+1

This is what I came here to ask for!

+1 Yes please!

Happy with the move of annotation management to design mode. Makes more sense.

Our product owner, currently on a collaborator seat, responsible for the detailed requirements would also like to view the annotations (in design mode). Now the seat must be upgraded to a dev seat or full seat, which is a bit overkill for just this feature.
I believe annotations could be handled more like comments.
 

+1 x 1,000

It would make so much sense for Collab seats to be able to see annotations. We have a lot of stakeholders for marketing content, brand managers and so on who we don’t want to let near dev mode (no offence they say themselves they don’t want it!) but would have a use for annotations.

Ideally, for our teams, there would be a way to scope annotation visibility by seat type too. That could be set when editing categories e.g. a ‘marketing’ category that devs can’t see, a ‘private’ category that only the design team can see to discuss decisions that we don’t necessarily want everyone to know about etc. etc.

When we migrated from Invision this was one of the main things our designers fed back on from day one: how do we add a private comment?
 

YES! Due to an elaborate pre-Figma design system, our company really doesn't have a use for dev-mode. But the annotations would be such a great feature to document certain design decisions.

Second this. At my company we have started to place annotations in components that are adjacent to designs and visible to all viewers. Not as good, but the funny thing is that because we are doing this we have realised that we have little use for dev mode and are considering switching those seats to viewer seats - a few hundred of them. 

+1 - This would be a game changer for my team. We are not able to actually use annotations as they are now because we almost always need to share files with outside stakeholders (clients, 3rd party teams, etc.). Simple change that would make this feature actually useful for my team.

+1!
No idea why this wasn’t included in last release... at minimum collab users should also be able to view these.

Couldn't agree more

My Collab team members and stakeholders would be happy even to just see the annotations that are created in Design Mode. They don’t want or need measurements.

+1
Great feature. Almost useless if hidden to viewers. And comments aren’t a good alternative. 

 

great idea, because what a point of this feature if it is not visible

Just found the Annotations feature way too late—but it was an instant game-changer and we pushed it straight into production.

• Finally solves hand-off gaps that plugins never fully covered.

• After weeks of relying on Annotations + Measurements we discovered—surprise!—you need at least one Dev-Mode seat just to read them.

• Our external stakeholders intentionally hold only View seats (no Dev, no Design) yet they must be able to read these notes—ideally even per-category.

• PDF export: please give us an option to include Annotations in the output as well!

Opening up read-only access (and PDF output) would remove a huge adoption barrier for key stakeholders & clients.

+1!!!!!

Annotations really need to be visible to Viewers. At least the text based ones, no need for measurements. Most of the time they include important information that’s not only useful for developers…. 

+1

When this feature first came out, I was so hyped to use it (I thought switching from our custom notes to this would be a huge upgrade). I even told my teammates, “Let’s ditch our notes and use Annotations instead, my friends!”

But then I realized… only paid seats can see the Annotations.

So I had to go back, apologize to my team, and painfully convert all those Annotations back to our old notes. It took me a week to undo that, Figma!!!

This is a simple feature with overwhelming demand (which is why there are so many free plugins offering the same thing). Yet you decided to charge people just to view these notes? Honestly, that feels unfair.

My company has over 500 Figma users, but only about 10 of them need paid seats—the rest are just viewers. I'm sure many companies adopt a similar model, because paying for 100+ seats just so people can view annotations is incredibly expensive.

A huge oversight to restrict this feature to certain users. It’s basically rendered this feature useless, or a risk if anything.

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