Figma vs. Adobe XD | Hacker News Reader

Figma vs. Adobe XD

figma.com

90 pointspsnehanshu57 comments

Not many realize that when you use an adobe product you are giving them a right to conduct an audit of your organization. These are typically fishing expeditions by consulting companies like E&Y. The last time they sent one of these mails - I had bluntly told them their products are crap and we are heavy users of figma.

From https://www.adobe.com/in/legal/terms.html 15. Audit Rights. If you are a Business, then we may, no more than once every 12 months, upon seven 7 days’ prior notice to you, appoint our personnel or an independent third-party auditor who is obliged to maintain confidentiality to inspect (including manual inspection, electronic methods, or both) your records, systems, and facilities to verify that your installation and use of any and all Services or Software is in conformity with its valid licenses from us. Additionally, you will provide us with all records and information requested by us within 30 days of our request in order for us to verify that the installation and use of any and all Services and Software is in conformity with your valid licenses. If the verification discloses a shortfall in licenses for the Services or Software, you will immediately acquire any necessary licenses, subscriptions, and applicable back maintenance and support. If the underpaid fees exceed 5% of the value of the payable license fees, then you will also pay for our reasonable cost of conducting the verification.

This is pretty standard for B2B software that is licensed at a user or node level or similar.

Yes, but no-one does this without evidence. These terms apply even if you use any of their free stuff like acrobat reader. And even when you trial any of their apps.

Not to mention they stopped doing these kind of audits in US per my understanding. In other countries they still seem to be doing them. There is a whole set of firms to help you with these audits.

> Yes, but no-one does this without evidence

cough nobody mention Oracle cough

I know of zero technical and happy oracle customers. They seem to exist largely because of non technical folks forcing it into an organization due to their incredible sales teams or they have legacy usage from back when they were innovative. If it’s the latter they love to audit to extract as much cash as they can before the organization ditches them.

This is lunacy. First, who signs these types of contracts without red lining that, and second, who's actually ever willingly complied with this? Allowing someone to this level of access to your "records" could cause so many more regulatory issues.

>First, who signs these types of contracts without red lining that, and second, who's actually ever willingly complied with this?

Companies buying software voluntarily accept license clauses about potential software audits -- because they want to use the software.

There are even niche law firms that help defend against software audits. E.g. : https://scottandscottllp.com/autodesk-audits-how-did-autodes...

The rationale for deliberately buying software where the vendor has auditing rights is that the buyer gets more value out of using AutoCAD than worrying about audits.

"The big-muscle anti-piracy tactics of Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk in India"

https://archive.factordaily.com/the-big-muscle-anti-piracy-t...

It is not unique to Adobe.

It sounds like it's a real problem, but they picked an aweful case study to highlight.

The guy's 30 employees were repeatedly downloading pirated software, and the lesson he learned after the first audit was to quickly delete the software right before the auditors came. I'm not surprised the industry group passed his name around as someone who might plausibly have pirated other company's software.

In my understanding, businesses, in theory should never use unlicensed proprietary software. If they want to cut costs, they should use free software. There are almost always free alternatives, which may or may not lack features available in their paid alternatives. If they badly want those software, they should try to increase their revenue using free software and then switch to paid.

Audit clauses vary greatly in their ability to enforce. It basically comes down to the ability of each side to push back. Obviously, the more dollars at stake the harder the vendor will push to actually audit. And the easier it easier to replace the vendor the harder the customer will push back.

As far as audit clauses go, I always try to stipulate that the audit is conducted by employees of the client or vendor. I don't want any outside consultants snooping around my IP.

"Faster in the cloud With Figma, your files just live on the Web. No more version mixups. No more cloud syncing. No more transferring files between your work and personal computers."

In other words, your data doesn't belong to you. No service, no data.

There is no cloud just other people's computer.

And this is why Adobe is paying so much for Figma: they’ve built the kind of closed data garden that Adobe wants to own across its whole product range.

Every year it becomes a bit harder to find the “default to local file system” setting in Photoshop (it’s off on a fresh install). Every year the UI for Creative Cloud files becomes a bit bigger. Eventually access to local files is probably going to be locked behind an administrator password with scary warning dialogs.

