Data Indicate Figma’s Userbase Is Rapidly Expanding Beyond Design Market
Design professionals’ embrace of Figma has driven tremendous growth. As the law of large numbers and potential market saturation kick in, one big question is whether Figma can sustain its pace. ATC’s proprietary usage data reveal not only very strong developer momentum for Figma, but also broadening usage across the software stack that bode well for its future growth.
Over the past six years, Figma has posted average developer usage growth of 164%%. For comparison sake, out of the 3,000 software products tracked on the ATC platform, only seven others (examples include Anaconda and TypeScript) have sustained average y/y growth above 100% for six years in a row. Additionally, ATC’s developer usage data indicates Figma’s average growth rate of 164% is nearly double the average posted by 8 recent high-growth software IPOs (84%) .
A deeper dive into our data shows that Figma’s tremendous growth has been driven by very strong adoption in the design community, broadening usage beyond design professionals (e.g. the highest percentage-growth-rate company functions for Figma usage in 2022 are business/data analysis (+516%) and product management (+329%)) and increasing utilization by software engineers outside of frontend.
ATC measures top developers’ product usage in various software business functions Over the past four years, Figma’s utilization by top developers has gained meaningful traction in Low Code and Automation, Frameworks and Runtimes, and even Code Production and Delivery. ATC has found that product utilization by top developers in new areas is a strong leading indicator of a product’s likelihood to gain meaningful share outside of its initial core function.
Another indicator in our data that suggests Figma is on a path to playing a larger role in end-to-end software development: its emerging relationships with products at other layers of the stack. Below is ATC’s analytics-driven relational taxonomy for Figma, in which we highlight three expanding relationships tied to Figma’s growth in functional code development.
