Migrating a 100-Artboard Adobe XD File to Figma in 2 Hours

I opened the XD file, and my hand froze on the trackpad.

Artboards filled the canvas all the way to the edges. Four rows down, twenty-five columns across. One hundred artboards, arranged like a giant collage.

“Can this actually be converted into Figma?”

That was, honestly, my first and only thought.

This is the story of the two hours that followed.

📌 Opening — When 100 Artboards Land on Your Screen

A while ago, an acquaintance asked me to help move a project they had been running in XD over to Figma. The service had grown over the years, and the file had accumulated around 100 artboards.

When I opened the file, I really did stop and stare. Even at maximum zoom-out, the artboards spilled past the edges of my display.

“This is way too much for manual work.”

Adobe XD enters maintenance mode in 2026. No new features. Long-term, anyone serious about design tooling has to think about a migration target — usually Figma. Manually rebuilding 100 artboards screen by screen? I didn’t even want to imagine the days that would take.

So I turned to the plugin I happen to develop myself.

🎯 The Question — Can a Plugin Really Handle This?

The question I wanted answered was simple:

“Does a converter plugin actually hold up on a file this big?”

Any converter can handle a 5–10 artboard smoke-test file. Whether it survives 100 nested, long-evolved, mixed-vocabulary artboards is a completely different question.

The three things I wanted to measure:

I picked Pixel Fine Converter — yes, the plugin I build. A bit shameless, I know, but I built it, so I use it. If you want the broader landscape of plugin options I weighed before committing, see Adobe XD to Figma — 10 Plugins for Migration (Free & Paid).

⏱️ The Conversion — 30 Minutes Watching a Progress Bar

A quick disclosure before the conversion clock starts: cleaning up the file beforehand (deleting old artboards, fixing missing assets, sorting out broken links) took me another 1–2 hours. I’m leaving that out of the “two hours” headline because it’s a step you’d do in XD or Figma either way. The full pre-flight is something I’ve written up before in Migrating from Adobe XD to Figma — A Practical Guide.

With a clean file ready, I loaded it into the plugin and pressed convert.

The progress bar started moving.

Honestly, the first few seconds were tense. XD and Figma have very different internal models, and 100 artboards is the kind of scale where you don’t know if the plugin will run out of memory and finish, or run out of memory and crash.

The progress bar paused briefly while taking inventory of the artboards, then started ticking up steadily. One, two, three artboards converted… and the count kept climbing.

Around artboard 10, I went to make coffee. When I came back, it was still running.

About 30 minutes later, the bar hit 100%.

The Figma canvas now held screens I recognized from the XD file. Watching them sit there, “more or less the same,” in Figma was — I’ll be honest — genuinely satisfying.

“It worked.”

That was my reaction, plain and simple.

🔍 Core Artboards — 1 Hour of Focused Checking

“It worked” and “it’s usable” are different sentences, of course. So I started spot-checking.

Checking 100 artboards with the same depth would have eaten the entire day. So I tiered the verification:

• Core screens (login, dashboard, settings — the heart of the product): ~15 artboards
• Derived screens (variations, error messages, confirmation modals): ~50 artboards
• Older drafts and stockpile ideas: ~35 artboards

For the 15 core artboards, I went in carefully. The checkpoints were roughly:

• Text: font, line-height, size — does it match the XD original?
• Colors and gradients: solid fills mostly carry over; gradients need a closer look
• Components: are XD symbols rebuilt as Figma components, with master/instance relationships and Variants preserved?
• Auto Layout: do XD stacks and repeat grids translate into Figma Auto Layout, with child positions and padding intact?
• Prototypes: are screen transitions, interactions, and triggers carried over the way XD intended?
• Images and icons: are vector assets placed cleanly as SVG?

Checking the 15 core artboards took about 1 hour — roughly 4 minutes of focused review per artboard. I spent extra time comparing components, Auto Layout, and prototype links side by side in XD and Figma. Seeing so many different features come through one after another was a quietly meaningful experience: confirmation, as a plugin developer, of the value of what I had built.

The result: over 90% of the core screens were essentially flawless. The remaining 10% needed minor tweaks, but each was a few-minute fix. (For specifics on which kinds of differences tend to appear in conversions, When Free XD-to-Figma Conversion Stops Being Enough goes into them.)

“This is much better than I expected.”

That was the honest assessment.

⚡ Remaining Artboards — 30-Minute Skim

Because the core screens had converted with such surprising accuracy, my anxiety about the remaining 85 artboards dropped considerably.

I went through the derived screens and older stockpile in roughly 30 minutes — about 15–20 seconds per artboard, scanning the thumbnail and looking only for obviously broken layouts.

No major breaks. Minor line-height drift here and there, but nothing that would block shipping.

Total measured time: conversion 30 minutes + core verification 1 hour + remaining verification 30 minutes = 2 hours.

A real production migration would add more careful review on top of that. But that’s the reviewer’s job, not the converter’s job. What I wanted to know — how far does the plugin take you — had a clear answer.

💡 What I Learned About Large-Scale XD Migration

A few takeaways from the experiment.

Lesson 1: Pre-cleanup matters more than the conversion itself

In raw hours, the 1–2 hours of file cleaning is longer than the 30 minutes the plugin spends converting. Conversion accuracy is significantly affected by how clean the input file is. Boring work, but skipping it inflates post-conversion fixes more than it saves.

Lesson 2: The real value of a converter is “verification efficiency,” not raw speed

What surprised me a little: the most valuable thing a converter offers isn’t the conversion itself — it’s how much shorter it makes verification.

A low-accuracy converter forces a manual review-and-fix pass over every artboard. At some point, “rebuilding from scratch would have been faster” starts becoming true. A high-accuracy converter compresses that review to “minor tweaks.”

Lesson 3: All-at-once vs. split-into-batches

Whether to convert 100 artboards in one go or split the file into batches is a real decision. I chose all-at-once this time, but that’s not always right.

• All-at-once: Relationships between screens stay visible inside one Figma file; internal links survive.
• Split: Lower memory risk; smaller blast radius on errors.

For massive files (200+ artboards), splitting deserves serious thought. If the XD-to-Figma transition itself is new to you, Adobe XD: A Practical Usage Guide has the context you’ll want.

🎬 Closing — And a Quick Disclosure

Two hours with a 100-artboard Adobe XD file. For me, this wasn’t just stopwatch testing — it was the moment a tool I built had to hold up at real scale.

Pixel Fine Converter held up. Better than I expected. Watching 100 artboards line up neatly in Figma, I genuinely thought: “okay, I built something that works.”

The behavior that worked at 100 artboards works the same at 10 or 50. If any of this resonates, the free tier (up to 3 artboards per file) is the easiest place to start.

Related reading

• Migrating from Adobe XD to Figma — A Practical Guide — The full migration process, end to end
• Adobe XD to Figma — 10 Plugins for Migration (Free & Paid) — Plugin comparison
• When Free XD-to-Figma Conversion Stops Being Enough — Free vs. paid decision framework
• Adobe XD: A Practical Usage Guide — XD-side context for designers moving across