With the Cloud based stuff You loose some freedom when you work off line. Cloud base stuff can be dangerous if You don't have a good anti virus and cloud based with Adobe was way to intrusive and if Xara does that ,I'll go elsewhere.
@jim64 - I wrote a review of the Adobe Creative Cloud for Communication Arts Magazine about two years ago. As I remember, you download the software that you want to use from the Creative Suite. You are not actually working in the cloud, except on a collaborative basis. You do get updates as they become available and bug fixes, etc. But you don't have to download the entire suite, only the products you need, as you need them.

Xara does not work in a cloud (though it might some day as this seems to be the direction software is heading), but it does communicate with Xara when you log on. I think most software does this now. It is not intrusive and for the most part it goes totally unnoticed. But if there are new templates, clip art, nav bars, etc. this is added to the appropriate galleries in the background.

To the best of my knowledge, Xara is not collecting personal information about you. If a program crashes, it does automatically create a crash report which it sends to Xara who may contact you for details of what happened.