Figma vs Adobe XD: Which Should You Learn First?
This used to be a real debate. It isn't anymore, and students deserve a straight answer instead of an outdated "it depends."
After Adobe's attempted $20 billion acquisition of Figma collapsed in late 2023 due to regulatory pushback in the EU and UK, Adobe stopped investing in XD's development. As of 2026, Adobe XD is officially in "maintenance mode" — it still technically works, receives occasional bug and security fixes, but has shipped no meaningful new features in years and is no longer sold as a standalone product. It only exists bundled inside the full Creative Cloud subscription.
Meanwhile, Figma has become the industry-standard tool for UI/UX design — real-time multiplayer collaboration (which XD added years late), a strong free tier, an enormous plugin ecosystem, and continuous monthly feature updates. Design teams overwhelmingly hire for Figma fluency today, not XD.
The practical answer for a student: learn Figma. Don't spend time on XD at all, unless you're joining a legacy team that specifically still uses it (increasingly rare). Figma has a free tier that's more than enough to build a full student portfolio, and its import tool can even pull in old XD files if you ever need to reference legacy work.
This isn't really a "which first" comparison anymore — it's closer to "learn the modern tool, understand the older one existed." That's a useful thing to know for interviews too: being able to explain *why* Figma won (collaboration-first design, faster iteration, better pricing for teams) signals real industry awareness, not just tool proficiency.
