I really wanted to like penpot, but when I tried a few months ago, simply navigating between pages (even on the example documents) was causing parts of the document to change in bizarre ways. I didn't want that level of risk with documents I actually cared about, so continued to use figma. I guess it's time to give it another shot.
Same experience here. I tried it a few months ago and even on simple use I quickly ran into so many bugs & issues I quickly gave up. I'm willing to learn a new UI, but the tool must be reliable, and it simple was not.
I've loaded an example document and do not see what you mean when navigating between pages. A problem like that should be extremely jarring and it is very hard to believe it would be ignored.
For now. Mattermost too used to be cheaper than Slack, and Gitlab too used to be cheaper than GitHub. I know the story, "look we did X, the open-source Y" and two years in you now have two versions, the free and the "enterprise" one with exclusive features.
Also, when it comes to UI elements this is my go to vector editor. Keeps things simple, has good ways of handling units and layout. A pleasure designing custom icons, or quick graphical elements. Plus a great export system to keep things organized.
There are many things you can do besides full app flows, it doesn't dictate how you use it. Really reminds me of early Sketch and how productive I was with it. Its wild that this is open source.
It is my go-to vector editor as well. But a large pain point is that text elements cannot be vectorized or converted to paths or shapes. So your designs cannot be exported meaningfully because there is no guarantee that the receiving end will have the same fonts you designed with.
Exporting to svg may look completely different when opened elsewhere if your designs have any text elements.
> Penpot Desktop loads the Penpot web application like a browser does. For offline use, the built-in local instance creator can set up and run a local Penpot instance via Docker (per the official self‑hosting guide).
I'm willing to pay the "performance tax" of the web stack/self-hosting if it means my design files aren't held hostage in a proprietary cloud silo.
Figma is fantastic software, but it has become a single point of failure for entire product orgs. If Penpot is "laggy" right now but gives me a docker-compose up guarantee that I own the pipeline, that's a trade-off I'll take.
Performance can be optimized eventually (it's code); closed-source licensing terms cannot be optimized by users (it's legal).
Exactly.
I'm a little interested to see if perhaps designer's eyes will continue to open to the power of licensing terms and control of their work with the whole AI conversation. The only designers i've heard say they care about open source are on the web side of design.
Why don’t they provide a desktop version, similar to software such as GIMP, Inkscape, and others?
Do they believe they cannot achieve the desired revenue through crowdfunding? Many projects—most notably Blender—have been highly successful using this approach. It seems unreasonable that an average designer should be required to learn server administration
I am not sure what you are really asking here. They have almost 20k commits of frontend and server code [0] over half a decade of development. What would a desktop version of this look like outside of a bundled Tauri/Electron wrapper?
The closest analogy would be Sketch for macOS, which Figma simply copied at first, and then mostly replaced. I would love to see open source Sketch for open source systems.
- Our business model is Open Nitrate (see https://community.penpot.app/t/penpots-upcoming-business-mod...). For the impatient, think of it as a reverse open-core. The current pricing model for SaaS is quite straightforward. The "unlimited storage" for Enterprise on SaaS is fine, believe me.
- This is a European startup that was founded in 2011 and pivoted to a product-centric actvity in 2021. We're 45 people. We believe open source is the right social contract. All employees use Linux as their operating system. Yes.
- In terms of our vision of AI, I published this whitepaper in August https://penpot.app/blog/penpot-ai-whitepaper/ If you want to understand how we think about Penpot, design and platforms, read it.
- The whole point of building Penpot was to unite designers and developers. New tools and platforms can play a role. We focused on declarative and semantic design paradigms departing from imperative design paradigms.
- We have 1.2M users, 25k Penpot new deployments every month, 30k new SaaS signups every month and a growing community of contributors and partners. Ironically, the early adopters are Fortune 500 companies knowing that a cycle is over and that they need to own their design assets. UI design is now as valuable as code, if not more.
- I don't like the "Open-Source Figma" label as we're building a superior tool but I understand it's a nice shorcut for now :)
- DM me on Linkedin if you have a couple of millions to spare :P
Hello. I was delighted to see Penpot get a lot of traction when Adobe were going to buy Figma. I'm not a fan of Adobe because they killed so many of my favourite products. I switched from Macromedia (acquired by Adobe) Fireworks to Sketch to Figma and probably would have moved from Figma to Penpot already but I simply don't need Figma anymore. I use Shadcn UI and Claude Code to do my design these days without every having to touch Figma. All I need is a lightweight image editor that can crop and optimise some vectors and bitmaps now and again. I'd like if I had a lightweight design system that syncs designs with my code and the code with my design but I don't really need it. It looks like you are building something like this. Your MCP should be more usable with the new Claude Opus model and their new advanced tool use https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use but it would be useful to package that functionality into a tool that can call servers without needing MCP. Then I would give it to my Claude Code design subagent without worrying about it polluting my context window. I took the time to write this because I really like what you are trying to do and your new Open Nitrate business model is wonderful. I wish you lots of luck. If you ever want to chat about AI feel free to get in touch at [email protected]
I feel like we are in a godlden age of foss tools that are reasonably competitive with existing proprietary incumbants.
I'm going to try to run an instance for my local creative community. If everyone chips in server costs and donation, then it would be huge savings for everyone.
So, Java instead of wasm, but open source. While LogSeq is an open source copycat (not really) of Obsidian, I simply can’t stand it. I have tried Penpot a couple of years back, so cannot say anything about it, with the exception that I noticed it’s Clojure. Would love to learn more if someone can comment on that. I guess I’m biased against Java, but I’m not experienced with it, so I may be very wrong on that one. Of course having an open-source Figma around feels empowering, so much it is ingrained into the current dev process.