Exactly. They want to be the Microsoft teams of media. The individual apps are less important than the ecosystem and network effects.

I hate it but will probably pick up some stock.

You are an enabler. Are you not ashamed of your choices?

You can't even disable it completely, at best in e.g. Lightroom you can pause the cloud sync and it may get re-enabled without your consent. You will only notice that your upload bandwidth is suddenly saturated and if you have a monitoring tool installed, are you able to determine who is the culprit. It once chewed through my meager monthly quota overnight when I installed it on a laptop prior to going to a friend's house who didn't have internet while tethered to my phone. I was very unhappy about that "feature" to say the least.

Why not build a reverse cloud solution? Files are worked on right in the cloud, and then afterwards automatically synced to a local folder on one or more computers? This way if the cloud implodes, you at least have several (nearly) up to date copies of your work.

cough cough git

Axure, another design and prototyping tool, uses a Subversion-style model, where you have both a cloud and local copy. You pull down the initial file, save it locally, then check out individual pages or components to work on before pushing them back up.

It means you have to manually manage the commit state which is a bit of a pain, but it’s good because you still have the file and can work on it if you can’t access the cloud for whatever reason.

Sure there are risks- but it is fantastic functionality to collaborate in a web first app like Figma or Google Workspace.

If you've ever tried collaborating on design files, the file only living on the web is a feature. No merge conflicts or other issues. No sending the same file back and forth with new revisions.

Abstract for Sketch is nice, but having to help a designer resolve merge conflicts is annoying.

If you're a company, this is solvable by making the files live in a server the company controls.

If you're an individual this is obviously not a concern.

Can multiple people edit the file at the same time then?

>If you're a company, this is solvable by making the files live in a server the company controls.

A company policy blessed shared folder on a file server still doesn't solve the "Single Source Of Truth" issue.

That's why corporate servers still don't stop the proliferation of files such as:

  budget2022_v2.xlsx
  budget2022_v3_draft.xlsx
  budget2022_v15_revised_by_JaneDoe.xlsx
  ... etc ...

So one way corporations try to solve that is using groupware/collaboration software such as MS Sharepoint. Users are then supposed to "check out" the xlsx file and then check it back into the "document library". But the process is so cumbersome that very few companies and users have 100% discipline to do that. This also doesn't let multiple users edit at the same time.

The new generation of cloud-first-collaboration-as-1st-class-UI services (like Figma) don't have the multiple conflicting docx/xlsx issue because sharing the work is the baseline normal usage. Figma doesn't try to bolt on the collaboration behavior to 30-year old software and file formats like MS Office.

You're thinking in terms of badly designed technologies you are familiar with.

I'm talking just about a solution to the problem at hand:

Instead of storing files on servers controlled by a 3rd party company (and calling it "the cloud"), you store the files on servers that you control (and don't call it the cloud).

I didn't say anything about share point or how the files are to be stored.

This can be a feature builtin to figma or any application that is "cloud native": all you need to configure is the server address.

While I somewhat agree, in my experience in practice the “just run it locally” approach results in software I need to use a clumsy and slow VPN to access, runs on servers that are either wildly over or underpowered, is constantly going down for maintenance, and never gets updated beyond essential security patches. The org I work for recently switched from on-prem Jira to cloud Jira, and the cloud version is a breath of fresh air by comparison.

I’m sure some IT departments are better at this than others, but in my experience most of them aren’t great at it.

>I'm talking just about a solution to the problem at hand:

>Instead of storing files on servers controlled by a 3rd party company (and calling it "the cloud"), you store the files on servers that you control (and don't call it the cloud).

I guess I can't tell if you're talking hypothetically or giving a realistic alternative that designers can use today.

Is there a "local corporate web collaboration" similar in features to Figma that designers can use today? The comment I replied to, you said "this _is_ solvable" (present tense) instead of "this _can potentially be_ solvable" (hypothetical future UI collab software installed on internal corporate server that doesn't exist yet).

That's why my interpretation of a present tense solution is something like Adobe XD files (".xd") saved on a shared corporate server... which reproduces the the chaos of multiple xlsx/docx files.

