How a Freelance Designer Chose Between Figma and Adobe XD After Running Both on Real Client Projects

Fact-checked by the SnapMessages editorial team

The Figma vs Adobe XD freelance debate should have been settled when Adobe stopped new XD development in 2023, yet working designers still hesitate before committing. That hesitation is understandable: if you already pay for Adobe Creative Cloud, XD has zero marginal cost, which reshapes the pricing argument that most comparisons lead with. According to the UX Tools 2024 Design Tools Survey of 2,220 respondents, Figma now commands 82.3% of the UI/UX interface design tool market among surveyed designers, a figure that reflects where client briefs and job postings have moved, not just personal preference.

This article works through two real project types, a health-focused app redesign and a branding project for an Adobe-heavy agency client, to show where each tool performed, where it fell short, and which verdict holds up under honest scrutiny. You will get a clear position backed by concrete data, plus the specific scenario where choosing XD in December 2025 is still a defensible call.

What “Maintenance Mode” Actually Means Mid-Project

Adobe XD’s maintenance mode status means no new features, no AI tooling updates, and no UX improvements, only security patches and OS compatibility fixes will ever ship. That distinction matters practically: while XD still opens files and exports assets, every month that passes, it falls further behind in the capabilities that client briefs now assume as standard.

An Adobe spokesperson confirmed directly to The Register in January 2024 that XD “is no longer being sold as a single application to new customers, and Adobe has no plans to further invest in the product.” That is not a roadmap slowdown; it is a terminal decision. For a freelancer beginning a new project, that means any workflow you build around XD-specific features is a workflow with no upgrade path.

The Career Risk Angle Is Real

The professional implication compounds quickly. The vast majority of current UI/UX job postings and client briefs specify Figma as a required or preferred skill. A spot-check of design role listings on LinkedIn and major job boards in late 2025 consistently shows Figma listed as a hard requirement, with XD either absent or listed as a secondary “nice to have.” Building XD proficiency at this stage is a professionally diminishing investment for any freelancer actively seeking new clients. Enterprise teams at companies like SoFi, Chase, and Experian have standardized on Figma for design handoff, which means the tool your client’s engineering team already knows how to inspect matters more than it used to.

One important distinction that most comparisons skip: the risk calculus is completely different between starting a new project in XD and finishing an existing one. If a client hands you a 60-artboard XD file and asks for revisions, completing that work in XD is rational and efficient. The concern is not abandoning old XD files, they still work, it is about where you invest your primary workflow for new work going forward.

Does the Pricing Math Change If You Already Pay for Creative Cloud?

Yes, significantly. Figma’s free tier covers three active files and unlimited personal projects with full professional features, while Adobe XD is only accessible through the Creative Cloud All Apps bundle at roughly $54.99 to $89.99 per month as of December 2025. If you are a Figma-only freelancer, the paid Professional plan at $12 to $15 per month per editor is still meaningfully cheaper than any Creative Cloud tier.

The calculus flips entirely when a client or agency is already paying for Creative Cloud. In that scenario, XD has zero marginal cost, and the pricing argument that dominates most Figma vs Adobe XD comparisons simply does not apply. This is the specific freelancer scenario almost no ranking article addresses, and it is worth being direct about: if your client’s production environment runs on Adobe CC and you are billing against their license, XD is free to you for that engagement.

The Honest Concession on Figma’s Pricing

Figma’s Professional plan is cheaper than a full Creative Cloud subscription, but the gap is not dramatic if design tooling is your only Adobe use. A freelancer who uses Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere regularly for client deliverables is already paying for CC. Adding XD use costs nothing extra. That is a real financial consideration, not a rounding error.

Where Figma’s pricing advantage becomes decisive is for designers who have moved their entire workflow to browser-based or non-Adobe tools. For those freelancers, paying $54.99 to $89.99 per month for a CC subscription just to access a tool in maintenance mode is genuinely hard to justify. The free tier of Figma covers most solo freelance needs until a team grows or client volume demands more active files simultaneously.

Collaboration and Client Sharing: Where the Tools Behaved Differently

Figma’s browser-based prototype links worked without friction on both test projects: any stakeholder with a URL could view, inspect, and comment without creating an account or installing software. On the health app redesign, a five-person client team that included a product manager, two developers, and a marketing lead all accessed the prototype within minutes of receiving the link. No installs, no account creation requests, no IT tickets.

