How Figma’s Multiplayer Technology Works

Collaborative editors like Google Docs allow people to work on a rich-text document in real-time, which is convenient when users want to immediately see each others’ changes. However, sometimes people prefer a more asynchronous collaboration style, where they can work on a private copy of a document for a while and share their updates later. The al... See more

Figma has collaboration built in natively as a first party. This means the ability to comment on designs. But it means much more too. It means the ability to design together at the same time. To be able to send a live demo to someone frictionlessly and then be able to make live changes as you talk to them. It means being able to build design system... See more

The solution: Figma's product roadmap doc.

Then, realize that the holy grail is combining single-player and multi-player. For example, I first heard about Figma from a designer that had switched from Adobe XD. He had built significant trust with Figma as a single-player, recently moved to multi-player and the guy was literally screaming from the top of his lungs on rooftops about how amazin... See more

The issue there is that all these tools pretty much anything that wants to use that kind of canvas UI. It's a tough engineering problem. And there's like a ton of the functionality of like a canvas like that that is — it's almost like a text editor that it just has to be there in order for it to feel complete. And if it's not complete, it'll feel b... See more