Canva vs Penpot
Canva and Penpot are both design and whiteboard software. Canva is a commercial product from Canva. Penpot is open source under MPL-2.0, with 62k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Canva when
- Non-designers in a small business or marketing team need to produce on-brand graphics quickly.
- Pick Penpot when
- Your team wants a Figma alternative it can self-host or use without per-editor lock-in.
Side by side
Template-based design for social posts, presentations, documents, print and video, with brand kits and AI image tools.
A browser-based design and prototyping tool for product teams, using open standards such as SVG, CSS and HTML, with components and design tokens.
Designs are hard to move out of Canva in editable form, and team pricing has risen sharply.
Plugin ecosystem and performance on very large files still trail Figma.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Not published
Clojure, ClojureScript, Rust and PostgreSQL
Closed source, sold by Canva
Open source, MPL-2.0 (weak copyleft)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can use it inside a product you sell; changes you make to its own files must be shared.
18k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
62k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 11 years ago, latest release 2.18.5.
Other comparisons
More design and whiteboard tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.