Hey everyone! I’ve been having some trouble with Figma lately and wondering if it’s just me. I’m running it on a Mac M1 and the performance has been pretty disappointing. It feels sluggish and sometimes freezes up during my design work. I’m actually thinking about upgrading to a Mac M4 Pro because of this, but before I spend all that money, I wanted to check with the community first. Are you folks having similar problems with Figma? Is this something that’s happening on Figma’s end, or could it be my hardware that’s causing the issues? Would love to hear about your experiences and any solutions you might have found.
tbh i had the same problem on my m1 air and switching to the desktop app helped alot. also make sure you dont have like 50 plugins running - some of them are memory killers. my figma runs smooth now without upgrading anything.
I’ve been dealing with similar Figma performance issues on my M1 setup for months now. What ended up making the biggest difference was adjusting my zoom levels and viewport settings. I noticed the lag was particularly bad when working at high zoom percentages or with complex vector illustrations. Another thing that helped was disabling some of the real-time collaboration features when working solo - apparently having live cursors and constant syncing enabled can bog things down significantly. The RAM usage also seems to spike when you have multiple Figma tabs open simultaneously, so I started closing unused projects instead of keeping them all active. Your M1 should definitely be capable enough to handle Figma smoothly, so there’s likely a configuration issue rather than a hardware bottleneck causing your problems.
honestly, before dropping cash on new hardware, id try clearing figma’s cache first. had similar slowdowns on my m1, and that fixed it for me. also, check if youve got tons of browser tabs open - chrome can be a memory hog with figma.
I experienced this exact issue on my M1 MacBook Pro around six months ago. The problem turned out to be related to excessive prototyping components in my files rather than hardware limitations. What worked for me was breaking down large files into smaller, more manageable projects and reducing the number of active components on each artboard. Also discovered that running Figma in the desktop app instead of the browser made a significant difference in performance. The M1 should handle Figma perfectly fine, so I’d suggest auditing your file structure and component usage before considering an upgrade to the M4 Pro.