Penpot

What Penpot actually is

Penpot is an open-source design platform aimed at product teams that need design and code collaboration without handing the entire workflow to Figma. Its own tagline is “The open-source design tool for design & code collaboration,” and the GitHub description calls it “The open-source design platform for Product teams that need scalable collaboration.” That is the lane: Figma-style collaborative product design, but with self-hosting on the table and an open-source license instead of another closed SaaS tab quietly becoming company infrastructure.

Live GitHub stats

Penpot’s GitHub repo, penpot/penpot, has 57,989 stars and 3,873 forks. That is not a niche weekend clone with a heroic README and three abandoned issues; it has real gravity.

The license is MPL-2.0, which is a practical open-source license for a tool like this. It is not AGPL, not “source-available if you squint,” and not one of those licenses where the marketing page says open but the lawyers say absolutely not.

The last push date is 2026-08-02, which is a strong maintenance signal. The primary language is Clojure, which is worth knowing before your team assumes every self-hosted app is just another Node container with vibes. The repo currently has 727 open issues, which says two things at once: people are using it, and there is a real backlog.

What it's good at

Penpot is good at being the open-source answer to the question people keep asking after Figma changes pricing, packaging, AI terms, team controls, or whatever the latest SaaS-shaped inconvenience is. It is not trying to be a generic whiteboard, a project tracker, or a “visual collaboration operating system,” which is usually how software becomes five mediocre products wearing one trench coat. The pitch is tighter: product design collaboration, with a workflow familiar enough for teams already living in Figma-land.

The most important thing Penpot has going for it is that it treats design and code collaboration as the product, not as an enterprise upsell bullet. That matters because design tools sit in an awkward place inside companies. They hold product intent, UI details, brand assets, comments, handoff context, and sometimes the only living record of what the team meant before Jira turned it into sediment. If that system is closed, rented, and admin-controlled by a vendor dashboard, your “design source of truth” is not really yours.

Penpot also has the advantage of being available as both self-hosted software and an official cloud service. That gives teams a sane adoption path. You can try the hosted version without turning your infrastructure team into unpaid design-tool operators, then move toward self-hosting if control, compliance, or long-term cost becomes the point. Figma starts at $12/month on the SaaS side for the comparable replacement target listed here, while Penpot’s official SaaS starting price is $0/month. Free is not a strategy by itself, but it does make the first evaluation meeting less annoying.

There is also a community signal here beyond GitHub. Penpot’s Hacker News top story, “Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform,” reached 1,145 points and 128 comments back in 2022. That does not prove the product is perfect, because HN can get excited about a terminal font if the license is right. But it does show Penpot has been on the radar for builders for a while, not just circulating as this week’s “Figma killer” screenshot thread.

What to watch for

The main tradeoff is operational reality. Penpot has a deploy difficulty of 3 out of 5, which puts it in the “reasonable, but do not assign it to the intern on Friday” zone. The MPL-2.0 license is friendly enough, and the 2026-08-02 last push date suggests active maintenance, but a collaborative design platform is still a serious application to run. Expect to think about storage, upgrades, backups, auth, email, and whether your team actually wants to own the boring parts of a design SaaS. The 727 open issues are not a panic button, but they are a reminder that this is living software with rough edges, not a sealed appliance from procurement heaven.

How to deploy

Penpot supports both self-host and official-cloud usage. For self-hosting, Docker Compose is the common path for this kind of stack, and Penpot is no exception in the practical sense: you should expect containers, environment variables, persistent volumes, and the usual “read the docs twice before exposing it to the internet” routine. Do not paste some random compose file from a blog and call it infrastructure. Use the dedicated deployment guide at /deploy/penpot/ for the current setup path.

Related tools

For more tools in this lane, use the Figma alternatives page: /alternatives/figma/.

That is the right comparison set for Penpot. It should be judged against collaborative interface design tools, not generic drawing apps, whiteboards, or whatever “creative productivity suite” means this quarter.