Has anyone else looked into the new Connected Projects feature?
I was really excited when I heard about this new functionality because I thought it would solve the expensive external seat problem we’ve been dealing with for years. I was hoping it would work similar to how Slack Connect lets you collaborate without extra costs.
But after checking out the details, I’m pretty let down. The restrictions seem really unnecessary and don’t make much sense:
- You can only connect a project to one external company
- There’s a very low limit on how many connected projects you can have active
For agencies like ours who work with 25+ different clients and partners regularly, these limits make the feature almost pointless. We’re still going to end up paying for additional seats like before.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but I really thought this time would be different. Anyone else feeling the same way about these limitations?
I had similar hopes when the feature was announced, but after testing it with a few client projects, the reality is quite different from what we expected. The single external company restriction is particularly frustrating when you’re working on projects that involve multiple stakeholders or subcontractors. We ended up having to choose which external partner gets access, which defeats the purpose of streamlined collaboration. The project limit feels arbitrary too - it’s almost like they designed it for smaller teams or very specific use cases rather than the complex workflows most agencies actually deal with. I’m wondering if these are intentional business decisions to protect their seat revenue or if they’re planning to expand the limits based on user feedback. Either way, we’re stuck with the same expensive workarounds for now.
The rollout feels rushed to me honestly. We ran into the same issues during our pilot phase last month and it seems like Figma didn’t really consider how agencies and consultancies actually operate. What’s particularly annoying is that the documentation made it sound much more flexible than it actually is. The one-to-one project limitation breaks down immediately when you have clients who bring their own vendors or when projects involve multiple external teams. We’ve had to go back to the old method of either purchasing additional seats or using workarounds like shared generic accounts, which isn’t ideal from a security standpoint. I suspect they’ll eventually raise these limits but probably tie it to higher tier plans. For now it’s basically unusable for any serious multi-client workflow.