Figma vs Rive
Both are design tools. Here is what separates them.
What Figma is
Figma is a design tool that runs in the browser. The product family covers Figma Design, Figma Make, Figma Weave, Dev Mode, Figma Motion, FigJam, Figma Slides, Figma Draw, Figma Sites and Figma Buzz, so interface work, whiteboarding, slides, websites and marketing assets sit inside one account. Figma Design carries auto layout, variables, components, slots, brushes, textures, grid layout, multi-edit, and branching and merging. Prototyping on top of it supports Smart Animate, interactive components, conditional logic and mathematical expressions, which is enough to demonstrate state changes rather than only screen-to-screen transitions. Files auto-save a version every 30 minutes. Dev Mode handles the handoff. Selecting a layer exposes code snippets, component properties and structured layer data, and a compare changes view shows two versions of a design side by side. Code Connect maps Figma components to their counterparts in production code, dev resources link a layer out to GitHub files, Jira tickets and Storybook stories, and a Figma MCP server pulls design system components into a codebase. The rest of the family covers adjacent work. FigJam ships more than 300 ready-made templates, integrates with Asana, Jira and GitHub, and offers 24 hour guest access without a login. Figma Slides imports PowerPoint files and supports live audience polls and an alignment scale. Figma Buzz generates images through OpenAI and Gemini models, removes image backgrounds, and imports, trims and exports video. Figma Make accepts text prompts, voice input, and attached designs, images, videos, audio, PDFs and text files. Figma Sites includes a CMS view for adding, editing and publishing page content. FigJam and Figma Slides are included with every seat on every plan. Seats come in three kinds, and the gap between them is the main budgeting lever. On Professional a Full seat is $16 per month, a Dev seat $12 and a Collab seat $3. On Organization those become $55, $25 and $5, and on Enterprise $90, $35 and $5. Organization and Enterprise are sold on annual billing only. The free Starter plan gives a single team with one folder and three files, while Professional gives a single team with unlimited folders. AI usage is metered in credits. A Professional Full seat carries 3,000 per month, Organization 3,500 and Enterprise 4,250, while Dev and Collab seats carry 500 each. Starter allows 150 a day up to 500 a month. Enterprise plans can allocate credits across teams, departments or cost centres and read usage through an AI credit usage API. Variable modes are capped at 10 on Starter and Professional and 20 on Organization, and are unlimited on Enterprise through extended collections.
What Rive is
Rive is a design tool for interactive animation that combines a vector editor, a timeline animator and an interactivity layer in one application. The file built in the editor is the file that ships in the app. Graphics are drawn by a GPU accelerated vector rendering engine, and the average Rive file is about 43 KB. The State Machine links animations with conditional transitions, so a graphic reacts to user input, screen size, scroll position and application state. Data Binding connects text, colours, layouts and other properties to live application data at runtime, and Events let a Rive graphic notify the host application when a meaningful state change occurs. Text can be replaced at runtime and supports any language, while fonts, images and audio can be loaded as dynamic assets rather than embedded in the file. Responsive layouts let a component reflow and resize to fit its container, and scripting in the Luau language covers custom and procedural behaviour. Rive imports SVG vectors, raster images in PNG, JPEG and WebP, and PSD files with their layers preserved. Animation covers skeletal rigs with bones, inverse kinematics and constraints, plus mesh deformation with vertex weighting. A cloud renderer outputs video, GIF and PNG sequences. Runtimes are published for Web, React, React Native, Flutter, Apple, Android, Unity, Unreal, C++, Defold, Framer, Webflow and Wix Studio, all open source under the MIT licence. The Free plan costs nothing per seat and allows unlimited personal files but only three collaborative files, one project and one workspace. It caps each imported asset at 10 MB and provides no exports, no revision history and no CDN hosting. Cadet is $9 per seat per month for a maximum of three seats, raises the asset cap to 100 MB and lifts the limits on collaborative files, projects and exports, including .riv files. Voyager is $32 per seat per month for up to 25 seats and adds libraries, hosted embed URLs and unlimited revision history. Enterprise is $120 per seat per month and adds unlimited subteam workspaces, custom S3 bucket storage, SSO and SOC 2 Type II. Paid plans can be billed monthly or yearly.
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