Penpot is also implemented in Clojure/ClojureScript. ClojureScript is a Clojure Dialect which compiles down to JavaScript. So there is no Java involved on the frontend :)
I tried Motiff and penpot, to be framk Motif was way superior than both figma and penpot in terms of rendering and performance with large design files. unfortunately they shutdown due to lawsuits. Went back to figma.
For me the deciding factor is which one has access to the most free packages of already-designed objects (i.e., for making workflows, etc.). How does penpot do in that regards compared with Figma?
[+] [-] supermatt|4 months ago|reply
EDIT: still broken 8 months later :(
[+] [-] cirelli94|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Epskampie|4 months ago|reply
Hopefully they've improved a lot recently?
[+] [-] VerifiedReports|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] yuters|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Alupis|4 months ago|reply
Their free tier supports up to 8 members, limited to 10GB of storage.
The next tier supports unlimited members, and is price-capped at $175 a month, but is limited to 25GB of storage.
The final tier is price-capped at $950 a month, with unlimited storage.
[1] https://penpot.app/pricing
[+] [-] hk__2|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] poly2it|4 months ago|reply
Surely it's not actually unlimited. I wish such claims wouldn't be as common in the industry.
[+] [-] boriskourt|4 months ago|reply
There are many things you can do besides full app flows, it doesn't dictate how you use it. Really reminds me of early Sketch and how productive I was with it. Its wild that this is open source.
[+] [-] arcastroe|4 months ago|reply
Exporting to svg may look completely different when opened elsewhere if your designs have any text elements.
[+] [-] v3ss0n|4 months ago|reply
I run it on Dedicated server with 64GB Ram , it starts to lag as soon as a 5-6 pages and memory 20GB, lagging out the whole team and then crashes.
[+] [-] shakna|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] SoKamil|4 months ago|reply
> And a huge memory hog
On the server side or the frontend side?
[+] [-] WillAdams|4 months ago|reply
https://github.com/author-more/penpot-desktop/releases
[+] [-] RamblingCTO|4 months ago|reply
> Penpot Desktop loads the Penpot web application like a browser does. For offline use, the built-in local instance creator can set up and run a local Penpot instance via Docker (per the official self‑hosting guide).
[+] [-] leo_e|4 months ago|reply
Figma is fantastic software, but it has become a single point of failure for entire product orgs. If Penpot is "laggy" right now but gives me a docker-compose up guarantee that I own the pipeline, that's a trade-off I'll take.
Performance can be optimized eventually (it's code); closed-source licensing terms cannot be optimized by users (it's legal).
[+] [-] rtaylorgarlock|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] elsa26|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nullzzz|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hbcondo714|4 months ago|reply
Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32851262
1145 points, 128 comments
[+] [-] comezkandirali|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] boriskourt|4 months ago|reply
[0]: https://github.com/penpot/penpot
[+] [-] wltr|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sodimel|4 months ago|reply
Source (& releases): https://github.com/author-more/penpot-desktop
Topic on penpot forum: https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-desktop-road-to-1-0/72...
[+] [-] b3ing|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] simulo|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] vsviridov|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Myzel394|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] zonghao|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] diacritica|4 months ago|reply
- New rendering engine should fix the performance issues. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciG0U5jJtHY (older reference https://community.penpot.app/t/its-time-for-penpot-to-almost...) Open beta coming in the next few weeks, finally!
- Our business model is Open Nitrate (see https://community.penpot.app/t/penpots-upcoming-business-mod...). For the impatient, think of it as a reverse open-core. The current pricing model for SaaS is quite straightforward. The "unlimited storage" for Enterprise on SaaS is fine, believe me.
- This is a European startup that was founded in 2011 and pivoted to a product-centric actvity in 2021. We're 45 people. We believe open source is the right social contract. All employees use Linux as their operating system. Yes.
- In terms of our vision of AI, I published this whitepaper in August https://penpot.app/blog/penpot-ai-whitepaper/ If you want to understand how we think about Penpot, design and platforms, read it.
- 3 months later, we can demo our MCP server capabilities here https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-mcp-server-showcase-as... but see also our internal folder with 1min clips here https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1CCuBqHEevWsp15bY... (my favourite is the flat design to design tokens and back to design). "design as a graph" is our ML-based applied research. We hope to have something cool ready at some point next year.
- The whole point of building Penpot was to unite designers and developers. New tools and platforms can play a role. We focused on declarative and semantic design paradigms departing from imperative design paradigms.
- We have 1.2M users, 25k Penpot new deployments every month, 30k new SaaS signups every month and a growing community of contributors and partners. Ironically, the early adopters are Fortune 500 companies knowing that a cycle is over and that they need to own their design assets. UI design is now as valuable as code, if not more.
- I don't like the "Open-Source Figma" label as we're building a superior tool but I understand it's a nice shorcut for now :)
- DM me on Linkedin if you have a couple of millions to spare :P
[+] [-] tonyoconnell|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] boriskourt|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pentagrama|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dustingetz|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] closingreunion|4 months ago|reply
I'm going to try to run an instance for my local creative community. If everyone chips in server costs and donation, then it would be huge savings for everyone.
[+] [-] wltr|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nuriaion|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Mashimo|4 months ago|reply
Clojure 79.2%
JavaScript 7.2%
SCSS 6.0%
Rust 4.7%
HTML 1.4%
Shell 0.4%
Other 1.1%
[+] [-] Animats|4 months ago|reply
[1] https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-desktop-road-to-1-0/72...
[+] [-] boriskourt|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sreekanth850|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] aedis|4 months ago|reply
Tried Penpot, it was laggy and non usable.
[+] [-] rc1|4 months ago|reply
Not open source however
[+] [-] rubenvanwyk|4 months ago|reply