Sharing a prototype through XD required more management. Viewing a shared XD prototype via a browser link works adequately for basic click-through review, but comment functionality and developer spec inspection required either a Creative Cloud account or export to a third-party handoff tool. On the branding project with an agency client, this added a coordination step that slowed the feedback loop on two revision cycles.

The Offline Edge XD Actually Has

XD performed more reliably on a local machine with a large, complex file and limited internet access. Working on a 50-artboard branding deck from a location with intermittent Wi-Fi, the desktop-native XD app remained fully responsive where Figma’s browser-based editor lagged noticeably on asset-heavy screens. This is not a hypothetical edge case, it is a real workflow consideration for freelancers who travel or work from locations without consistent broadband.

Figma does have a desktop app with offline capabilities, but its offline mode is more limited than XD’s native application, particularly for large files with many components. For freelancers whose work regularly includes remote locations or client site visits with poor connectivity, this is worth factoring in honestly rather than dismissing. If you regularly work on files larger than 100MB in low-bandwidth conditions, XD’s local performance is a genuine advantage.

For teams where real-time co-presence matters, developers and designers inspecting the same frame simultaneously, product managers dropping comments during a live review, Figma’s collaborative model is substantially better. XD’s co-editing is limited and noticeably less polished than what Figma has offered since its earliest versions.

Prototyping, Animation, and the One Thing XD Still Does Better

Auto-Animate and voice prototyping in XD are legitimately more capable than Figma’s equivalents for complex animated flows. This is not a marketing claim; it reflects how the tools actually behaved when a client on the health app project requested a near-production animation demo showing a multi-step onboarding sequence with spring physics.

In XD, that sequence took roughly 45 minutes to assemble using Auto-Animate with custom easing values. The equivalent in Figma using Smart Animate required manually staging intermediate frames and a workaround involving component state transitions to approximate the same spring behavior. The result was close, but the XD version took less time and required fewer compensating steps. On a billable project, that time difference is real money.

When Figma’s Prototyping Is Sufficient

For the far more common case, a click-through prototype demonstrating navigation flow, screen transitions, and modal behavior for stakeholder review, Figma’s prototyping tools are entirely sufficient. Most client presentations do not require spring physics or voice triggers. They require a convincing demonstration of how an interface behaves when tapped or clicked, and Figma handles that cleanly.

The honest answer here is that the right tool depends on the deliverable. If your client needs a near-production animation demo for investor presentations or handoff to an animation-heavy development team, XD’s animation toolset has a genuine edge. If your client needs a prototype they can click through in a browser and share with their board, Figma is the better fit. Most freelance projects fall into the second category.

A vetted UI/UX expert analysis on Toptal with two decades of experience concluded that Figma’s browser-based accessibility and design systems make it the stronger choice for most modern design workflows, while acknowledging that XD’s animation toolset remains its most defensible remaining advantage.

Plugin Ecosystems and the Compounding Advantage

Figma’s plugin library has over 1,000 community-developed plugins covering accessibility auditing, design token management, content generation, developer handoff, and automated quality checks. XD’s plugin ecosystem has measurably contracted since 2023 as developers stopped investing in a platform with no published roadmap.

This is not just a number comparison. Plugins in a design workflow are a form of unpaid support infrastructure. When a freelancer needs an accessibility checker mid-project, or a plugin that generates realistic data for mockups, or a handoff tool that produces CSS variables automatically, the availability of that plugin on demand saves real time. On both test projects, Figma plugins handled tasks that would have required manual workarounds in XD, or would have been unavailable entirely given the state of XD’s plugin marketplace in late 2025.

Community Resources as a Practical Asset

Figma’s community forums, free UI kits, and live tutorial ecosystem are active and growing. XD’s equivalent community has been largely silent since mid-2023. For a solo freelancer without a studio team to consult, community resources function as a kind of on-demand support network. Finding a free, current Figma UI kit for a health app project took minutes. Finding an equivalent, recently updated XD kit required significantly more searching and yielded older files with outdated component structures.

The compounding effect matters: each month that XD receives no new features, its community resources age further, its plugin library shrinks further, and the pool of developers familiar with XD-specific handoff specs gets smaller. A freelancer starting a new project today is not just choosing between two current tools, they are choosing between a tool with an expanding support network and one with a contracting one. Product teams at organizations ranging from mid-market SaaS companies to enterprise clients like those benchmarked by Contrary Research have already made this shift, and the handoff expectations they bring to new projects reflect it.

This pattern mirrors what the broader tech industry has seen with other discontinued tools. For freelancers interested in how productivity tooling affects daily output, the parallel conversation about why teams are switching to asynchronous messaging tools follows similar logic: when a platform stops investing in its product, the network effect that made it valuable begins to erode quickly.

