Figma Wins Talent and Adoption
Matthew Moore, Head of Design at Lime, on Figma vs. Adobe
Figma beat Adobe where it mattered most, in the hiring market for designers. Once designers expected to work in Figma, Adobe XD being bundled into Creative Cloud stopped mattering much, because a cheaper tool that strong candidates do not want to use creates recruiting friction and weakens the design team’s influence over product decisions. Figma also spread beyond designers, which made that preference even harder for IT to override.
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At Lime, designers already had Adobe Creative Suite access, including XD, but still used Figma because browser based collaboration, shared files, and easier handoff made the work faster. The issue was not price, it was that XD added friction while Figma felt like the tool that serious product teams actually wanted.
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A second design leader described the same pattern. Their company paid for Adobe for Teams, had 14 Adobe Creative Cloud users, 10 Figma users, and zero XD users. Figma won because libraries, version history, browser access, and shared design systems made it useful for product, brand, and developer workflows, not just mockups.
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That is why Adobe bundling did not crush Figma. Figma turned designers into a hard to ignore buying constituency, while companies still kept Creative Cloud for Photoshop, Premiere, and After Effects. In practice many organizations ended up paying for both, because XD was the replaceable piece, not the rest of Adobe.
The next stage is broader seat expansion around the same wedge. Once a company accepts that Figma is the default environment for high quality design talent, the path to more revenue is pulling in product managers, engineers, marketers, and brainstorm workflows, so the tool is not just where designs are drawn, but where cross functional product work happens.