Tooling

Every tool this wiki mentions, grouped by the job it does, with tags for what it costs and what it depends on. Many sources describe teams with enterprise plans. The tags show which practices are within reach on a smaller budget and which quietly assume a larger one.

Plans and prices change often. Each tag links to the vendor’s own docs, last checked in September 2026. Confirm before you buy.

Reading the tags

• Cost: Free, Open source, Freemium (a free tier with paid features), Paid, and In-house, meaning a company built it for itself and you can’t buy it.
• Needs: what has to be in place first. That might be a Figma plan or seat (Figma Org/Enterprise, Full or Dev seat), Repo + build (a code repository and a build step), CI (the automated pipeline that checks every change before it merges), or an AI tool (Claude Code, Paid Claude plan).
• A tag like Pro: themes names the paid tier and the feature it unlocks.
• Used in links the pages that cite a tool. Related marks a tool no page cites yet, next to the page where it would fit.

Tokens

DTCG format: the shared, tool-independent file format for tokens. It’s a specification, not a tool.
Free Open standard
Used in: Token architecture

Style Dictionary: turns one token file into each platform’s output (CSS, iOS, Android).
Open source Repo + build (docs)
Used in: Token architecture, Platform divergence

Terrazzo: another token pipeline that reads the DTCG format.
Open source Repo + build (docs)
Used in: Token architecture

Tokens Studio: edits tokens inside Figma and syncs them to a Git repo. Single-file sync to GitHub or GitLab is free. Themes and multi-file sync are Pro.
Freemium Figma plugin Pro: themes, multi-file sync (docs)
Used in: Token architecture, Context engineering

Figma variables via REST API: reading or writing variables from a script, for example to sync them with a token file. The variables themselves work on any plan. The API for them doesn’t.
Figma Enterprise Full seat (docs)
Used in: System inventory

Specs and design-to-code

Specs (formerly EightShapes Specs): Nathan Curtis’s Figma plugin. It generates anatomy, props, and layout/spacing specs from a component. Features like token Citations and subcomponents are Pro.
Freemium Figma plugin Pro: tokens, nested specs (docs)
Used in: Specifications

specs-cli: the command-line version of Specs. It reads a whole Figma library through the REST API and writes one YAML spec per component into the repo, with no AI involved. It needs a Figma personal access token, and subscribers add a Specs license key.
Open source Figma API Repo (repo)
Used in: Figma Agent Access

Figma Code Connect: maps a Figma component to its import in code, so agents see the real import line instead of guessing it.
Paid Figma Org/Enterprise Full or Dev seat (docs)
Used in: Risk Management

Storybook: live component examples and docs. Since 10.3 it also generates a component manifest (a JSON index of components and props) that agents can query through an MCP add-on. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the standard way AI agents read data from other tools. The AI features are still in preview.
Open source Repo + build (docs)
Used in: AI readiness, Documentation coverage, AI Governance, Onboarding adopters

Inventory and adoption

Figma REST API: the base for usage scanners like Pinterest’s FigStats. File reads work on the free Starter plan with a Full or Dev seat, at 10 calls a minute. View and Collab seats get about 20 calls a month.
Free Figma API (rate limits)
Used in: Adoption Metrics, Agent CI Pipelines

Figma library analytics: built-in component usage stats. The in-app view needs an Organization plan. The Library Analytics API, the version a script can read, needs Enterprise.
Paid Figma Org/Enterprise (in-app, API)
Used in: Adoption Metrics

FigStats (Pinterest) and Atlassian’s adoption scanner: usage trackers for Figma and code, built internally. The small-team version of FigStats is a script on the Figma REST API. For code, it’s a script that counts imports.
In-house
Used in: Adoption Metrics, System Performance

Airtable: Romina Kavcic’s browsable view of token files, synced one way from GitHub.
Freemium (pricing)
Used in: System inventory

PostHog: product analytics that also tracks what AI features and agents do in production. It checks design decisions against real usage.
Freemium (pricing)
Used in: System Performance, Risk Management

