:twisted_rightwards_arrows: Sign up for the Branching beta →

@shanahu 🎉 This is so exciting! Will this be available to Professional plan in general release? It’d be super sad if it doesn’t make it. Thanks.

Hi Thipok, thanks for your interest! We want to make sure we’re releasing features to our users that will bring them the most value. From our research and requests, the pains of decentralized design systems and collaborating on shared files at scale were felt mostly by larger, more complex organizations. If you’re on a Professional plan and experiencing similar challenges, we would love to learn more about them.

Super exciting! I am officially the 10th member to apply for branching beta.

Cheers!

I work in a small organisation. My issue is that everyone being able to see my work in progress leads to assumptions and misunderstandings. I’d prefer that, like a developer, I could “check-in” or “publish” my work once I’m happy with how it’s looking. Seems to me like branching functionality would be something similar.

This is exactly the same issue I have. When working on the master files, dev’s would see any change and immediately implement them without a sign off on the design causing issues. Making new files in Drafts and what not feels like you are trying to hide your work.

Jumping in to echo this, as well as the QA use case that I heard mentioned in the May 10th demo. However, I totally understand not only focusing on Org teams based on your research, for the price point for Org users to make/maintain this feature!

One more thought, branching would make incremental updates to designs so much easier to track and merge along with dev releases. I prefer to design future-state where we build up to a feature, but often our developers only want deliverables for a small chunk of work that’s defined in their Jira Issue!

Does the approval take that long?

I have been waiting for access for two weeks now. can you help me ?
Thanks

have you been approved to join the beta? I asked yesterday, I wonder how long the approval takes? @anon21722796 @shanahu

The approval to beta for this feature is only for Org accounts as it will not be available in Pro & Free tiers. ☹

It’s been a few months now for me pal, do not worry 😅

Thanks for this post. We signed up the entire team to kick the beta tires.

“start using branching before it becomes available to all Figma users” does this mean we’ll be able to use it on the Pro plan eventually?

Ah, a typo here so I’ve edited the original post. The beta is a testing period before we roll out the feature more. We’d love to learn more about the use cases and workflows your team has in mind though

I think it’s pretty clear what value branching functionality brings even solo designers… disappointing

have you been approved to join the beta ? I asked yesterday, I wonder how long the approval takes ?

Hey Anas, at the moment the branching beta is limited to teams on our Organization tier. I believe we’re adding teams slowly and in small batches.

Will be always exclusive for the Organization tier? or would be available for the professional tier too? I want to try it before upgrading to Organization plan

Nth-ing the need for solo designers to be able to control the version shared with a public audience (devs, clients, etc.).

This is a capability I was used to in Adobe XD – the shared link had to be manually updated (i.e. I push a button) in order for the changes to be pushed to those who had the link. It worked really well and this seems to be a huge gap in Figma.

This would be ideal on the professional license when working at a startup. I have multiple themes of our solution for each customer work and a fast pace (agile like) change process to my designs. This unfortunately means I have to version control separate projects and manually bring those changes in once it no longer affects developer in-flight work.

Hi, we’ve encountered a rather severe issue in the branching process: it seems that the merge feature only looks at the topmost element.

Try this:
create a file, and add a frame (it will represent a webpage, so name it “Page”).
Create branch A and add a header to Page (don’t merge yet)
Create branch B and add a footer to Page (don’t merge yet)

Now merge branch A. This will succeed without issues. The page in your main branch will now have a header.

In branch B you’ll get a notification that the main branch was updated, so you’ll need to update before you can merge. There will be a conflict on “Page” and the only 2 options you have are:

• choose the Page from the main branch, but then you’ll loose the footer you just created
• choose the Page from your own branch, removing the header that was added in Branch A

This issue is also described in more detail by another Figma user here

What makes it even worse is that if you have several screens in one SECTION, you can only choose between section. So you will risk loosing changes on several screens, either the ones your colleague created, or the ones you created.

Am I doing something wrong here? Or is there any solution to this problem?