Principles
Depends
Confidence: Low
This is a free community reference of design principles, not software you buy.
New check
Comparison
Principles vs Figma
Principles and Figma both land on Depends.
Figma
Depends
Confidence: High
Buy it if you are a product or design team building user interfaces together every week . it is the category standard and the free tier is genuinely usable.
| Compare | ||
|---|---|---|
| Verdict | Depends | Depends |
| Best for | Designers seeking principle inspiration | Product and UX teams shipping software who design together daily |
| Who it's not for | Teams shopping for actual design software | Solo freelancers or small teams that only need occasional simple mockups . a paid seat plan here is overkill; Penpot, Balsamiq, or even a template will do |
| Privacy | No known public vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed.² | Figma advertises SOC 2 Type 2, SSO, and a trust center, but 2025 was rough: Figma's own Data Processing Addendum discloses a security breach caused by a command injection, a command-injection CVE exists in Figma Desktop for Windows, and two RCE vulnerabilities were found in the third-party Framelink Figma MCP server that many teams connect to Figma.12 |
| Public sentiment | No genuine user reviews of this site were found; available review content concerns Ray Dalio's book of the same name.³ | Aggregate sentiment is strongly positive on the core product . 4.6 stars on G2 with real-time collaboration as the standout strength and users saying it speeds up layout work significantly.⁵ |
| Biggest gotcha | Searches for 'Principles' surface mostly Ray Dalio book reviews, vetting real feedback is hard³ | Seat-type sprawl is the big trap: full editor seats, Dev Mode seats, and cheap collaborator seats (around $5/month) mean your real cost depends on who touches files . model this before committing⁸ |
Pick Principles when
- Designers seeking principle inspiration
- Teams drafting their own design principles
- Design educators and students
- Design-system builders gathering precedents
When Principles is not a fit
- Teams shopping for actual design software
- Buyers wanting support, SLAs, or contracts
- Anyone confusing it with Ray Dalio's book
- Enterprises needing a governed, maintained product
Pick Figma when
- Product and UX teams shipping software who design together daily
- Design systems teams maintaining shared component libraries
- Startups through enterprises that want designers and developers on one canvas
- Teams that want the de facto industry tool with the largest community and plugin ecosystem
When Figma is not a fit
- Solo freelancers or small teams that only need occasional simple mockups . a paid seat plan here is overkill; Penpot, Balsamiq, or even a template will do
- Non-design teams (marketing, ops) that just want a whiteboard . Miro or Google Slides is the right-sized tool
- Budget-sensitive orgs planning to put many engineers on it . Dev Mode seat pricing drew open revolt from users, so the bill scales badly with dev headcount
- Buyers who need offline or self-hosted control of design data . Figma is cloud-first, and offline-first alternatives exist for that reason
Sources
- Design Principles . homepageprinciples.designofficial
- Design Principles . product security pageprinciples.designsecurity
review
- Figma Review: The Good and Bad (Crazy Egg)crazyegg.comreview
review
official
- Figma seat prices by tier (CheckThat)checkthat.aiofficial
- Figma Forum: New Dev Mode seat pricing is unacceptableforum.figma.comreview
- Figma Forum: Unclear billing practicesforum.figma.comreview
- Trustpilot reviews of figma.comtrustpilot.comreview
- NVD . CVE-2025-56803 (Figma Desktop for Windows)nvd.nist.govsecurity
security
security
security