Figma vs Penpot
Figma and Penpot are both design and whiteboard software. Figma is a commercial product from Figma, Inc. Penpot is open source under MPL-2.0, with 62k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Figma when
- A product team designs apps or websites together and wants designers and developers working from one shared file.
- Pick Penpot when
- Your team wants a Figma alternative it can self-host or use without per-editor lock-in.
Side by side
A browser-based design tool for interfaces, prototypes and design systems, with real-time multiplayer editing, Dev Mode for handoff and FigJam whiteboards.
A browser-based design and prototyping tool for product teams, using open standards such as SVG, CSS and HTML, with components and design tokens.
Per-seat prices have risen, Dev Mode and full seats are billed separately, and files live only in Figma's cloud.
Plugin ecosystem and performance on very large files still trail Figma.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service and desktop app
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Not published
Clojure, ClojureScript, Rust and PostgreSQL
Closed source, sold by Figma, Inc.
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.
5.7k 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.