The Verdict After Two Real Projects

Figma is the right default for any new freelance project started in 2025. That conclusion held across both test projects, and the supporting data, market share, enterprise adoption, active development, and plugin ecosystem depth, points in the same direction. Coursera’s editorial team notes that Adobe put XD into maintenance mode in 2023, meaning Adobe is not “investing in ongoing development or shipping new features within the product”, a direct quote that should settle the question for any freelancer evaluating where to build their primary skill set.

The honest XD exception is narrower than most comparisons admit, but it is real. If you are an existing Creative Cloud subscriber doing short-term work for an agency client who already has XD source files, finishing that work in XD is perfectly rational. You are not making a mistake; you are using a tool that still functions for its defined purpose. The risk is in starting new source files in XD, building new component libraries in XD, or representing XD fluency as a current, marketable skill to new clients.

What the Adobe–Figma Relationship Means for Tool Loyalty

Adobe attempted to acquire Figma for $20 billion in 2022, and that deal was blocked by regulators in the EU and UK in December 2023. Since then, Adobe has invested in its own competing tools within Creative Cloud, including Adobe Express and expanded design features in Illustrator, while Figma has proceeded toward an independent IPO. The two products are now on genuinely separate trajectories.

For freelancers, the practical implication is that deep workflow lock-in to either tool carries risk. Building your entire process around Figma-exclusive features is a reasonable bet given its current position, but maintaining some familiarity with file export and handoff in formats that other tools can consume (PDF, SVG, exported assets, design tokens) keeps your options open. The design tool market has surprised the industry before.

The median annual wage for web developers and digital designers in the United States was $98,090 as of May 2024 according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by Figma’s resource library. Freelancers at that level cannot afford to build primary skills on a platform with no roadmap. Tool selection is a career decision, not just a preference.

If you are already optimizing your broader digital workflow, the same discipline applies to communication and productivity tools. The question of how to choose between platforms with different collaboration models comes up in other contexts too, for instance, when evaluating Zoom vs Google Meet for client video calls, the analysis follows a similar framework: active development, network effects, and client-side expectations all outweigh feature parity in the short term.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Adobe XD still worth learning in 2025?

No, not for new projects. Adobe XD entered maintenance mode in 2023 and receives no new features, meaning any skill built on XD-specific functionality has no upgrade path. The exception is completing existing client work already built in XD, where staying in the tool is practical and efficient.

Can I use Figma for free as a freelancer?

Yes. Figma’s free tier allows three active files and unlimited personal projects with full professional features, including prototyping, sharing, and basic commenting. Most solo freelancers can operate entirely on the free tier until their client volume grows large enough to require more simultaneous active files.

What happens to my existing Adobe XD files?

Existing XD files continue to work for Creative Cloud subscribers. Adobe’s maintenance mode commitment means security patches and OS compatibility updates will continue, so you will not lose access to your files. The concern is with starting new work in XD, not with accessing or editing files you already have.

Does Figma work offline?

Figma has a desktop app with limited offline capabilities, but it performs less reliably than Adobe XD’s native desktop application on large, asset-heavy files without internet access. If your work regularly involves large files in low-bandwidth locations, XD’s offline performance is a genuine advantage worth weighing.

Which tool do most clients expect in 2025?

Most clients, particularly SaaS companies, product startups, and enterprise teams, expect Figma. According to Contrary Research’s 2025 data, 95% of Fortune 500 companies use Figma. Clients in legacy publishing, print-heavy agencies, or studios with deep Adobe CC investment may still have XD files in circulation, but even many of those clients have begun requesting Figma deliverables for new projects.

Is Figma better than Adobe XD for prototyping?

For most freelance use cases, click-through navigation demos, stakeholder review prototypes, developer handoff, Figma’s Smart Animate is sufficient and easier to share. For complex animated flows requiring spring physics or voice interactions, Adobe XD’s Auto-Animate toolset is more capable. The right answer depends on whether your client needs a review prototype or a near-production animation demo.

What is the cheapest way to access both Figma and Adobe XD?

Figma’s free tier covers basic freelance use at no cost. Adobe XD requires a Creative Cloud All Apps subscription at roughly $54.99 to $89.99 per month, there is no standalone XD purchase option available to new customers as of June 2023. If you need occasional XD access for legacy file work, the most cost-effective approach is a single month of CC at the lowest qualifying tier rather than an annual commitment.