Illustrator and macOS Big Sur (version 11)

Illustrator 25.x and Illustrator 24.x work with macOS 11 (Big Sur), but may have some compatibility issues. 

Adobe strongly recommends that customers do their own testing on a non-production partition to ensure that new operating systems work with their current hardware and drivers (printing, and so forth). 

If you do encounter issues not already documented here, feel free to report them on our feedback site.

Are legacy versions of Illustrator compatible with macOS Big Sur?

No, legacy/perpetual versions of Illustrator were not designed or tested to work on macOS 11 (Big Sur). 

Adobe does not recommend that customers using old versions of Illustrator upgrade to macOS Big Sur.

Illustrator version 23.x and earlier are not available in the ‘Older versions’ list within the Creative Cloud desktop app.

Before upgrading to macOS Big Sur, you may uninstall the older versions as the uninstaller will not work after upgrading. If you have already upgraded to macOS Big Sur, you can use the Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool to uninstall older versions.

Apple silicon compatibility

Illustrator now runs natively on Apple computers using the Apple silicon M1 chip with 1.5X the speed of similarly configured previous generation systems.  
Some of the features like Adobe Bridge in Illustrator menus, DXF and DWG file format support, and legacy third-party (Intel-only) plugins, are not available in the native mode. However to avail these features you have to run Illustrator in Rosetta emulation mode.

For more details, see Illustrator for Apple silicon.

For compatibility issues in Illustrator when using previous versions of macOS, see the workarounds listed in macOS High Sierra and macOS Mojave.