Workspaces in Figma Enterprise

Workspaces is a feature on the Figma Enterprise plan that allows companies to group teams and members within an organization.

In this guide, we’ll provide an overview of workspaces and walk through best practices and some considerations for setting up workspaces for your organization.

What are workspaces?

With Workspaces, organizations can group related teams and team members together, making it easier for people within your company to navigate and find content easier. Workspaces are helpful to both end users and admins:

End users can see teams and content grouped by workspace as they browse through files, filter search results, and access libraries. This allows them to more easily find what they’re looking for and focus on the content that’s most relevant to them.
Admins can delegate administration by workspace—including membership, and reviewing roles before true up—to the people in their company that know the users in that workspace best.

Structuring your organization’s workspaces

Before diving into the structure of a workspace, you should first consider how content is created, grouped, and shared at your company. We recommend aligning workspaces with the brands, products, or clients your business supports. This allows each distinct area of the business to structure their Figma teams, projects, files, and libraries in a way that makes sense to them.

Within a workspace it often makes sense to split up the work for a single product or business unit into multiple teams in order to organize files and allow for more granular permissions. In the following example we have a company, Acme, with workspaces aligned to multiple products like Audio, Home, Music, and News. Within their music streaming product they may have a mobile app, desktop app, a portal for musicians to manage their music, and a growth team. Each one of these product areas could exist as a team within the Acme Music workspace. And teams related to other products can live within their respective workspaces, making relevant design work easier to discover.

Diagram showing the organizational structure of a company named Acme that includes design system, audio, home, music, news, and video workspaces.

For smaller organizations that may only support a single product or brand, we recommend keeping your workspace setup light and simple, or not using workspaces at all.

Creating a workspace around your design system

The structure and complexity of design systems vary from company to company. As such, your workspaces setup will depend on how design work and resources are shared across teams within your business.

Centralized design systems

If your company’s design system is managed by a dedicated team and supports multiple products or brands, we recommend you set up an additional workspace for it. This enables team members responsible for maintaining the global design system to organize libraries in a single place that is separate from workspaces for a specific product or brand. Libraries published in a given workspace can be shared across the entire organization and accessed by other workspaces.

In the example below, libraries that live in the Design system workspace are published to the entire organization so that they can be used across all 6 workspaces within the organization. Admins can also set default libraries and pick which ones will be enabled in the assets panel by default.

Image depicting how Acme's design system workplace has assets that can be published to other workspaces including Acme audio, home, and music.

Decentralized design systems

In some cases, companies do not have an overarching design system; instead each product may have its own set of libraries that are managed by their respective teams. In this case we recommend you create a design system team within eachworkspace. By isolating each set of libraries within a dedicated team, admins can more easily manage permissions and access to libraries.

In the example below, each of the four workspaces has a Design system team with libraries specific to that product area.

Image depicting the relationship between different libraries and how they relate to Acme product groups.

Default libraries in workspaces

With the introduction of workspaces, you can now enable default libraries for all teams and files in a workspace.

As a design systems manager, you are likely to want finite control over which design libraries are used in which workspaces, teams, and files. We recommend approaching this globally as an admin, publishing libraries at the organization level. From there, you can then switch on default libraries for specific workspaces that makes sense.

For example, if you have an Acme Music workspace, you can toggle on the Acme Music specific libraries that your teammates will need in your workspace settings. The same would work for an Acme News workspace, Acme Home workspace, etc.

If you work in an agency, with a workspace for each client, you can follow a similar method here. The difference would be that instead of a globally toggled-on set of libraries, you would create workspace-specific design systems for each client. We can then toggle these libraries on for that entire workspace and work effectively within that space.

As a workspace admin, you can also override global library settings within your workspace. Don’t need the global brand color library in your Acme Audio workspace? You can toggle this off. This provides you with an extra level of design system management.

Getting started

Aligning workspaces in Figma to your company’s org structure will enable you to manage and scale up your Figma usage as your business grows. To help you think through the best way to setup workspaces for your company, we’ve created this template in FigJam where you can review additional examples and even map out your own workspace structure before setting it up in Figma.