What will happen to figma and adobe xd after the takeover

After more than a year of intense pressure from antitrust regulators in the UK, EU, and US, Adobe and Figma mutually agreed to kill the merger. Adobe even had to pay Figma a massive $1 billion breakup fee. Because the deal collapsed, the landscape for both tools looks completely different than what everyone expected. Here is what happened to Figma and Adobe XD.

1. Figma: Independent and Thriving

Instead of being absorbed into the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem, Figma remains fully independent—and it has essentially won the UI/UX tool wars.

Financial Windfall: Figma used that $1 billion breakup fee from Adobe to aggressively fund research, development, and hiring.

Rapid Product Expansion: Figma has expanded heavily beyond standard interface design. They launched native AI features (like auto-layout generation and copy tweaking), built out robust developer-focused tools, and launched "Sites" to venture into no-code web publishing.

The Industry Standard: Figma continues to dominate the market. It didn't lose its free tier, its UI didn't get cluttered with Adobe legacy code, and it remains the default software taught in design schools and used by product teams worldwide.

2. Adobe XD: The Collateral Damage

While Figma walked away stronger, Adobe XD is effectively dead.

Abandoned Mid-Deal: When Adobe thought they were getting Figma, they quietly began "sunsetting" XD to avoid competing with themselves. They removed it from the Creative Cloud storefront for new users and stopped adding features.

Left in Maintenance Mode: Even after the merger collapsed, Adobe decided not to resurrect XD. The product remains in strict maintenance mode. Adobe's engineering teams only push critical security updates and minor bug fixes for existing enterprise accounts, but they are not investing in new features.

The Great Migration: Most design teams that were holding out on XD have completely migrated to Figma, as there is no future roadmap for Adobe's native UI/UX tool.