Adaptive vs responsive design

Responsive design

In its simplest definition, responsive design uses just one layout for a web page and “responsively” adjusts to better fit the user’s screen, whether it’s a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, or a mobile phone.

Adaptive design

In layman’s terms, adaptive design creates different fixed layouts that adapt to specific screen sizes. In short, you have multiple versions of a web page to fit someone’s device, as opposed to a single, static page which looks the same (and reorders or resizes content) across all devices.