Elena Kondratenko
June 30, 2026
3
minutes read
They're two different tools that people keep confusing. Figma Make is prompt-to-prototype: you describe or import a design and it generates an interactive app-like experience, now even with a Supabase backend. Figma Sites is publish-from-canvas: you compose a real multi-page website with built-in web interactions and put it live. Use Make to explore and build the experience, use Sites to ship the site. They connect, so the real answer is often both.
Figma Make and Figma Sites are not the same tool, and the confusion is costing teams time. Make is a prompt-to-prototype generator: you start from a text prompt or an existing Figma design, iterate visually, and it produces an interactive, app-like result, now able to connect to Supabase for real auth and data. Sites is a publish-from-canvas website builder: you compose a multi-page site using built-in web interactions like scroll reveals and hover effects, then publish it live from Figma. The short rule: reach for Make to explore and build an experience, reach for Sites to ship an actual website, and use both together when you need to do both.
We build and ship sites and products for clients, and "which Figma tool do I use" comes up constantly now that there are three of them. This is the practical breakdown, with the honest limits of each, so you pick the right one instead of fighting the wrong one.
Figma Make is the experimentation tool. You give it a prompt or an existing design and it generates an interactive prototype you refine with more prompts or by editing the output directly. Its 2026 step-change is the Supabase connection: Make can now build a functioning web app with real user authentication and data storage without you writing the backend, which moves it from "clickable mock" toward "working app demo."
The thing to understand is what Make is not. It outputs an interactive experience inside Figma's environment, not a hosted website you point a domain at. Its sweet spot is bespoke, expressive interactions and app-like flows, the custom moments that go beyond a standard web page. Use Make to answer "what should this experience feel like, and does this flow work," not "where do I publish the marketing site." When the experiment is ready, its output can flow into Sites for publishing.
Figma Sites is the publishing tool. You copy your work from a Figma Design file, every layout and type detail preserved, compose it into multi-page structure, add production-ready web interactions without hand-building them, and publish a live site from the canvas. It reuses your existing libraries, styles, and components, so brand consistency carries over instead of being rebuilt.
Sites shines when the goal is a real, polished, multi-page website fast, especially a marketing or brand site that reuses your design system. It has built-in motion primitives, marquees, hover effects, scroll-triggered reveals, that you'd otherwise hand-code. The honest framing from people who use it: Sites is great for getting a multi-page site live efficiently, and it's still a beta product on Full seats, so treat it as a fast path to a polished site rather than a guarantee of production-grade output.
Here's where teams lose time. Make produces something that feels finished and Sites publishes something that's live, and it's easy to assume either gives you a production-grade website. The code underneath is the reality check. Independent reviews of Figma Sites output have been blunt: the generated code can be a flat tree of <div> and <span> tags with autogenerated class names and little semantic structure, which hurts accessibility and SEO even when the page looks right.
That matters because semantic structure is exactly what screen readers and search engines, including AI search, rely on. A page that looks polished but is built as div soup is legible to neither. So the rule holds: Make and Sites are excellent for exploring and shipping fast, but "published from Figma" is not automatically "ready for an enterprise launch." The closer the site gets to production, accessibility, performance, SEO, AEO, real CMS content, the more it needs a developer's pass on top. We broke that handoff down in our Figma to Webflow workflow.
The cleanest mental model treats all three as one pipeline. Figma Design declares the structure: components, variants, variables, the information architecture and states. Figma Sites composes and publishes the pages using its built-in web interactions for anything common. Figma Make adds the bespoke, expressive interactions that go beyond Sites' defaults, ideally authored at the component level so they scale.
In practice that means: nail your components and responsive rules in Design, compose and publish the site in Sites, and drop into Make only where you need a custom interaction the defaults can't produce. The friction people report, interactions duplicated across tools with no central ownership, comes from skipping that discipline and building the same behavior in three places. Decide once where each interaction lives.
Pick by the verb. If you're exploring an experience or building an app-like flow with real data, that's Make. If you're composing and publishing a multi-page website that reuses your design system, that's Sites. If you're doing both, build the experience in Make and publish through Sites, which is what the two are designed to do together. And if the result has to clear an enterprise bar, plan for a developer to take the published output the rest of the way.
The pattern is the same one under every AI building tool: these generate a fast, convincing draft, and the system that finishes it is what ships. Figma Make and Figma Sites are genuinely strong at the draft and the fast publish. If you want that output taken to a production-grade enterprise site, evaluated for accessibility, performance, and AEO rather than just how it looks, that's where our Webflow development work starts.
