Adobe XD is not a live rival to Figma anymore. Adobe effectively stopped developing it after its $20 billion attempt to acquire Figma was blocked by regulators in 2023, and no meaningful new features have shipped since. If you're asking whether to start a new design project on Adobe XD in 2026, the honest answer is no. The more useful question is what to do if you're already using it, and why Figma won this fight decisively.
What actually happened to Adobe XD
XD launched in 2016 to compete directly with Sketch and later Figma. For a few years it was a real contender, backed by Creative Cloud's massive install base and tight integration with Photoshop and Illustrator. That changed after Adobe tried to buy Figma outright for $20 billion in 2022, a deal blocked by antitrust regulators in both the US and UK in 2023. Once the acquisition fell through, Adobe's investment in XD effectively stopped rather than resuming as an independent competitive push.
The tool still opens existing files, exports assets correctly, and functions for anyone already using it. What's gone is any forward momentum: no significant feature releases, no roadmap, no serious design team starting new projects on it. Reddit design communities treat XD as functionally retired, not because it stopped working, but because there's no reason to invest new work in a platform its own maker has stopped developing.
What XD still costs and what that buys
XD is bundled into Creative Cloud subscriptions: Single App runs $22.99/month for XD alone, and All Apps costs $59.99/month for the full Creative Cloud suite. For a team already paying for All Apps to use Photoshop and Illustrator, XD comes at effectively no marginal cost, which is the only real argument for touching it in 2026.
What that buys is a functional but frozen tool: UI design, prototyping, voice prototyping, and Creative Cloud integration that all still work exactly as they did when development stopped. There's no meaningful reason to expect new capability, and the plugin and template ecosystem that Figma has built out over the same period simply doesn't exist for XD at comparable scale.
What Figma actually costs
Figma's Starter tier is free and includes unlimited drafts, 3 Figma files, 3 FigJam files, and a daily AI credit allowance, enough to seriously evaluate the platform or work on personal projects. Professional runs $15/user/month and removes the file cap while adding team libraries and advanced prototyping. Organization and Enterprise tiers scale up to $55 and $90/user/month respectively for larger teams needing shared libraries, branching and merging, SCIM provisioning, and advanced analytics. Dev Mode, which gives developers CSS, iOS, and Android code snippets plus redline specs, is a $25/user/month add-on on top of Professional.
What that money buys is the thing XD never matched: real-time multiplayer collaboration where multiple designers work in the same file simultaneously with live cursors and inline comments, a capability that's been Figma's core differentiator since before the acquisition attempt even started. Design system tooling through components and variants, browser-based access across every operating system, and a plugin marketplace that dwarfs anything XD built are the practical reasons design teams standardized on Figma rather than staying loyal to Adobe's tool.
Why this isn't actually a close comparison
A fair comparison assumes both products are being actively developed and competing for the same future. That's not what's happening here. Figma's free tier alone, generous enough for individuals and small teams to genuinely learn and use the tool, already outpaces what a frozen XD offers at any price point, since XD's $22.99/month Single App plan buys access to a tool that isn't getting better while Figma's roadmap keeps moving.
The real comparison worth making isn't XD versus Figma on features. It's whether an existing XD-based team should keep paying Creative Cloud fees to maintain legacy files, or invest the migration effort now while the file conversion tools and community documentation for switching are still well-supported, rather than waiting until fewer people remember how to do it cleanly.
What migrating off XD actually looks like
Figma supports importing XD files directly, and for most standard UI design work, layers, artboards, and basic prototyping links carry over reasonably well. Complex XD-specific features, particularly voice prototyping and some of Adobe's proprietary interaction patterns, don't have a clean one-to-one equivalent and require rebuilding manually in Figma's own prototyping system.
Teams with large, mature XD component libraries should budget real time for this, not a weekend project. Rebuilding a design system's components and variants natively in Figma, rather than relying purely on the import tool, produces a cleaner result and avoids inheriting XD-era workarounds that don't map well to how Figma's auto-layout and variant systems actually work.
Who should actually still consider XD
Almost nobody starting fresh. The narrow case for touching XD in 2026 is a team already deep in an active XD project with a near-term deadline, where a mid-project platform switch would cost more in disruption than finishing on the tool already in use. Even then, that's a reason to finish the current project on XD, not a reason to plan new work there.
Teams with strict on-premise or self-hosting requirements that neither Figma nor a frozen XD can satisfy should look at Penpot, the open-source alternative, rather than treating XD's Adobe pedigree as a reason to default back to it.
Real cost for a small design team
A 5-person design team already on Creative Cloud All Apps for Photoshop and Illustrator: keeping XD alive costs nothing extra since it's bundled, but that team still needs Figma Professional at $15 x 5 = $75/month, $900/year, to actually collaborate on live projects, since XD's lack of real-time multiplayer makes it impractical for a team that size to work in simultaneously. The Creative Cloud spend on XD specifically becomes pure sunk cost once the team standardizes on Figma for real work.
A solo freelancer with no Creative Cloud subscription evaluating either tool fresh: Figma's free Starter tier costs nothing and covers real project work immediately, while trying XD standalone runs $22.99/month for a tool with no forward development. There's no version of this comparison where starting cold on XD makes financial sense over Figma's free tier.
What actually breaks in practice
The practical risk of staying on XD isn't that it stops working tomorrow, Adobe hasn't announced a shutdown date for existing users. It's slower-moving: as browsers, operating systems, and design workflows evolve around an actively developed Figma, an unmaintained XD gradually falls further behind in ways that don't show up as a dramatic failure, just growing friction, missing integrations, and a shrinking pool of designers who still know the tool well.
Data handling and where files actually live
Figma states it does not train AI models on private design files, limiting AI training data to public Community files unless a user explicitly opts in, and doesn't sell user data. Files export cleanly as SVG, PNG, or PDF, and the platform holds SOC 2 Type 2 certification. That's a reasonably clean privacy posture for a browser-based tool handling proprietary product design work.
Adobe's position is more complicated. Adobe updated its terms of service in 2024 to claim broader rights to access user content for AI training purposes, which caused real backlash from the design community. Adobe later clarified that Creative Cloud files aren't used for Firefly AI training without explicit consent, but the initial terms change damaged trust in a way that lingers for privacy-conscious teams evaluating whether to keep files on Adobe's platform at all, XD included. Adobe's own analytics still collect usage data across Creative Cloud apps, and files remain exportable, but the trust gap opened by that 2024 ToS episode is worth factoring in separately from XD's development status.
For teams already wary of Adobe's broader data practices, that's one more reason the calculus favors moving off XD entirely rather than treating it as a safe place to park legacy files indefinitely.
Which one to actually pick
Pick Figma for any new design work, full stop. There's no scenario in 2026 where starting fresh on Adobe XD makes sense given its development has stopped and Figma's has not.
Pick to stay on XD only if actively finishing an existing project where switching mid-stream costs more than completing on the current tool, and even then, start planning the Figma migration for whatever comes next rather than treating XD as a long-term platform.