Quality and CI

axe-core: automated accessibility checks. Run it through jest-axe, Playwright (open-source browser testing), or the Storybook test runner. It catches only the machine-detectable subset of issues.
Open source CI
Used in: Accessibility

Chromatic: visual regression testing for Storybook. It screenshots every story on each change and flags pixel differences for review. It’s also a place to publish Storybook. The free plan covers 5,000 snapshots a month in Chrome. Paid plans start at $179 a month.
Freemium Storybook CI (pricing)
Related: Adoption Metrics, Agent CI Pipelines

GitHub Agentic Workflows: runs an agent inside GitHub Actions with no write access. The agent can only request actions, and a separate job checks and runs them. The model behind it (Copilot, Claude Code, Codex, and others) brings its own billing.
CI GitHub Actions AI engine billing (docs)
Used in: Agent CI Pipelines

Releases

Changesets: versioning and changelogs for packages in one repo, including a monorepo that publishes each component as its own package. Each pull request adds a small file that says which packages change, the SemVer bump, and a one-line summary. At release time, Changesets bumps the versions and writes the changelog entries.
Open source Repo + build npm packages (repo)
Related: Release management

Agentic AI

design-system-ops: Murphy Trueman’s skill pack for inventory, metadata, accessibility audits, onboarding docs, and CI checks. Each skill is a SKILL.md file of instructions an agent follows. The repo is free, but running it takes a paid Claude plan (Pro or higher) or API billing.
Open source Claude Code Paid Claude plan (repo, Claude Code plans)
Used in: System inventory, Accessibility, Onboarding adopters, Context engineering

AGENTS.md: a plain file at the repo root. It tells any coding agent where things live and links out to per-task context.
Free Repo
Used in: Context engineering

Figma MCP server: gives an agent a component’s names, variants, and token values. The remote server works on any plan. The desktop server needs a Dev or Full seat on a paid plan. Daily limits scale with the plan: 200 calls a day on Starter and Professional, 600 on Organization and Enterprise. View and Collab seats get 6 calls a month (20 on Starter).
Freemium Figma API Dev/Full seat for daily use (guide, limits)
Used in: Risk Management

Figma plugin for Claude Code: bundles the Figma MCP server settings with Figma’s own skills. figma-use writes frames, components, and variables into a Figma file. figma-generate-library builds a Figma library from a codebase. figma-code-connect matches published components to their code and creates the Code Connect links in bulk. Writing to a file needs a Full seat, and Dev seats stay read-only. The Code Connect skill also needs an Organization or Enterprise plan. Figma announced writing to the canvas in March 2026 as free during a beta, and says it will later be a usage-based paid feature.
Claude Code Paid Claude plan Full seat to write Beta: usage-based later (setup, skills, write access, pricing note)
Used in: Risk Management

figma-cli: Sil Bormüller’s CLI that lets Claude Code or Cursor build in Figma Desktop directly, with no API token and no Figma rate limit. It also exports JSX, Storybook stories, and DTCG tokens, and checks a file against saved contracts in CI. The default connection mode patches the desktop app. Browser and Safe modes don’t.
Open source Figma Desktop Claude Code or Cursor (repo)
Used in: Figma Agent Access

Other MCP connections: Kavcic’s starter set is GitHub, GitLab, Mintlify, PostHog, and Slack. Each one follows that tool’s own plan and permissions.
Varies
Used in: Risk Management

Starting without a budget

The free route covers most of what this wiki describes. Tokens can run through the DTCG format and Style Dictionary or Terrazzo. Storybook covers live examples and a starter component manifest. For docs, Documentation coverage measures staleness from git history, not from a platform. For agents, an AGENTS.md file plus the repo, in the shape the design-system-ops MCP guide recommends, is enough. It “does not ship a design system MCP server, and most teams don’t need one.” What the free tier can’t reach is mostly on the Figma side: Code Connect, library analytics, and the variables API.