Penpot: The Open-Source Figma

https://github.com/penpot/penpot

by selvan • 8 months ago

775 207 8 months ago

github.com

b3ing2• 8 months ago

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

simulo• 8 months ago

Penpot took it from CSS.

diacritica4• 8 months ago

Exactly, we took it from CSS and we have said it multiple times. The audacity of Penpot was to actually do it and accept the consequences.

echelon• 8 months ago

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

I love this team. It's so endearing.

tyleo• 8 months ago

While I agree, I'm not sure it's a team, it looks like mostly one dude :)

jhancock• 8 months ago

Thats Clojure...one person can look like a whole team ;)

couldn't help being cheeky...actually there are quite a few contributors.

8organicbits• 8 months ago

I'm seeing several contributors: https://github.com/penpot/penpot/graphs/contributors

pavlov• 8 months ago

Penpot is a startup that raised $12M a few years back:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/02/penpot-the-open-source-pla...

okhobb3• 8 months ago

Figma is also one dude.

Myzel394• 8 months ago

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

zonghao2• 8 months ago

They seem to update very frequently; I don't know if it still crashes now — I'm planning to try it myself.

v3ss0n5• 8 months ago

What i tested happned 5 months ago. if the issue exist 1 month ago too it is the same problem.

The problem lies with the whole thing is XML and SVG unlike Figma's Canvas/WebASM . The whole thing is unable to scale.

zonghao2• 8 months ago

I self-hosted Penpot, and during use I also encountered crashes — but it was my browser that crashed. I’m not sure what caused it (because I was forced to close the page).

WillAdams4• 8 months ago

For folks who want a stand-alone desktop release:

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

RamblingCTO4• 8 months ago

That's a pity:

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).

seu• 8 months ago

Came here to complain about the same. I downloaded the app, but it needs an online account. What's the whole purpose of making it open source and downloadable, if it doesn't work offline?

v3ss0n5• 8 months ago

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.

shakna• 8 months ago

Figma is a huge memory hog, too...

mitemte• 8 months ago

Figma has become absolutely shocking in the past few years. The performance is so bad these days. It doesn’t help that almost every designer doesn’t care to split things into more than one document. I’ve seen Figma documents with hundreds of screens.

v3ss0n5• 8 months ago

Figma can handle unlimited amount of screens in one huge canvas

SoKamil• 8 months ago

very crash prone
And a huge memory hog

On the server side or the frontend side?

v3ss0n5• 8 months ago

What we tested is both. It start to choke on Browser and then server side.

vsviridov• 8 months ago

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

Alupis2• 8 months ago

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

poly2it2• 8 months ago

unlimited storage

Surely it's not actually unlimited. I wish such claims wouldn't be as common in the industry.

walski• 8 months ago

Does it really matter if in real-world-use 99% of the users never hit any limit? And I cannot blame anyone to use "unlimited" instead of "fair use, with reasonably large limits so that you will (probably) never see any restrictions in your use of the product"

tossandthrow• 8 months ago

It likely is as it is not general purpose storage.

Even though your Linux iso's are called "images", they can not be added to a penpot design file - sorry to say.

PaulRobinson• 8 months ago

It's a little like "unlimited holidays". If you turn up on day 1 and then say "Right, I'm off on my unlimited holidays! See you never!" and disappeared, they would stop paying you. There is an implicit fair use clause in all unlimited offers - I know a guy who pushed back on "unlimited holidays" because he didn't want to get penalised in performance reviews and it turns out that in his UK-based org it was 29 days a year, or one day more than the legal statutory minimum.

Firms like penpot are basically saying "look, if you pay us this much, we're not going to put hard quotas on you, just get on with it", but if you then try storing backups of annas archive on it, they are probably going to suggest that you are not operating within the spirit of the agreement, even if you're within the letter of it: fair use will apply.

Some people like to know where they stand. They want hard quotas. So fine, ask them for hard quotas. Ask for the fair use clause and understand it.

