At Config 2025, the Figma release landed with the subtlety of a meteor: four brand‑new products—Draw, Sites, Buzz, and Make—plus dozens of core improvements that quietly shipped to every team overnight. If you’ve already clicked View version history in your files you’ll see the changes stacked up like Christmas morning. One keynote and a single auto‑update later, our carefully curated tool stacks suddenly feel… redundant.

Contributors

By Polina Reut, Hanna Matsiyeuskaya and Ilya Greben

from Design Systems Surf team

This article is a practical unpacking of the Figma new features you should actually care about. We’ll look at what’s new (and what’s next), the limitations in this first public build, and how the new suite could reshape day‑to‑day design management.

Quick glance at the Figma release: The 2025 Figma updates that matter

Figma Draw — A native vector playground with brushes, texture fills, shape builder, and text‑on‑a‑path. Think 80 % of everyday Illustrator tasks, but right where you’re already working.

Figma Sites — Frame‑to‑production publishing that turns layouts into responsive web pages without a detour through Framer or Webflow. It’s still young, but already dangerous for marketing microsites.

Figma Buzz — A brand‑safe content factory that lets marketing teams bulk‑create on‑brand assets while designers retain control of the underlying components.

Figma Make — An AI companion that reads your canvas, then turns plain‑language prompts into prototypes—complete with readable React/Tailwind code you can actually ship.

Below we’ll dive deeper into each tool, sprinkle in a bit of Figma what’s new context, and flag the rough edges you should watch out for.

Figma Draw: “Wait… do we still need Illustrator?”

The latest version of Figma drops a re‑imagined vector workspace directly inside Design. Brushes with jitter, variable‑width strokes, progressive blur, texture fills, lasso selection, a legitimate Shape Builder—basically the greatest‑hits panel you’ve been begging Adobe to modernise for a decade.

Draw means you can bounce from UI layout to custom icon to hero illustration without the mental tax of swapping apps. Styles, variables, and Dev Mode hooks travel with every path, so your design tokens remain intact, and exported SVGs retain data‑attributes for Storybook pipelines.

Limitations & reality check: complex mesh gradients, 3D bevels, and CMYK‑ready print pre‑press still belong to Illustrator. For product‑centric teams, though, Draw covers the lion’s share of daily vector work while giving you a single Save and restore point in version history.

Figma Sites: From frame to functional web page in one tab

Sites takes your Figma frames and publishes them to the web—auto‑provisioned SSL, edge caching, and rollback controls included. Pre‑built blocks, breakpoint‑aware typography, and a live HTML/CSS view make the learning curve mercifully short.

It doesn’t (yet) replace the full power curve of Framer or Webflow—custom CMS collections, complex logic, and bleeding‑edge GSAP‑style motion are still outside its current scope—but for landing pages, docs, and event sites the convenience is unbeatable. You design, hit Publish, and see your work live seconds later, complete with version history and restore points baked in.

Figma Buzz: Canva‑style asset factories, but fully on‑brand

Buzz lives at the intersection of brand design and growth marketing. Copy‑paste any Figma frame into Buzz, lock the bits you don’t want the social team to touch, and let them bulkgenerate thousands of variants via CSV import or AI‑assisted text/imagery.

Brand governance remains front‑and‑center: typography tokens, colour ramps, and logo placement can be locked per template, so non‑designers can see and control only what you allow. Channel presets cover everything from Instagram Reels covers to Apple Watch tiles, and scheduled export means marketing can queue a full campaign without a single “quick asset request” Slack DM.

Figma Make: Prompt‑to‑prototype—and beyond

Make is the AI glue that binds Draw, Sites, and the rest of Figma. Instead of an empty chatbot, you begin with the visual context of your design; the model parses layer hierarchy, constraints, and variables, then suggests context‑aware edits. Need that button to trigger a magnetic hover? Select it, type the prompt, and Make wires up the interaction—in readable React/Tailwind (or vanilla) you can hand straight to engineering.

It’s early days, so expect some limitations (nested loops and advanced data fetching occasionally mis‑compile), but the foundation is solid: a design‑first AI that knows your file’s constraints, tokens, and last‑saved state.

Should you consolidate today?

If you currently pay for Illustrator, Framer or Webflow, Canva, and a prototyping playground, the maths just changed. The new suite won’t erase every edge‑case overnight, but for the bulk of product, brand, and marketing workflows it offers a coherent, single‑subscription alternative. Less context‑switching, fewer exports to manage, and one security review instead of six.

That said, keep an eye on the limitations:

Illustrator still rules advanced vector domains like mesh gradients, embossing, and print‑prepress.
Framer & Webflow retain the crown for highly bespoke interactions, custom CMS logic, and bleeding‑edge animation tooling.
Buzz is brand‑safe but currently limited to digital/print assets (no video yet).

Figma itself is transparent about this current state; view the release notes or the public beta roadmap to see what’s slated for the next new version/release.

Final take

Figma didn’t just ship a feature drop; it launched a credible challenge to the fragmented design‑tool landscape. Whether you embrace the full suite or cherry‑pick the parts that fit your pipeline, the gravity of an all‑in‑one design OS just got a lot stronger.

Time to update that workflow diagram—and maybe your software budget.

Got something you’d like us to cover in more depth? Message us on LinkedIn—we’re always up for expanding the article.