Figma vs. Whimsical

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Figma
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Figma, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their collaborative design and prototyping application to support digital product and UI development.
$144
per year
Whimsical
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Whimsical is a visual workspace application from the company of the same name in Denver, allowing users to create collaborative wireframes, mindmaps, flowcharts, and sticky notes.
$12
per month per editor
Pricing
FigmaWhimsical
Editions & Modules
Professional
$144
per year
Organization
$540
per year
Starter
Free
Pro
$12
per month per editor
Business
$18
per month per editor
Enterprise
$240
per year per editor
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FigmaWhimsical
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details17% discount for annual billing on Pro and Business plans.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
FigmaWhimsical
Best Alternatives
FigmaWhimsical
Small Businesses
OmniGraffle
OmniGraffle
Score 9.1 out of 10
Stackby
Stackby
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
OmniGraffle
OmniGraffle
Score 9.1 out of 10
InEight
InEight
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprises
OmniGraffle
OmniGraffle
Score 9.1 out of 10
InEight
InEight
Score 8.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
FigmaWhimsical
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.6
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
5.5
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
5.1
(0 ratings)
5.7
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
6.4
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
6.4
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
6.4
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
7.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
FigmaWhimsical
Likelihood to Recommend
Figma is a solid design tool to craft the UX design concepts/solutions for digital products. For printed marketing materials such as brochures, marketing flyers, press releases, etc, other design tools such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, or InDesign might make more sense to use for those use case scenarios.
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It's extremely well-suited for rapid wire-framing of concepts, as product teams can quickly collaborate on any idea and create a visual blueprint of it. Whimsical could provide more intuitive feature prioritization templates. The current templates lack the necessary detail and could be further enhanced from a UI/UX standpoint.
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Pros
  • It's efficient, very efficient. Many things that take multiple clicks on other platforms can be completed in less than half the clicks, for example.
  • Alignment of objects is fast, accurate and easy as red line guides appear when moving objects around.
  • Autolayout ensures a balanced visual experience and aligns with CSS grid systems.
  • The ability to specify a grid and use it. For example, a 2pt or 4pt or 8pt grid.
  • Components and the ability to create a design system speeds up future work tremendously and creates design and brand consistency.
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  • Simple to use
  • Tons of uses
  • Can be customized with themeing
  • Can organize all your boards pretty much however you want
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Cons
  • Animated prototyping.
  • Tappable overlaid layers - bugs on fixed components, such as an app navigation footer in a prototype
  • Swapping a component but retaining inputted copy or imagery.
  • Performance on prototypes to work better in UserZoom - having to delete hidden layers manually, optimize images, and streamline the file, in general, is time-consuming
  • Folder structures - larger teams need multiple layers of folder structure to help find things.
  • Branch performance - we need better, more user-friendly solutions to get designs to merge better.
  • Branch performance - branching with the option to choose which pages you want in the branch without deleting each page you don't need.
  • Default sharing options need improvement.
  • Responsive ratios' in prototyping without having to recreate pages.
  • Better collaboration with Jira to bring in links in the design mode not just dev mode.
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  • It can be a little frustrating trying to line things up exactly right but that's probably more user error than anything
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Likelihood to Renew
Figma is a pretty cool tool in many areas. My team almost uses it on daily basis, such as, brainstorming on product/design topics, discussing prototypes created by designers. We even use it for retrospectives, which is super convenient and naturally keeps records of what the team discusses every month. Furthermore, I do see the potential of the product - currently we mainly use it for design topics, but it seems it is also a good fit for tech diagrams, which we probably will explore further in the future.
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No answers on this topic
Usability
It's easy to use for designers who are familiar with design terms and functions from Photoshop and Illustrator. However, non-tech and non-designer collaborators have a hard time figuring out how to leave comments and apply changes, compared to other online design tools like Canva and Squarespace. Even simple drag-and-drops and rearrangement of certain blocks become too complicated due to uncommon functions like Hug and Lock.
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Whimsical is overall very easy to learn and remember. One issue with the usability occurs when you attempt to move connected boxes around the workspace. Frequently connections break or do not add easily, causing further disconnects. You can manually fix these issues, but it's a oprobem that seems would have an easy fix
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Reliability and Availability
The only regret I have is, its not available when there is no internet
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No answers on this topic
Performance
I think its great, As there are many other software or systems which can be integrated with it as plugins or API's
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
I haven't used their support lately but in the past, they had a chat that I used often. They often responded in a few hours and were able to give a satisfactory solution. I would imagine it's less personal now but the community has expanded drastically so there are more resources out there to self serve with a bit of Google magic.
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I reached out to support, as I was interested in possibly investing in the organization, and they quickly and happily informed me they are a bootstrap organization and do not take on investors at this time. The swift response and information readily available for my consumption was extremely helpful and shows how solid the team behind it is.
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In-Person Training
In-person training has its own benefits - 1. It helps in resolving queries then and there during the training. 2. I find classroom or in-person training more interactive. 3. Classroom or in-person training could be more practical in nature where participants can have an hands on experience with tools and clarify their doubts with the trainer.
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No answers on this topic
Online Training
Online training has its own merits and demerits - 1. Sometimes we may face issues with connectivity or the training content 2. The way training is being delivered becomes very important because not everyone is comfortable taking online training and learning by themselves. 3. With the advancement of technology online training has become popular but there is a segment of people who still prefer class-room training over online one.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
I learned UX Design using Sketch and my team was using Sketch when I joined. We no longer use Sketch, and therefore I cannot compare its current functionality to Figma, but at the time of our switch, Figma just had more advanced capabilities- better collaboration, auto-layout tools, prototyping, etc. From what I can tell, it remains best in class for UX Design tools.
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ClickUp's mind mapping tool was very basic and hard to use from my perspective. Whimsical was by far easier and did what I wanted for a SaaS/cloud-based mind mapping tool. Xmind is fine as a desktop app, but updating the app was a pain whereas, with Whimsical I don't have to worry about that. Also, I wanted to continue working on a mind map wherever I was, even if I didn't have my laptop or device with me and Whimsical allows me to do that.
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Scalability
I think this is great and as I mentioned at ADP we use Figma extensively whether by designers, researchers or content writers
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • Allows us to get funding for further phases of the project (which is uncountable)
  • Well, it lets us show off when needed due to well suited UI-oriented character
  • Easily approachable by anyone (browser use)
  • User friendly interface
  • More advanced cooperation requires some of the users to have a license
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  • We've been using free version, so it's a no brainer.
  • As it helps us focus on the information organization process, we don't lose time redoing work due to the lack of planning before doing design or code.
  • We can collaborate on the same project, so it's easier to get things done as we're working from home as well.
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ScreenShots