If you are a founder or product manager who has started researching design tools, you have likely come across this exact comparison dozens of times. It is one of the most searched topics in the design world, and for good reason: the tool a design team uses affects collaboration, cost, and even how easily you can review and give feedback on work in progress.
There is one important update that most comparison articles have not caught up with yet, and it changes this comparison significantly. This post gives you the current, honest picture.
The Short Answer Upfront
Before getting into details: Adobe XD has reached end of life in practical terms. It remains available to some existing Creative Cloud users, but Adobe has stopped major feature investment and no longer sells it as a standalone app to new customers. For nearly any new project starting now, Adobe XD is not a viable choice, regardless of how it compares feature-by-feature to the alternatives.
That leaves the real comparison as Figma versus Sketch, with Adobe XD included here mainly so you understand why it is no longer part of the conversation, and what it means if your existing design files are in XD format.
What Happened to Adobe XD
For years, Adobe XD was a serious contender in this space, bundled into Creative Cloud and used by many teams already paying for Adobe's other products. That changed starting around 2023.
As of early 2024, Adobe confirmed it would not invest further in XD, a decision that came after Adobe's attempt to acquire Figma was blocked by regulatory scrutiny. The tool is now in what Adobe describes as maintenance mode, meaning the company continues addressing bugs and security issues for existing customers but is not developing new features or pushing the product further.
For businesses, this has a few practical implications:
-
If your existing designer or agency has files in XD format, they will eventually need to be migrated, as the format becomes harder to open over time
-
Hiring designers who specialize in XD will become increasingly difficult, since the talent pool is actively moving elsewhere
-
Adobe's current direction appears to combine Illustrator for vector work, Adobe Express for simpler tasks, and an expectation that serious product design teams use Figma independently
If you are starting a new project and a proposal includes Adobe XD as part of the workflow, it is worth asking why, since it suggests the team may not be working with current industry standards.
Figma: The Current Default for Most Teams
Figma has effectively become the standard tool for UI and UX design work, particularly for teams that involve any collaboration between designers, developers, and stakeholders.
What Makes Figma Different
Figma runs entirely in the browser, which means there is nothing to install and no version-control headaches from people working on different file versions. Everyone, including non-designers like founders, product managers, and developers, can open a live design file, leave comments directly on specific elements, and watch changes happen in real time.
Where Figma Excels
For most app and web projects, Figma's strengths line up directly with what businesses need:
-
Real-time collaboration means stakeholders can review work-in-progress without waiting for exported files
-
A generous free tier makes it accessible for early-stage projects and small teams
-
A large plugin ecosystem covers everything from accessibility checks to content generation
-
Interactive prototyping lets you click through a design as if it were a working app, useful for usability testing and stakeholder demos
-
Design files connect cleanly to development handoff tools, reducing friction when a design moves into code
Where Figma Falls Short
Figma is not without tradeoffs. Because it is browser-based and cloud-hosted, it requires a stable internet connection for full functionality, and very large, complex files can occasionally feel slower than a native desktop application. For most business use cases, neither of these is a significant issue, but they are worth knowing about.
Sketch: Still Relevant, but Narrower
Sketch was, for years, the dominant design tool before Figma's rise, and it still has a loyal user base, particularly among Mac-based design teams who started their workflows on it years ago.
What Makes Sketch Different
Sketch is a native macOS application, which gives it a performance edge on large files compared to browser-based tools, and many designers who learned on Sketch appreciate its focused, less cluttered interface.
Where Sketch Excels
Sketch remains a solid choice in specific situations:
-
Teams already standardized on Sketch with an established library of components and plugins
-
Mac-only design teams who do not need cross-platform access
-
Designers who prefer a lighter, more focused tool without Figma's broader feature set
Where Sketch Falls Short
The biggest limitation is platform exclusivity. Sketch is Mac-only, which immediately rules it out for any team with Windows users, and increasingly, that includes developers, product managers, and clients who need to view or comment on designs. Real-time collaboration in Sketch typically requires additional cloud services layered on top, rather than being built in from the ground up the way it is in Figma.
How to Choose for Your Project
For most businesses starting a new project today, the decision comes down to a fairly short checklist.
Choose Figma If
You have a mixed team using both Mac and Windows, you want stakeholders, including non-designers, to be able to view and comment on designs easily, your project involves close collaboration between designers and developers, or you are starting from scratch with no existing design files in another format. This covers the large majority of app and web development projects.
Choose Sketch If
Your entire team is Mac-based, you already have an established Sketch workflow and component library that would be costly to migrate, and cross-platform access for stakeholders is not a priority.
What to Do If You Have Existing Adobe XD Files
If you are working with an agency or freelancer who has design work in Adobe XD from a previous project, this is not a crisis, but it is worth addressing sooner rather than later. XD files can typically be imported into Figma with reasonable fidelity, and migrating now, while the format is still widely readable, is easier than waiting until tooling support degrades further.
A Note on "Which Tool Is Best"
It is worth remembering that the tool itself is not what determines whether a design is good. A skilled designer can produce excellent work in Figma or Sketch, and a poor process will produce poor results regardless of the software. What the tool does affect is collaboration, review speed, and how easily a project moves from design into development, which is why, for most businesses, the practical answer to "which tool" has become less about features and more about workflow fit.
The Bottom Line
For new projects in 2026, Figma has become the practical default for the vast majority of teams, particularly anything involving collaboration across roles or platforms. Sketch remains a reasonable choice for established Mac-based teams with existing workflows. Adobe XD, regardless of its past strengths, is no longer a forward-looking option, and any existing XD files should be on a migration path rather than a long-term foundation.
If you are evaluating a design or development partner for your project, asking which tools they use, and why, is a small question that can reveal a lot about how current their workflow actually is.