Most of us know what it means (it's a soft quota with fair use limitations), and are happy with not abusing the tier and having a bit more freedom, though.

chrisbuc• 8 months ago

Perhaps "uncapped" rather than "unlimited" would be a better term for us to start using

hk__22• 8 months ago

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.

sallveburrpi4• 8 months ago

What would be a better way to fund large-scale open source projects in your opinion?

Please don’t say donations because that doesn’t work for something as complex as the projects you mentioned

Edit: ok there are some where it works like Blender - no idea how they do it though…

CuriouslyC3• 8 months ago

Mattermost is nice but I lost some respect for them for a couple reasons:

1. Slightly worse product than Slack (if just for lack of connect) yet they're charging more for the cheapest license.

2. Gating reasonable OAuth support behind the paid version is crippleware

IMO they're gonna get forked, and they'll deserve it.

Alupis2• 8 months ago

That's the beauty of the open source, self-hosted option then, no? If they radically change pricing one day, pick up your ball and self-host without any limits.

givemeethekeys• 8 months ago

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.

rubenvanwyk2• 8 months ago

What? That’s crazy.

explodes• 8 months ago

From a comment above, this should be, at least partially, doable with MCP: https://github.com/penpot/penpot-mcp

nullzzz• 8 months ago

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

boriskourt7• 8 months ago

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

aedis• 8 months ago

Lunacy is amazing for me. Very fast and intuitive.

Tried Penpot, it was laggy and non usable.

rc1• 8 months ago

https://icons8.com/lunacy

Not open source however

barrenko• 8 months ago

Thank you both, had no idea about existence of lunacy (the app).

rubenvanwyk2• 8 months ago

I found out about Lunacy because it uses AvaloniaUI; have been a fan of it so far.

hbcondo714• 8 months ago

First discussed here 3 years ago:

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

1145 points, 128 comments

cyberax• 8 months ago

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

lejalv2• 8 months ago

https://github.com/penpot/penpot-mcp

boriskourt7• 8 months ago

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.

arcastroe• 8 months ago

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.

nirv• 8 months ago

This is why I dismissed Penpot as even the simplest tool for quick, basic prototyping. I could tolerate some visual and workflow bugs, but encountering this limitation was a deal breaker.

tonyhart77• 8 months ago

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

boriskourt7• 8 months ago

https://pitch.com/ is also a huge Clojure visual app. They build UIX [0] which is a really nice interface to React.

[0] https://github.com/pitch-io/uix

comezkandirali4• 8 months ago

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

wltr10• 8 months ago

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.

Valodim• 8 months ago

You mean which Figma replaced in the market, because they were not limited to a native app?

This is imo a cautionary tale that being a native app primarily is a bad idea in this year.

boriskourt7• 8 months ago

Figma has set an expectation for designers that their projects support multi-user editing by default and are available to clients, teammates and stakeholders without having to install anything. Its hard to go against that kind of productivity in any org.

Penpot provides the same.

b3ing2• 8 months ago

Sketch copied Fireworks, which Adobe abandoned after buying out Macromedia. I knew XD would fail, which is funny because Adobe had the best UI tool but didn’t know what to do with it.

They still are really clueless, Animate has had hardly any updates in 13yrs, yet other animation tools offer a lot of innovative features.

sodimel• 8 months ago

There is in fact an effort to make a desktop application!

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...

comezkandirali4• 8 months ago

I am referring to the convenience of being able to download it from the store and start using it immediately. If it were as effortless as I described, they would reach a much larger number of users

boriskourt7• 8 months ago

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?

[0] https://github.com/penpot/penpot

comezkandirali4• 8 months ago

I am not a software developer. There are many people who think like me...

wltr10• 8 months ago

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.

nuriaion• 8 months ago

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 :)

wltr10• 8 months ago

Perhaps my bad. I just don’t know Clojure at all, and honestly it might be the first time I’m seeing it, hence the mistake. My quick search prior to my posting returned this:

Clojure is a dynamic and functional dialect of the programming language Lisp on the Java platform.