EDIT reply to: >I'm talking about a solution that the creators of Figma could have engineered.

I think you're losing track of your advice in this subthread because that statement about Figma really has nothing to do with the previous recommendation you made: >If you're a company, this is solvable by making the files live in a server the company controls.

> I guess I can't tell if you're talking hypothetically or giving a realistic alternative that designers can use today.

I'm talking about a solution that the creators of Figma could have engineered.

In case someone didn't know, Figma is being acquired buy Adobe. This post will not stay up for long.

https://www.figma.com/blog/a-new-collaboration-with-adobe/

well now it's archived: https://archive.ph/AuEtn

> Figma will be forever free for students and educators.

Forever™

I thought the exact same thing. If I had a dollar every time a company like this, e.g. Microsoft, promised the same thing...

Just look at Microsoft buying Activision, saying they won't make Call of Duty Xbox exclusive. A few months later Sony already pointing out changed that are being made that are going in that direction.

Honestly, anyone who believes that Figma will stay free for students is nieve, at best.

> Also, pay attention to the Adobe XD’s sharing and cloud storage limits. The Starter plan allows for one shared file and 2GB of file storage. With Figma, sharing and cloud storage is unlimited.

Let’s pay attention to Adobe FG‘s upcoming limits then.

Should rename this to Why Adobe acquire Figma?

So they can build all of their CC apps on the Figma tech.

Phew! The page is archived.

https://archive.is/AuEtn

Either the page is going down or the intention to keep Figma operating independently remains giving Adobe customers a choice between XD and Figma. Internal conflict of offerings from a company aren't new.. looking at both AWS and Azure..

Maybe it’s a good strategy to saturate the market with your owns products.

Like L'Oréal and its 3000 brands that fill the supermarkets.

Unlike loreal, keeping both alive prob means a lot of development cost.

Looking at the number of products Adobe has and the money they make as a whole, they’ll probably be fine.

There is such a negative reaction on Adobe buying Figma exactly because Adobe has terrible track record here. They are more likely to cannibalize the product they acquire in order to kill competition to their existing offer.

Figma offered much more for free compared to Adobe products.

"Figma will be forever free for students and educators."

Curious to see if they honor that, and for how long. Adobe products are heavily discounted but not free for students or educators.

Isn't XD pretty much dead? The last release that wasn't just bugfixes happened a year ago, while before that they were pushing out something new every month or two.

Probably they stopped investing in XD as soon as acquiring Figma became an idea, which must have been a long time ago.

Unrelated, but XD is such a stupid name.

Reminds me of my teenage texting days xD

Figma has amazing collaboration features but working on larger projects on figma is terrible. It gets very glitchy and doesn't match the responsiveness of XD in my limited experience.

It's also trivial to create mockups that never finish loading in the share view. Still the best design collab tool, though.

Yeah, I haven’t seen that emoticon in years.

Interesting, I can view the page with no problems.

Having said that, let's see how Adobe will try to merge these two tools into one.

Adobe doesn’t merge products after acquisitions, they just shut down the less popular one.

Cf. Freehand, Fireworks, Director, GoLive…

CF is still around ;)

intentionally keeping the page up for few more weeks, so that outsiders can justify the move by adobe.

Figma was smart.

But I use Photoshop and Illustrator…

Don’t stop! We believe you should use the best tool for the job. If you’re photo-editing, choose Adobe Photoshop. If you’re doing detailed illustrations, Adobe Illustrator is a no-brainer.

> Don’t stop! We believe you should use the best tool for the job. If you’re photo-editing, choose Adobe Photoshop. If you’re doing detailed illustrations, Adobe Illustrator is a no-brainer.

Meanwhile, the acquisition message from Adobe was something like "We can't wait to make Figma better for photographers and illustrators".

Infamous "Everything will grow until it has X" and now it's Figma's turn.

Shit I've ever thought about until now but I wonder how Adobe will cripple Figma to stop if from competing with their other products. I know tons of designers who do illustrations and simpler en graphics in Figma.

Why would anyone need this page to justify Adobe's move? I would think the straight up adoption rate of Figma alone would easily justify it to pretty much anyone.

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