Figma opens FigJam to third-party plugins and widgets
Figma is extending its open platform to FigJam, giving builders access to two APIs for creating collaborative tools. The announcement follows the company’s work two years ago bringing plugins to Figma, and the goal is to apply the same developer-friendly approach to its whiteboarding product.
The core principle from Figma’s original plugin API carries over: anyone comfortable with simple JavaScript and HTML should be able to build for FigJam. The plugin API itself also carries over, meaning existing Figma plugins can be republished for FigJam, in many cases with only a single line added to the manifest file.
Two APIs for two kinds of tools
Figma is distinguishing between two development tracks for FigJam, each suited to different use cases.
Plugins for individual workflow automation
Plugins run individually for each user in a file, making them ideal for automating repetitive single-user tasks. Early examples from the builder community include organizing sticky notes by color, adding categorization tags, extracting themes from text via word clouds, spell checking, and generating sticky notes from raw text. Content library plugins are also in the works, bringing icons, emojis, logos, and other assets into boards. Developers working on these include Alex Einarsson, Daniel Destefanis, Tekeste Kidanu, and the team at Icons8, among others.
Custom templates represent another plugin category, allowing companies to build private, browsable template libraries specific to their brand and organization.
The widget API for shared, interactive experiences
Widgets, by contrast, behave like native FigJam objects. They are draggable onto a board and can be interacted with by multiple users at once, which makes them suited for voting, polls, games, and other shared activities.
The widget API is declarative and functional, modeled after React. Developers define a widget’s appearance using components such as <Frame/>, <Rectangle/>, <Text/>, and <SVG/>, which map to FigJam layers but align more closely with CSS properties. Event listeners can trigger arbitrary code on user interaction, like clicks. The API also supports custom in-line property menus similar to those on native FigJam objects.
Figma identified several widget categories it expects to be popular: facilitation tools for voting and polling, games and play mechanics, interactive diagramming for mind maps and org charts, collaborative note-taking with Markdown and LaTeX support, and on-canvas data visualization.
Getting started
Figma’s API documentation covers both plugins and widget development, and includes guidance on republishing existing Figma plugins for FigJam. Sample projects, including FigJam-specific examples, are available in the official plugin samples repository on GitHub.
