Penpot
FigmaFigma vs Penpot: Which Is Better for Teams Switching to Open Source? (2026)
Quick Verdict
Choose Penpot if...
The clear winner for engineering-led teams that want vendor-independence, self-hosting, and design files that are literally web standards — accept the smaller plugin ecosystem as the price of sovereignty.
Choose Figma if...
Still the best pure design product on the market — choose it if shipping velocity and ecosystem depth outweigh sovereignty, and accept the per-seat pricing trajectory and vendor lock-in as the trade-off.
If your team is evaluating a move from Figma to Penpot, the conversation usually starts with one of three triggers: a price hike, a procurement officer flagging vendor lock-in, or an engineering team that wants design files that behave like real code. After Adobe's attempted acquisition collapsed in 2023 and Figma's IPO conversation accelerated through 2025, that 'what if we got locked in?' question has stopped being theoretical for a lot of design leaders.
This comparison is written specifically for teams considering the switch to open source — not for solo designers picking their first tool. The trade-offs that matter to a 30-person product org migrating two years of design system work are very different from the 'which has more plugins' debates you'll find on most comparison blogs. We'll focus on the things that actually break a migration: component parity, design token portability, real-time collaboration performance at scale, self-hosting realities, and what your developers will and won't get on day one.
The short version: Figma is still the more polished product, with a deeper plugin ecosystem, faster canvas performance on huge files, and AI features that Penpot hasn't matched. Penpot is the more honest product for engineering-led teams — it's built on SVG, CSS, and HTML primitives instead of a proprietary rendering engine, which means designs translate to code with far less translation loss. It's also genuinely free and self-hostable under MPL 2.0, with no asterisks. If 'we own our files and our infrastructure' is a hard requirement, the comparison is already over. If it's a nice-to-have, the rest of this guide will help you decide whether Penpot's current feature gap is small enough to live with. Browse other options in our UI/UX design tools category.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Penpot | Figma |
|---|---|---|
| Real-Time Collaboration | ||
| CSS Grid Layout | ||
| Design Tokens | ||
| Interactive Prototyping | ||
| Components & Assets Library | ||
| Inspect & Code Handoff | ||
| Plugin System | ||
| Self-Hosting | ||
| Dev Mode | ||
| Design Systems & Libraries | ||
| FigJam Whiteboarding | ||
| Figma Slides | ||
| AI Design Tools | ||
| Auto Layout | ||
| Plugins & Community |
Pricing Comparison
| Pricing | Penpot | Figma |
|---|---|---|
| Free Plan | ||
| Starting Price | $7/editor/month | $12/editor/month |
| Total Plans | 3 | 4 |
Penpot- Unlimited files and projects
- Up to 8 editors per team
- Unlimited viewers and developers
- Plugin support
- Self-host option
- Open source (MPL 2.0)
- Everything in Professional
- Capped at $175/month max
- 25 GB storage
- Ideal for 25+ editor teams
- Priority features
- Flat fee regardless of team size
- Unlimited storage
- 90-day autosaved versions
- Dedicated infrastructure
- Advanced access management
- Enterprise-grade support SLAs
Figma- Up to 3 design files
- 3 FigJam boards
- Unlimited viewers
- 30-day version history
- Unlimited files and FigJam boards
- Unlimited version history
- Team libraries
- Shared fonts
- Audio conversations
- Everything in Professional
- Centralized billing
- Org-wide libraries
- Design system analytics
- Branching
- Everything in Organization
- SSO/SAML
- SCIM provisioning
- Advanced analytics
- 24/7 priority support
Detailed Review
Penpot is the answer to the question 'what would a design tool look like if engineers built it?' It's open source under MPL 2.0, built on SVG/CSS/HTML primitives instead of a proprietary canvas engine, and offers genuine self-hosting via Docker — not a marketing checkbox, but a fully supported deployment path used by Google, Microsoft, and Red Hat.
For teams switching to open source specifically, Penpot's appeal is structural: your design files are literal web standards, which means the gap between 'design' and 'production CSS' is the smallest of any mainstream tool. Native CSS Grid support, a built-in design token system, and a code inspect mode that emits genuinely usable CSS make it the strongest option for engineering-led product orgs. The free Professional tier (up to 8 editors per team, unlimited files, plugins included) is enough for most small product teams to never pay anything. The $7/editor/month Unlimited tier caps at $175/month total — a pricing structure that's almost unheard of in the design tool space.
Where Penpot falls short of Figma is polish and ecosystem depth: fewer third-party plugins, less mature AI features, and slightly less performant canvas rendering on extremely large files. For most product teams under 50 designers, those gaps are tolerable. For a team explicitly switching to open source, they're the price of admission — and a price most teams find more than fair.
Pros
- Genuinely open source (MPL 2.0) with full self-hosting via Docker — no feature gating, no usage limits
- Built on SVG, CSS, and HTML so designs translate to production code with minimal translation loss
- Free Professional tier supports up to 8 editors per team with unlimited files — production-grade, not a trial
- Pricing caps at $175/month for the Unlimited tier regardless of team size, killing the per-seat scaling problem
- Native CSS Grid and design token support give engineering-led teams a real bridge between design and code
Cons
- Plugin ecosystem is meaningfully smaller than Figma's, which can break workflows that depend on specific plugins
- Canvas performance on very large files (500+ frames) still trails Figma noticeably
- AI tooling and Dev Mode-style annotations lag behind Figma's 2025–2026 feature releases
Figma remains the polished, default-choice design platform for product teams who measure success in shipping velocity rather than infrastructure independence. Its real-time collaboration is best-in-class, its plugin ecosystem is the deepest in the category, and its 2025–2026 AI features (image generation, prompt-to-prototype, resolution upscaling) have widened the gap on raw productivity for teams that adopt them.
