Penpot: The Open-Source Figma

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.

EDIT: still broken 8 months later :(

You don't just have to self-host, they offer a hosted version that's far more reasonably priced than Figma[1].

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

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.

Unstable, very crash prone with just a few users designing 10 plus pages. And a huge memory hog too.

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.

There's an unofficial desktop version.[1] It lags the hosted version quite a bit. Anyone tried it?

[1] https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-desktop-road-to-1-0/72...

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).

For folks who want a stand-alone desktop release:

https://github.com/author-more/penpot-desktop/releases

It’s indeed a reasonably usable tool. Gets very slow with large canvases though, so don’t put everything into a single canvas.

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 think Figma stole the grid layout idea from penpot, but it’s common in software to do that

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.

I want to like penpot, but on even my beefiest computers it causes the whole system to slow to a crawl when opening anything complex.

I tried to self host penpot a few months ago but the app would crash after a few minutes and not properly show the canvases. So a no for me

Have been self-hosting this on Docker/Portainer for several weeks for a few people. Works fine so far.

First discussed here 3 years ago:

Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32851262

1145 points, 128 comments

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.

Interesting. No idea how it works, but I'm willing to try this out for a quick test as long as I can self host it

Penpot has been invaluable! A very nice system and team. 'On prem' Figma has a lot of unique possibilities.

Lunacy is amazing for me. Very fast and intuitive.

Tried Penpot, it was laggy and non usable.

I dunno if I can move to a design platform that doesn't have a silly name. It'd ruin the joy I get every day when I open it.

It's amazing how the design world in my experience loves to use closed-source software, Figma first. The chiasm with the dev world is huge. Penpot's cool in this perspective.

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.

Clojure huh???? never see that outside financial system

[dead]

[dead]

Do you support MCP? I really want to be able to do conversation-based UI design!

I was immediately drawn to the emoji in the commit message titles.

I love this team. It's so endearing.

With the integration of AI, people are using Figma for more than just design.

A recent use-case that a friend was gushing about:

- Input notes, data into Figma and ask its AI to summarize it into presentation worthy slides with built-in games to keep meeting members engaged, and host them to a website.