Figma to AE

Figma to AE · Free

Your Figma frames, in After Effects, in one click

Select a frame, press one button, and the same artwork rebuilds itself in your open comp as real layers. Shapes keep their paths. Text stays text. Groups arrive as groups, ready to rig.

Get it free See how it works

Free, with no account. The transfer runs on your own machine, so nothing is uploaded.

The Figma to AE plugin open in Figma, showing the Send selection to Ae button

You already designed it once

You can build a whole product interface in Figma in an afternoon. Then the motion work starts, and none of it comes with you.

What usually happens

  • Paste, and the artwork lands as a flat image
  • Redraw the rectangles by hand to animate anything
  • Retype the copy and match the font by eye
  • Rebuild the grouping so there is something to parent to
  • Do it again when the design changes on Thursday

What you actually wanted

  • One button that says send this to After Effects
  • Shape layers with their own paths, not a screenshot
  • Live text you can retype and restyle
  • Groups that arrive as groups you can rig
  • A second press when the design changes

What lands in your comp

Nothing is flattened. Everything below arrives as a layer you can open, animate and parent like any other.

Shape layers

Rectangles, ellipses, polygons, stars and vector paths arrive as real shape layers with their own paths and fills.

Live text

Text comes across as text layers, not outlines, so you can retype a word without redrawing anything.

Groups and frames

Nesting survives the trip. Groups and frames become precomps, which is what gives you something to rig against.

Masks

Clipped content keeps its mask rather than arriving pre-cropped into a bitmap.

Images in position

Anything that has to be a raster is exported and placed where it belongs, at the right size.

Components and instances

Components, instances and boolean operations are read the same way as ordinary layers.

Get Figma to AE

Free, and it stays free. Tell us where to send it and the download starts on the next screen.

We store your email address so we can send you the download and, if you ticked the box, occasional updates about this plugin. We do not sell it and we do not pass it to anyone else. Unsubscribe from any email, or write to nvdreamspace@gmail.com to have your address removed, and it is deleted. The privacy policy sets out the rest.

Thank you. Your download is ready.

The archive holds both halves: the Figma plugin and the Figma to AE folder for After Effects. The install steps are further up this page and repeated in the readme inside.

Download Figma to AE

What you need

After Effects 2019 or newer

Version 16.0 through the 2026 releases. Tested on 26.3.

The Figma desktop app

The browser version cannot reach a local server, so the transfer has nowhere to go.

Windows or macOS

Every fix so far was written and verified on Windows. Nothing in the code is platform specific and macOS is expected to work, but we have not tested it there yet.

It installs in two places

One half sends, the other receives. Set both up once.

  1. Import the plugin

    In the Figma desktop app, open Plugins › Development › Import plugin from manifest and choose Figma/manifest.json from the download.

  2. Run it from the Plugins menu

    It appears as Figma to AE. Select a frame, then press Send selection to Ae.

It has to be the desktop app. A browser tab cannot reach a server on your own machine.

Both halves have to be running

That is the one rule. The plugin open in Figma, the panel open in After Effects. They meet on localhost, which is why there is no account, no upload and no cloud service in the middle, and why it still works with the wifi off.

The Figma plugin

Reads the frame or layers you selected and packages them up.

localhost

Ports 7240 and 7250, on your computer. Nothing leaves the machine, and it works offline.

The After Effects panel

Builds the layers in your frontmost comp. Keep it open while you work.

If either one is closed, Figma reports that it could not connect to After Effects.

If Figma says it cannot connect

Almost every report comes down to one of these five, in roughly this order.

The panel is not open

If the Figma to AE panel is closed there is nothing listening. Open it from Window, Extensions, Figma to AE.

Figma is running in a browser

A browser tab cannot reach a server on your own machine. Use the Figma desktop app.

The panel is missing from the menu

Debug mode did not take. Run the command for your system again and restart After Effects fully.

Something else is on the ports

The transfer uses ports 7240 and 7250 on localhost. Both need to be free.

Two versions of After Effects are open

Whichever one you opened first owns the connection. Close it, or send to that one.

Something new

Shift click the send button to save the selection as JSON, and send it with your report.

Still stuck? Tell us and it goes on the list.

1

Select, then press one button

The whole plugin is one button and two options. Pick a frame in Figma, press Send selection to Ae, and watch the bar underneath while it runs.

  • Export a reference image alongside the layers if you want one
  • Rasterise a layer deliberately, when that is what you need
  • Shift click to save the selection as JSON for a bug report
The Figma to AE plugin panel with the Send selection to Ae button and its two export options
2

The other half, sitting in After Effects

This panel is the receiving end, and it has to be open for anything to arrive. Send into a New Comp or straight into the Current one, and it builds the layers there.

  • Set where exported images are written, or point it at a folder beside your project
  • Choose the comp size multiplier, frame rate and duration for a new comp
  • Precomp groups on the way in, or precomp and un-precomp afterwards
  • Detect parametric shapes rather than importing every rectangle as a path
The Figma to AE panel docked in After Effects, showing the New Comp and Current buttons, the image save path and the group tools

And when the design changes on Thursday, you select the updated frame and press the button again. That is the part that pays for the install.

Where this came from

Not a new idea.
A repaired one.

The original is AEUX, built by the motion design team at Google and released as open source. For years it was the way designers got work out of Sketch and Figma and into After Effects.

Then it stopped. The last release, 0.8.2, went out in September 2022. Figma changed, After Effects changed, and the transfer quietly broke. People kept opening issues about it and nobody picked them up.

Because it was open source, it did not have to end there. We repaired it. The connection works again, the panel was rebuilt, the host script runs on every After Effects from 2019 through 2026, and the local server no longer holds a port it has finished with.

We keep this alive, and we fix it based on what you report. If it breaks against a new version of Figma or After Effects, tell us and it gets looked at. That is the whole arrangement, and it is why this is free.

All the original work, and the credit for it, belongs to the AEUX authors. This is their code, repaired and maintained, offered to the same community it was written for. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Google or Adobe.