawing tool, because a token changed in one place propagates through every file that references the published library. Large organisations run their entire design language this way.
Prototyping links frames together with transitions and conditional logic, producing something clickable enough for user testing without code. Dev Mode gives engineers measurements, generated CSS, exportable assets and a view of which components changed since the last inspection, which cuts down the back-and-forth of "what is this spacing supposed to be". FigJam is a separate whiteboard surface for the messier work of workshops and diagrams.
The plugin ecosystem is large and does real work: icon libraries, accessibility contrast checking, content population with realistic data, translation, and bridges into code repositories. A team will typically settle on a handful and forget they are extensions.
The limitations are real. Being browser-based means performance degrades on very large files, and a design system file with thousands of components will make an older machine struggle. Offline work is limited. Figma is an interface tool, not an illustration or photo editing tool, and people pushing it toward complex vector artwork hit its edges. The Adobe acquisition attempt and its collapse left the pricing question unsettled for a while, and seat-based costs across a large organisation add up, particularly with the separate editor and viewer tiers.
Who it suits: product teams designing software interfaces, especially any team with more than one designer or a real handoff to engineering. Who should look elsewhere: illustrators and print designers, and teams needing serious offline capability.