What doesn’t work
Figma doesn’t open .xd files: dragging one onto the canvas does nothing useful. Adobe hasn’t published the XD format, and Figma never added an importer. So every route from XD to Figma is some kind of conversion, and none of them is perfect.
The three routes
1. A converter plugin or service. Paid tools such as Convertify (a Figma plugin, priced per user per month) and Magicul (priced per file) rebuild an XD file as Figma frames, components and text. This is the closest you’ll get to an editable copy with components and styles intact. It costs money and needs the file uploaded to their servers. For a big design system you’ll maintain for years, it’s usually worth it.
2. SVG per artboard (free). Open the .xd file on this page and save each artboard as SVG, or all of them at once with the unlock. Drag the SVGs into Figma. Each becomes a frame with editable vector shapes, groups and text layers, with colours, gradients and shadows mostly kept. What you lose: XD components become plain groups, character styles and colour swatches aren’t created as Figma styles, constraints and auto-layout (XD’s Stacks and Padding) are gone, and prototype links don’t carry over. Text keeps its font name, so install the fonts first.
3. PDF or PNG as a reference (free). If you are going to rebuild the design properly in Figma anyway, a PDF or PNGs of every artboard, placed on a locked layer, give you something exact to trace. Combined with the handoff sheet (every colour, text style and text string as a spreadsheet) this is often faster than tidying a messy automatic conversion.
Rebuilding the design system
The handoff sheet in the £9 unlock exports the document’s named colours, its character styles (font, weight, size, line height, letter spacing) and every text style actually used, plus a tokens.json file. Recreating those as Figma colour and text styles takes minutes and makes everything you import consistent.
Which to choose
For a handful of screens you need to tweak, SVG is fine and free. For a design you will keep building on, pay for a converter. For a redesign, export a PDF and the handoff sheet and start clean. Afterboard is honest about which of these it does: it views, inspects and exports; it doesn’t convert to .fig.