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Figma

Figma is the market standard for collaborative interface and product design. Several people work in real time in the same browser document, from the first wireframe to the developer-ready prototype. The tool is proprietary and runs exclusively in the cloud.

Few other tools have shaped product design as strongly. Figma moved the discipline out of local single-seat applications into a shared, always-current workspace. This page describes what Figma does, how it manages its data, and why in the Swiss context it becomes a sovereignty question, not as criticism of the tool but as an honest reading of its architecture.

Core concept

Figma is a browser application. There is a desktop client, but the file always lives on the vendor's servers, not on the device. From this follows its central strength: real-time collaboration without sync or version conflicts. Sharing a link shares the living state, not a copy. The ecosystem reaches beyond design alone and includes, among others, the FigJam whiteboard, the developer-oriented Dev Mode for translating designs into code, and Figma Slides for presentations. Feature scope and seat types depend on the plan, from the free Starter tier up to Enterprise.

Assessment

  • Use case: UI and UX design, prototyping, design systems and developer handoff. The de facto standard when a team works together on an interface.
  • Strength: Low barrier to entry in the browser, genuine multi-user collaboration, and a large ecosystem of plugins and community templates.
  • Limitation: Full vendor lock-in. The working files live in a third-party cloud, and there is no self-hosting option. Switching vendors carries content over only in part.

Where the working files live

Anyone working with Figma should know which legal jurisdiction their own designs sit in, because that is what determines who can lawfully access them. Figma is well secured and transparent here: the vendor holds a SOC 2 Type 2 report, is certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and ISO/IEC 27018:2019, and adheres to the EU Cloud Code of Conduct. That addresses information security. It does not address the question of which legal jurisdiction the data sits in.

This is exactly where digital sovereignty comes in. Figma runs its infrastructure on US cloud providers. For customers on the Enterprise plan there is a data residency solution that stores parts of the design files in a chosen region, currently the EU, with Australia and India added from the first quarter of 2026. That solution runs on AWS data centres, applies explicitly only to data at rest and not in transit, and excludes metadata, search indexes and further data types. Figma offers no Swiss region. For an organisation handling personal data this means in practice: the content leaves its own country, and depending on vendor and plan also the European legal area. That trade-off belongs in a vendor-neutral assessment: not against the tool, but along the question of which legal jurisdiction is acceptable for the specific content.

The contrast: market standard versus control

Figma thus stands for the same tension as Adobe Creative Cloud in classic graphic design: a technically leading, proprietary cloud ecosystem that became the standard through its reach and is hard to replace for exactly that reason. The sovereignty counterpart is Penpot, an open-source interface-design tool that can be self-hosted and so keeps data ownership in house. Penpot is not yet feature-equivalent in every respect, but it shows that the cloud architecture is not a technical necessity, it is a business decision. The choice between the two is not a pure tooling matter but a deliberate trade-off between market standard and control over the organisation's own content.

Putting it in perspective

Figma is an excellent tool, and for many teams the most productive choice. The sovereignty question does not devalue that, it only makes the decision conscious. Where uncritical drafts are created, the collaboration advantage usually clearly outweighs everything else. Where sensitive content is processed, the question of the data's legal jurisdiction belongs on the table before the tool is set. Since the Adobe acquisition fell through in late 2023, Figma has been an independent company, and publicly listed on the NYSE since its late-July 2025 IPO, which changes nothing about the cloud architecture.

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