Figma Brings Payload CMS Into Figma Make, With Hosting, Admin Panel and Database Built In

On 15 October Figma announced Payload in Figma, bringing the open source headless CMS into Figma Make. Payload's team joined Figma last year, and Figma says Payload downloads grew sixfold over the past 12 months, making it the fastest growing open source CMS on npm.

Here is what changes. When you prompt an app in Figma Make, it now also sets up a database, file storage, user login and an admin panel, and Figma hosts all of it. A designer can prompt a site using real content, a marketer can edit that content in the admin panel, and a developer can extend the app using Payload's open source framework. Granular permissions control who can change what.

Figma's own example is a delivery service website that needs to explain the service and also collect driver applications. Before, that meant connecting an external CMS and asking engineers to build a way to store and review applications. Now the site and the backend arrive together.

Once published, you reach the admin panel by adding /admin to the site's address. Teams can edit copy, swap media, tag content, review versions and publish updates without raising a ticket, and uploading a CSV can create a collection from existing data. IBM's Noah Trevino reports getting a working draft from his team's screens and field list, with version history built in.

We care about this one personally, because we build on Payload ourselves. The strongest argument for it has always been that content editors get a clean admin panel while developers keep full control of the code. Putting it inside a design tool lowers the cost of getting a data-backed prototype in front of a client.

The caution is the usual one. A prompted backend still needs a data model someone has thought about, and hosting inside one vendor's tool is a decision to make deliberately. Payload itself stays open source and can be self-hosted, so the exit route exists.