So I thought this is built on Java, or like that. I’d love if someone could explain it in simple terms, as I’d love to drop the ‘Java = bad’ attitude. It’s just that my prior experience taught me to stay away from Java.

Mashimo2• 8 months ago

At least the linked repository contains 0% Java.

Clojure 79.2%

JavaScript 7.2%

SCSS 6.0%

Rust 4.7%

HTML 1.4%

Shell 0.4%

Other 1.1%

Antibabelic• 8 months ago

They are referring the Clojure, which is hosted on the JVM.

maelito• 8 months ago

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.

kleiba• 8 months ago

In many industries, you want to use a mix of (a) the best tools available for the job, and (b) what everybody else in the same industry uses.

Open vs. closed source is a secondary consideration outside tech circles, and often within.

closingreunion• 8 months ago

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.

supermatt15• 8 months ago

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 :(

cirelli94• 8 months ago

I think you should post a issue at this point D:

supermatt15• 8 months ago

I raised the issue in the forums at the time, with video captures demonstrating the issue(s).

yuters2• 8 months ago

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.

supermatt15• 8 months ago

A problem like that should be extremely jarring

Agreed - I don't see how its not glaringly obvious to anyone who uses the app:

https://imgur.com/a/hZ1ja9o

VerifiedReports3• 8 months ago

Same, but the lack of Sketch import was a deal-breaker. It shouldn't have launched without that. Has that been fixed?

Epskampie• 8 months ago

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.

Hopefully they've improved a lot recently?

sreekanth850• 8 months ago

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.

lexicality• 8 months ago

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.

wildmXranat• 8 months ago

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

leo_e• 8 months ago

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).

rtaylorgarlock• 8 months ago

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.

elsa26• 8 months ago

Do you mean you would want to self-host apps like penpot if it was easy to do so?

singpolyma3• 8 months ago

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.

Animats• 8 months ago

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...

insane_dreamer• 8 months ago

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?

diacritica4• 8 months ago

Hi, Pablo from Penpot here.

- 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

dustingetz• 8 months ago

are you happy with ClojureScript?

diacritica4• 8 months ago

I'm afraid it depends on whom you ask. Some devs really like it, some others don't. As we move towards a more multilingual stack, everyone will be happy and the product will shine even brighter. I don't code in ClojureScript (or Clojure) so I can't answer directly. Here's a nice blog post though (on why Penpot chose Clojure) https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-chose-clojure-as-its-l...

The new rendering engine is wasm + rust + skia, in case you're curious.

boriskourt7• 8 months ago

Looking forward to the new rendering engine. Very exciting work!

pentagrama2• 8 months ago

Hi, any plans to release an installable offline desktop version with no account requirement, similar to Inkscape? That would be great.

lejalv2• 8 months ago

Does a docker image work for you? once running, you connect to http://localhost:9001/ and off you go!

AFAIK, no account requirement. Download & install instructions here https://help.penpot.app/technical-guide/getting-started/dock...

tonyoconnell• 8 months ago

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 tony@one.ie

diacritica4• 8 months ago

Thanks for you comment! I might reach out to you for some AI chat, sure! Can I ask you a question? What's the size of your team, the team uses Shadcn UI and Claude Code?

See, when you said "I don't need Figma anymore" I thought "that's why I don't really like the open-source Figma label" because we're building a different UI design tool, more like a platform, that's so close to code (also, open source, self-hostable, etc, etc) that you might want to use Penpot for the same reasons you didn't want to use Figma.

Anyway, thanks for the nice words!

mdtrooper2• 8 months ago

Sorry (maybe fall some negative karma points to me) but I tell that Penpot remembers to me to YaCy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy . When a project is awesome but the language made it is the worse (YaCy is made of in java, and PenPot Clojure).

rnewme• 8 months ago

Just for curiosity, what lang would you have picked for YaCy in 2003, and which one for the Penpot today?

mdtrooper2• 8 months ago

For YaCy python. And Penpot typescript.

kinderjaje• 8 months ago

Great one! Now someone vibe code Photoshop replacement.

Penpot: The Open-Source Figma

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