How to share a Figma prototype with a client

Figma will hand you a link in about five seconds. The hard part is everything after that: making sure the client can actually open it, that they see the work instead of the tool, and that they are looking at this week's version rather than one from three weeks ago.

Updated 14 July 2026

The quick version

If you just need the link and you need it now:

1. 1Open the file and press Present, the play button in the top right. This gives you a prototype link rather than a link to your canvas. The difference matters more than it sounds, and we will come back to it.
2. 2Click Share inside the prototype viewer.
3. 3Set link access to Anyone with the link, and leave the permission on can view. Skip this and your client will hit a request-access wall instead of your work.
4. 4Copy the link and send it.

Your client does not need a Figma account, they do not need to install anything, and it works in any browser. For a quick look at a single flow, that really is the whole job.

Three things that catch people out

A design link and a prototype link are not the same thing

Look at what you actually copied. A prototype link has /proto/ in it, and a node id:

figma.com/proto/xK9f3mN2p/Checkout?node-id=142-1847

A link with /design/ in it drops your client onto the canvas instead: your layers, your comments, and the graveyard of exploration frames parked off to the side. It is a different experience, and almost never the one you meant to send.

The node-id pins the starting frame, so whichever frame you were presenting from is where your client begins. If you hit Present with the wrong frame selected, that is what they see first.

Your client sees Figma before they see the work

By default the prototype viewer wraps your work in Figma's own furniture: the toolbar, the sidebar, the little blue flashes on every hotspot. Some clients read that as "still in progress". You can turn it off, but you have to remember to do it every single time.

"Anyone with the link" is carrying a lot of weight

That one setting is the difference between a link that opens and a link that makes your client ask permission. It is also, and this is the part worth sitting with, a public URL. Anyone holding it can open it. There is no password on it, and it does not expire.

What the raw link cannot do

Once it leaves your hands, a Figma link runs out of road fairly quickly.

• A password on the prototype is not a gate on the handover. Figma can password protect a prototype, and it works well. But it covers the Figma link and nothing else. The spec, the assets, the walkthrough video: still open URLs, sitting in the same email, under the same NDA.
• You cannot tell whether they opened it. Figma shows you who is in the file right now, but it keeps no view history unless you are on an Organization or Enterprise plan with activity logs. On the plans most studios are actually on, there is no way to know your client looked on Tuesday at 11pm and spent nine minutes on the checkout flow, which is exactly what you want to know before you chase them.
• It is one link, and the client needs six. The prototype, the spec, the assets, the walkthrough video, the note about what changed since last time. So you paste six links into an email, and now your client is the one doing the filing.
• It goes stale in their inbox, not in your file. The link stays live, which sounds like a feature until the client scrolls up to an older email and opens a link from three weeks ago pointing at a frame you have since deleted.

None of this is Figma doing something wrong. Figma is a design tool, and a very good one. Presenting finished work to a client is a different job, and it wants a different object.

A cleaner way to hand it over

The fix is not another link. It is to stop sending links at all, and send a place instead: one page, on your domain, that holds the prototype and everything sitting around it. When the work changes, the page changes. The client keeps the same URL they have always had.

That is what Modulat does. You get a branded page per client, and the password sits on the page, so the one gate covers the prototype, the files and the notes together rather than the Figma link on its own. You can see when the client opened it, on any plan. Prototype links made through Modulat can hide the Figma UI and the hotspot hints by default, so you are not remembering to do it by hand every time.

Because we run as a Figma plugin, you can turn a frame into a client-ready link and drop it straight onto the page without leaving the canvas. Nobody else building client portals does this, because nobody else built theirs for designers.

Quick answers