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aaronjellis
New Participant
July 16, 2024

Make Dev Mode Annotations Visible to All

  • July 16, 2024
  • 214 replies
  • 6669 views

Please make Dev Mode Annotations visible by all roles, not just Full Dev Mode seats. This can become costly for users needing context but not all the other dev-mode features.

Here’s the scenario:
We have a dashboard, with cards showing a customer’s account status. This status can be mapped from multiple back-end statuses, to show just one front-end status. For example, any of the following could be mapped to a single status known to the customer as “Completed”: canceled, terminated, sold, complete, etc.

This is something that the developer needs to reference, but then also the PM needs to reference in writing tickets (who doesn’t need full dev-mode access), the QE needs to reference for testing automations, and various other individuals on our team. Placing it in a comment makes it less clearly attached to the specific piece of the design, and requires us to keep documentation dispersed among different tools (Jira, Confluence, Figma etc).

Simply making Dev mode annotations visible to viewers would make for far less duplicate documentation or added dependency on other documentation tools for a designer and team.

214 replies

Betsy_Cowie
New Member
July 10, 2025

Adding my voice here even though I don’t expect anything to be done about it. It feels  disengenous to gatekeep even just viewing annotations. Back to manual annotations for me, and sending good designer-vibes and energies to everyone else doing so as well. I hope I’m proven wrong and this is adjusted soon.

Emmi Cohen
New Member
July 13, 2025

+100000000

kkh
New Member
July 15, 2025

Thanks, Figma, for this lovely little paywall surprise!

luis.carmona
New Participant
July 15, 2025

agree. this is absurd. annotations are a nice feature but also a basic feature, they should be available to everyone who is able to view a file.

Sam20
New Member
July 16, 2025

I spent AGES adding annotations only to realise they are not viewable by view users.  It’s nonsensical.  These annotations are as needed by our business teams (whom we encourage to use Figma) as they are by our developers.   PLEASE resolve this Figma
 

 

Pedro4
New Member
July 23, 2025

So, I just spent 2 months adding annotations using Figma’s feature.

Before, we created a “notes” component and everything was fine.

Today, we discovered through stakeholders that they cannot see. It’s more than 10 people, which supposedly needs to pay $25/month each to just view our annotations.

Trying to get money for such a simple functionality is such a bummer. Please review this business choice asap.

Roger Soucy
New Member
July 23, 2025

We have been using annotations heavily for the past couple months. While Fima may have intended Developers to be the primary audience for annotations, Product Managers / SMEs, Reasearchers and other stakeholders who are not designers or developers still need to see annotations. Annotations commonly define behavior and conditions that need to be verified against product requirements and overarching goals. Because they are part of the file and visible outside of Dev Mode, they should be visible to anyone with view access. Requiring a paid seat just to read annotations feels like Figma is exploiting an opportunity more than supporting the users needs across the community.

Asaf_Ben_Oved
New Participant
July 24, 2025

Annotations are a must for all stakeholders not just developers

Limor
New Member
July 24, 2025

This is horrible, Figma! As many write here, I also just found that viewers that were intended to read my annotations, cannot do so. It costs us time!

3 months ago a rep wrote here that the bug (is it?) is being fixed. I work with developers. This should not take 3 months.

Be better to your paying customers. 

Juliana Mantilla
New Member
July 24, 2025

+1 for annotations being visible to all. It doesn’t make any sense to limit it! People that have a VIEW-only license should be able to VIEW EVERYTHING!