10 best Figma plugins

As designers, we’re almost always searching for new tips, tricks, and tools to help speed-up and improve our workflow. After a few weeks of testing, I’ve compiled a list of the 10 best Figma plugins. This is definitely not an exhaustive list but just the ones I’ve found most useful thus far :)

Roller — Design linter

by Toybox

This plugin is kind of a game-changer for anyone working with a Design System or Style Guide. It’s taken the concept of “linting” from Engineering and has applied it to the design world 🌎. In a nutshell, this plugin lets you find and fix any style inconsistencies in your Figma file.

How it works:

1. Open the Plugin
2. Import or add your styles (colors, text, borders, etc.)
3. Click into an error
4. Replace or ignore the error with a style from your Library. That’s all there is to it — getting to 100% consistency has never been easier.

This plugin gives me some serious peace-of-mind — knowing that what I’m handing-off is consistent with what’s in our Design System.

Brandfetch

by Brandfetch

Holy macaroni — this lil-pup is sweet 🐶. Now, to be completely honest, I don’t see this being the most frequently used tool in your toolshed (plugin-shed?). However, it’s very cool and clutch for those moments when you need to grab a logo stat.

How it works:

1. Open up the plugin
2. Type in the URL of a site
3. Voila! A logo doth appears in your design

Feels pretty magical.

Content Reel

by Microsoft

Wowsers. This. Is. Great. 💯. If you’ve been a Sketch user, you’re probably familiar with Craft and its ability to input data into your designs (names, dates, phone numbers, etc.). Content Reel does exactly that — but takes it to a new dimension.

How it works:

1. Open up the plugin
2. Select a text layer
3. Click a category

Content reel will then add randomized data to that layer(s). Furthermore, you have super fine-grained control over how you want the data to display. For instance, you can say “I want 24 words of Lorem Ipsum here.”

This has been an awesome plugin to work with and I’m excited to see how they evolve it over time.

Color Contrast Checker

By Microsoft

I’ve tested all the color contrast checkers I could find — those being Stark, Able, Contrast, and this one here. All of them have some really great features and would definitely recommend trying them all out. Yet, for my workflow, I find that Color Contrast Checker is a super fast and simple tool to find errors without me having to click every layer.

How it works:

1. Open up the plugin
2. Select a Frame
3. Click Check and you’ll see a list of all the text layers that don’t meet WCAG requirements.

You can then click the color swatch to view the layer, adjust the lightness, and get to a passing grade.

This plugin is excellent, however, the drawback is it only works for text styles and doesn’t allow you to select two shapes i.e. a circle and a rectangle to see if they pass or fail. I’d recommend trying out Contrast if you’re looking for that type of functionality.

Figma Walker

by Kazushi Kawamura

This plugin is a take on Sketch Runner (lol with the name 🚶), which is a “launcher” that lets you get around your Figma files without having to leave your keyboard.

How it works:

1. Open up the plugin
2. Start typing a Page or Frame
3. Press enter and Walker will automatically take you to that place without having to use your mouse. Furthermore, you can quickly insert or add a new component directly from Walker.

This is super helpful but Figma hasn’t allowed developers to create their own keyboard shortcuts. If you’re using a lot of other plugins, the “Run Last Plugin” shortcut won’t always work — making this not quite as fast.

Palette

by Dustin Mierau

As far as palette creators go — this one is pretty slick. It does a great job of initially generating a random palette — but then giving you control to fine-tune the end result.

How it works:

1. Open up the plugin
2. Press the refresh button to view a new palette
3. Once you find a color you like, click to lock it
4. Press refresh to start building a palette that’s similar to the locked color
5. Press the checkmark to add the palette to a frame

Palette is an incredibly simple, fun, and effective way to create some beautiful palettes for whatever project you’re working on.

Spellchecker

by Vladimir

This is a pretty handy plugin for double-checking any spelling errors you may have in your file.

How it works:

1. Select a text layer
2. Open Spellchecker and it will then let you know if you have any spelling mistakes, provide suggestions, as well as tell you how many words and characters are present.

The only drawback I see to this plugin (which is a technical limitation at the moment) is you need to manually be checking every layer to see if something is misspelled rather than being notified in real-time. Despite that, I still think this is great to have for areas where you may have larger paragraphs, etc.

Unsplash

by Unsplash

Unsplash is the best — what else can I say. This has most likely been included in every “best of list” and you probably already have it installed. However, it just needs to be here :)

How it works:

1. Open up the plugin
2. Click a layer
3. Select an Unsplash photo by random, category, or through search. Unsplash will then automatically insert that photo into the shape.

This is a time/life/love saver ❤️

Responsify

by Brian Lovin

This is a simple/awesome plugin with a ton of value baked right in 🥧. Responsify lets you test out a Frame in multiple devices/resolutions.

How it works:

1. Select a frame
2. Go to the plugin
3. Click a device and Responsify will create multiple frames in the device sizes you selected. For example, if you select iPhone, Responsify will generate a frame for iPhone 10, iPhone 8 and so forth.

It would be awesome to have a little more control over the exact devices you can select but it’s still a great way to test multiple resolutions at once.

Autoflow

by Coinbase

Definitely another crowd favorite but one that undeniably needs to be included in this list. Autoflow makes it insanely easy to quickly draw flows between your Frames in Figma.

How it works:

1. Open up the plugin
2. Select two frames
3. Hit the hotkey and a line will be drawn between the two Frames

An incredibly simple, fast, and elegant solution. Highly recommend checking this one out and giving it a whirl.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy some of these plugins as much as I do :) Please drop a comment if you’ve got any other plugins that you use in your workflow!