Noel Abernathy
Freelance UX Designer · 1-10
1 review written · 4.0 average
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Reviews by Noel Abernathy
★★★★★
Reliability is not glamorous, but it is everything when you are a solo designer whose deadlines do not care about server outages. Two years in, and Figma has genuinely impressed me here. I can count the meaningful downtime incidents on one hand. A few minor hiccups in year one, some sluggishness during a browser update cycle that turned out to be on my end, and one memorable afternoon where multiplayer sync went briefly sideways. That last one caused a mild panic, but it resolved within the hour and nothing was lost. For a cloud-based tool, that track record feels solid.
The bug history is similarly reassuring. I work across three client projects at any given time, and I need prototype links to behave consistently when I hand them off. They mostly do. There was a period maybe eight months ago where Auto Layout had a quirk that broke some of my component padding on export, and the fix took longer to ship than I would have liked. That is my main gripe: minor bugs sometimes linger. The workarounds are usually manageable, but when you are billing hourly, workarounds cost you.
Overall, though, I trust Figma with my work in a way I did not trust the desktop tools I used before. Files save, history is there when I need it, and the performance on large files has gotten meaningfully better over the two years I have been on the platform. If you are a freelancer weighing whether the Professional plan is worth it, the answer for me was yes, mostly because I sleep better knowing the file is not sitting on a drive that could fail.