For teams considering the open source switch, the honest framing is this: Figma is the better product today, and the question is whether 'better product' is worth 'permanent vendor dependency.' Figma's pricing scales linearly per editor — Professional at $12/editor/mo, Organization at $45/editor/mo, Enterprise at $90/seat/mo — which becomes a real budget conversation past ~30 designers. Dev Mode is a genuinely good developer handoff product, but it's also a paid add-on that compounds the per-seat math. Variables, modes, and branching are powerful features that, once your design system depends on them, become migration debt if you ever leave.
Figma's strongest argument for staying is workflow gravity: if your team has invested 12+ months building a design system around Figma's specific primitives, the migration cost to any alternative — including Penpot — is non-trivial. For teams switching to open source for sovereignty or cost reasons but who already live deeply in Figma's ecosystem, the realistic path is often a hybrid (Figma for the core system, Penpot for new or sensitive work) rather than a clean cut.
Pros
- Deepest plugin and community ecosystem in the design tool space — most workflows have a plugin for them
- Industry-leading canvas performance on very large files with hundreds of frames and complex auto-layout
- Mature AI features (image generation, prompt-to-prototype, upscaling) that Penpot hasn't matched
- Dev Mode provides polished developer handoff with code snippets, annotations, and ready-for-dev workflows
Cons
- Closed-source, hosted-only — no self-hosting path means full vendor dependency for files and infrastructure
- Per-editor pricing ($12–$90) scales linearly with team size and becomes painful past ~30 designers
- Proprietary file format and Figma-specific features (variables, modes, branching) create migration debt over time
Our Conclusion
Choose Penpot if you need self-hosting for compliance or sovereignty reasons, your engineering team values designs that are literally built from web primitives (SVG, CSS Grid, design tokens), or your finance team has flagged the cost trajectory of per-editor SaaS pricing across a 50+ person org. Penpot's free tier is genuinely usable for production work — not a crippled trial — and its $7/editor/month Unlimited plan caps at $175/month total, which is the kind of pricing math that makes CFOs relax.
Choose Figma if your team's velocity depends on the plugin ecosystem, you've invested heavily in Figma-specific design system tooling like variables and modes, or you need Dev Mode and AI features today rather than 'on the roadmap.' Figma's canvas performance on files with thousands of components is still meaningfully better, and for product teams that ship weekly, that gap is hard to ignore.
The honest middle path: many teams we've talked to are running both. They keep Figma for the active design system and shipping work, while spinning up self-hosted Penpot for client work, regulated projects, or as insurance against future Figma pricing changes. Penpot's import-from-Figma tooling has matured enough in 2026 that this dual-track approach is no longer a maintenance nightmare.
What to do next: before committing, run a two-week parallel pilot. Pick one real feature — not a sandbox file — and rebuild it in Penpot. The friction you hit (or don't) in week one is the most honest signal you'll get. If you're also evaluating broader workflow changes, see our best design and creative tools roundup for adjacent options.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Penpot import existing Figma files?
Yes — Penpot has a Figma import tool that handles most components, frames, and styles. Complex prototypes, advanced auto-layout edge cases, and Figma-specific variables/modes may need manual cleanup. For a team with a mature design system, plan on 2–4 weeks of migration work for full parity.
Is Penpot really free, or is there a catch?
It's genuinely free. The cloud Professional tier ($0) includes unlimited files, plugins, and up to 8 editors per team. The MPL 2.0 license lets you self-host without any usage restrictions. The paid Unlimited tier ($7/editor/month, capped at $175/month total) exists for larger teams that want hosted infrastructure plus support.
How does Penpot handle real-time collaboration compared to Figma?
Both support multiplayer editing with live cursors and comments. Figma still has the edge on raw canvas performance with very large files (hundreds of frames, thousands of layers). Penpot is fine for typical product design work and has closed most of the gap in 2025–2026, but if your team regularly works in 500+ frame files, test performance before committing.
What are the realistic costs of self-hosting Penpot?
Penpot ships as Docker containers and runs comfortably on a small VM (4–8 GB RAM for a 20-person team). Realistic monthly infrastructure cost is $20–80 depending on cloud provider, plus the engineering time to set up backups, monitoring, and TLS. Most teams break even on cost vs. Figma Professional within the first month.
Does Penpot have Dev Mode and developer handoff?
Yes. Penpot's inspect mode gives developers CSS, SVG, and layout specs, and because the underlying format is web standards, the extracted code is more directly usable than Figma's. Penpot doesn't yet match Figma Dev Mode's annotations and ready-for-dev workflow polish, but the core handoff capability is there.
What's the biggest risk of switching from Figma to Penpot?
Plugin and integration gaps. Figma's plugin ecosystem is enormous, and if your workflow depends on specific plugins (e.g., specific stock asset libraries, advanced icon tools, niche AI features), check Penpot's plugin directory before committing. The second risk is cultural — designers used to Figma's UX may push back on Penpot's slightly different interaction model during the first month.