Remiam
·5 min read·

Adobe XD is gone. Figma was right.

Adobe quietly removed XD from Creative Cloud last month. Four years after we wrote a head-to-head, the answer turned out to be all of one of them. Some reflections.

Adobe quietly removed XD from new Creative Cloud subscriptions last month. Existing licences continue, but no new development, no new features. The product is effectively over. We wrote a head-to-head between Figma and XD in 2019; the prediction that Figma was innovating faster turned out to be a dramatic understatement.

What killed XD

  • 01Multiplayer. Adobe couldn't ship a real multiplayer experience in time, and once Figma had the entire design world on it, the switching cost flipped against XD.
  • 02Browser-first. XD was a desktop app forever. Figma was a browser tool from the start. Every cross-platform team picked Figma by default.
  • 03The Adobe acquisition attempt. Adobe tried to buy Figma for $20bn in 2022. Regulators blocked it in 2023. By then XD was a backup product Adobe couldn't justify investing in.
  • 04Sandboxed innovation. Figma's plugin marketplace is a real ecosystem. XD's wasn't.

What design teams should do now

  • 01If you're still on XD: migrate. Figma's import is decent and the disruption is one-time.
  • 02If you're worried about a single-vendor design tool: don't. Figma's hegemony comes with a healthy alternative ecosystem now — Penpot, Lunacy, Sketch is still around.
  • 03If you want a backup just in case: Penpot is open-source, file-format compatible, and improving fast.

Multiplayer-native tools beat single-player tools, every time, in this decade. Figma did to XD what Notion did to Confluence and Linear is doing to Jira. The product that lets two people stand at the same desk wins the team.

The bigger lesson

Multiplayer-native tools beat single-player tools, every time, in this decade. Figma did to XD what Notion did to Confluence and Linear is doing to Jira. The product that lets two people stand at the same desk wins the team. The product that requires a sync wins second place at best.

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