A decade, thats a wrap Adobe
We have been subscribed to Adobe for a decade, and for the first time, we can happily say we’ve started migrating away from Adobe products. Let’s dive into why we’re making this change and what we’re replacing Adobe with.
How we use Adobe now
We use Adobe products almost daily at JBMD, which led us to believe we’d be lifelong subscribers. However, since we only use a few apps and given current constraints, the cost no longer makes sense compared to other options in the market.
Here is all the adobe current services:
And here is all the services we actually use:
Looking at Adobe’s product list compared to what we actually use, Xd isn’t even on this since its in maintenance mode with no active development on it.
The winds shifted
We constantly wrestled with the decision to keep paying $55 monthly for Creative Cloud versus canceling for our peace of mind. The daunting task of migration kept us subscribed. When Adobe announced its acquisition of Figma in fall 2022, we felt hopeful. However that excitement fizzled out over the next six months, ending with them parting ways and cancelling plans.
The digital design software market has changed dramatically over the past decade. Adobe has been showing time and time again they are more focused on AI generated artwork than collaboration abilities with team members and digital design tools like Xd. It was time.
Another concern is that Xd could suddenly stop working, potentially leaving us unable to access our projects. We’ve built up a catalog of designs that we can’t risk losing if that were to happen.
The replacement
Figma is the clear replacement, especially after Config 2025 where it proved to be a strong competitor to Illustrator. Most of our vector art for marketing content could already be handled within Figma’s pre-May 2025 feature set. JBMD was also looking for a more straightforward way to create multiple design component libraries for our projects. We’ve been steadily building a shared component library using TailwindCSS to streamline our new web app projects, alongside our component library for Just Apps in the Apple ecosystem. Since Adobe Xd doesn’t support libraries, we needed a better solution for our next chapter.
Migration started
We have already started to migrate all our files over to Figma however it is an uphill battle as there is 342 projects in Illustrator and Xd, all with multiple art boards and flows. We are tackling the projects we are actively working on first so that newer designs are up to date with Figma but the migration of all project will probably take us sometime.
At our current estimates it would be around the end of the year to early 2026. Not including secondary systems like Creative Cloud storage, which we are migrating back to iCloud and Adobe Fonts which we currently don’t have a solution for.
We are just a small design shop, we won’t hurt Adobe by canceling our subscription but you have to wonder how long this can go forward as more and more tools erode the Adobe empire.
