Open Activity Monitor on a Mac running Figma and you'll find something unexpected. Not one Figma entry in the list, but several. "Figma", "Figma Helper", "Figma Helper (Renderer)", "Figma Helper (GPU)" - each one using hundreds of megabytes of RAM (the temporary workspace your Mac uses to hold whatever is currently running). Together they can account for 1, 2, even 3 GB of your system's memory, and that's before you've opened a second document.
None of this is a malfunction. It's Figma working exactly as it was designed. Understanding why helps you decide whether the memory use is actually causing a problem, and what to do when it is.
Why does Figma use so much memory?
The short answer: Figma's desktop app is a browser in disguise.
Figma started as a web app, running entirely in your browser. When they built the desktop version for Mac, they wrapped the same web application inside a Chromium shell, which is the open-source engine that also powers Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Slack, Discord, and many other apps. This architecture is sometimes called an Electron-style app (Figma uses a similar approach), and it gives developers a way to ship a cross-platform desktop app without rewriting everything from scratch for each operating system.
The consequence is that every Figma document you open is, under the hood, a web page being rendered by a full browser engine. That browser engine needs to be loaded into memory, just as Chrome loads itself when you open it. Then the document itself needs to be loaded: all the vector paths, all the component definitions, all the fonts, all the layer data. On a large design file, that alone can run into hundreds of megabytes.
Add in multiple open documents, a component library, and a few plugins, and the total memory use reflects the complexity of what Figma is actually doing. It's not excessive for the task. It's the cost of running a professional design tool built on browser infrastructure.
What is "Figma Helper (Renderer)"?
This is the process most people notice because it's usually the biggest one. "Figma Helper (Renderer)" is the process responsible for drawing the actual canvas: every frame of the artboards, every vector shape, every rendered text layer.
Because Figma is built on Chromium's multi-process architecture, different parts of the app run in separate processes, just as different Chrome tabs run in separate processes. The main Figma app process manages the window and the application shell. The Renderer process does the pixel-level work of drawing everything you see. The GPU process handles hardware-accelerated compositing. You might also see a "Figma Helper (Plugin)" process when plugins are active.
The Renderer process is where most of Figma's RAM lives, because it has to hold the entire document in a form that can be redrawn quickly as you zoom, scroll, and make changes. A simple file might use 300-500 MB here. A complex file with large component libraries, dense vector work, or many frames can push the Renderer process above 1 GB on its own.
This is not a runaway process or a sign that Figma has crashed. It is Figma's rendering engine doing its job.
How much memory should Figma actually use?
Here's a realistic breakdown of what to expect:
- Figma with one simple document open: 500 MB to 1 GB in total across all processes is common.
- A complex file with component libraries: 1-2 GB for the document alone. Dense vector files with many artboards push toward the top of that range.
- Multiple documents open as tabs: each open file tab loads its own rendering process. Three complex files open simultaneously could add up to 3-5 GB.
- Dev Mode enabled: the extra inspector panels and code-generation sidebars load additional UI, adding a few hundred megabytes on top of the base document load.
- Active plugins: each running plugin adds its own process overhead. A plugin you installed and forgot about can still add memory cost even if you're not actively using it.
These numbers are the normal cost of what Figma is doing. The question, as always, is whether that cost causes a problem on your specific Mac.
On a 16 GB Mac, Figma running heavily alongside a browser and a few other apps rarely causes noticeable slowness. On an 8 GB Mac, things can feel tight. Your Mac may start memory swapping: moving data from RAM onto the SSD to free up space. That's slower than RAM, and you'll feel it as sluggishness, slower switching between apps, or the canvas feeling less responsive than it used to.
The best way to check is Activity Monitor (press Command-Space, type "Activity Monitor", press Return). Click the Memory tab. Look at the Memory Pressure graph at the bottom. Green means your Mac is managing. Yellow or red means it's working harder than it should. For a full explanation of that graph, see what memory pressure means on Mac.
How to reduce Figma's memory footprint
A few things genuinely help, and none of them require any third-party software.
Close file tabs you're not using. In Figma's desktop app, every open file tab is a separate document loaded into memory, with its own Renderer process. If you have five files open in tabs but you're only working on one, the other four are still consuming RAM. Close them from the tab bar and reopen them when you need them. This is the single most direct way to reduce Figma's footprint.
Fully quit Figma when you're done. Not just close the window: actually quit. Press Command-Q or right-click Figma in the Dock and choose Quit. When Figma exits, all its processes exit with it and macOS reclaims that memory almost immediately. Closing the window leaves Figma running in the background, accumulating memory over time.
Restart Figma if it's feeling slow. After a long working session, Figma can accumulate memory from documents you've opened and closed, undo history, and cached render data. Restarting it clears all of that. Don't just close and reopen a file; quit the app entirely and relaunch it.
Disable plugins you don't actively use. Open the Plugins menu and choose Manage plugins. Any plugin listed there is available to load and can add to Figma's background overhead. Remove plugins you installed out of curiosity and never use. You can always reinstall them from the Figma Community.
Consider the browser version for very large files. This sounds counterintuitive, but the browser version of Figma can sometimes use less total system memory than the desktop app. The reason: when Figma runs in your browser, it shares the Chromium infrastructure your browser has already loaded. The desktop app runs its own private Chromium instance on top of whatever else is running. The trade-offs are real: no offline mode, slightly different keyboard shortcuts, no native window controls. But if you're regularly hitting memory pressure on an 8 GB Mac while working on large files, it's worth a try. See the comparison section below for more detail.
For general advice on diagnosing memory pressure on your Mac and finding other heavy processes, see how to free up RAM on Mac.
Browser vs desktop: the real trade-offs
The choice between Figma's desktop app and the browser version is more nuanced than it might seem.
The desktop app is more convenient for most people. It lives in the Dock, gets its own menu bar, supports native keyboard shortcuts without the browser intercepting them, and gives you proper window management. It also caches files for faster loading after the first open.
The browser version has one meaningful advantage for memory-constrained Macs: it doesn't run a separate Chromium instance. If you're already running Chrome or Safari, Figma in the browser runs inside that existing engine. On an 8 GB Mac with several apps already open, this can make a real difference to how much headroom is left for the rest of the system.
The trade-offs on the browser side: keyboard shortcuts clash with browser shortcuts (Command-W closes the tab instead of closing a frame, for example), there's no offline access, and the window chrome is your browser's rather than a clean native app window. For occasional use or very large files on a constrained Mac, the browser is a reasonable option. For everyday design work, most people prefer the desktop app.
One pattern that works well: use the desktop app for active work, and close documents you're done with promptly rather than leaving them open in tabs. That alone keeps the footprint manageable for most workflows. And if you want a broader look at managing RAM across all your apps, the guide to Chrome's memory usage on Mac covers the same Chromium architecture in a different context, which is worth reading alongside this one.