Figma vs Penpot: A Deep-Dive Comparison for Open-Source Design Tool Adoption in 2025
In late 2024, the design community experienced a collective jolt when Figma announced significant pricing restructuring, with some seats on Enterprise plans seeing cost increases of over 100%. This event, combined with the lingering unease from Adobe’s abandoned $20 billion acquisition attempt in 2023, has pushed many organizations to re-evaluate their design tooling stack. Enter Penpot, the open-source challenger that has been quietly maturing in the background.
The question is no longer “Is open-source design software viable?” but rather “Can Penpot actually replace Figma in a professional workflow?” Based on current feature parity, community momentum, and enterprise requirements, the answer is nuanced. This deep-dive compares the two platforms across critical dimensions to help you decide whether 2025 is the year to make the switch.
The Contenders: A Brief Status Report
Figma remains the industry standard, with over 4 million users and a valuation that peaked at $20 billion. It offers an unrivaled ecosystem of plugins, a robust real-time collaboration engine, and a deeply integrated suite including FigJam (whiteboarding) and Figma Slides.
Penpot, backed by the Spanish startup Kaleidos Open Source, has seen explosive growth since its 1.0 release in 2023. It boasts over 100,000 users and has secured significant funding to accelerate development. Its core differentiator is its open-source license (MPL 2.0), meaning the code is freely available, self-hostable, and modifiable. For enterprises with strict data sovereignty requirements, this alone is a game-changer.
1. Cost and Licensing: The Elephant in the Room
The financial model is the most straightforward comparison point, and it is where Penpot holds an undeniable advantage.
Figma operates on a per-seat, subscription-based model. As of 2025, the Professional plan costs $16 per editor per month, while Organization plans run $45 per editor per month. These costs scale linearly with your team size. For a 100-person design team, that is a significant six-figure annual expense.
Penpot is free. Not “free tier” free, but truly free. You can use the hosted version (Penpot Cloud) at no cost, or you can self-host it on your own infrastructure for total control. There are no user limits, no feature paywalls, and no “editor vs. viewer” distinctions—everyone is a full user.
The Verdict: If budget is your primary constraint, Penpot wins by a knockout. However, “free” has its own costs. You must account for the time your engineering team spends on maintenance if you self-host, and you lose the immediate access to a massive plugin ecosystem that Figma provides.
2. Feature Parity: Where Penpot Catches Up
Figma has a multi-year head start, but Penpot has used its open-source community to close the gap rapidly. Here’s how they stack up on core features:
Design and Prototyping
Both tools offer vector editing, auto-layout, constraints, and interactive prototyping. Penpot’s implementation of CSS Grid is arguably superior to Figma’s, as it allows designers to work with the actual CSS layout model used on the web. This is a massive boon for front-end developers who struggle with Figma’s abstraction of web layout.
Figma still leads in prototyping complexity, specifically with its “Smart Animate” feature and the ability to create advanced, conditional logic within prototypes. Penpot’s prototyping is functional but simpler, lacking the granular control over animation curves and triggers that Figma offers.
Collaboration
Figma’s multiplayer technology is buttery-smooth. Cursors move in real-time with sub-10ms latency, and comments integrate seamlessly into the file structure.
Penpot offers real-time collaboration, but it feels slightly more “classic” in its execution. It lacks some of the granular presence features (like seeing exactly which layer a teammate is viewing). That said, for asynchronous work, Penpot’s file management is solid, and self-hosted instances often feel faster because data isn’t traversing a third-party server.
The Plugin Ecosystem
This is the largest gap. Figma boasts over 1,000 community plugins and widgets, ranging from accessibility checkers to advanced design-token managers. Penpot has a plugin API, but the ecosystem is nascent, with only a few dozen production-ready plugins.
The Verdict: For a design team working on complex marketing sites or app UIs with heavy micro-interactions, Figma is still ahead. For a product team building standard B2B SaaS interfaces, Penpot is 90% of the way there—and the 10% gap is often filled by custom scripts due to its open-source nature.
3. The Developer Handoff: Penpot’s Secret Weapon
This is where Penpot changes the conversation entirely. In Figma, the developer handoff is a one-way street: the developer inspects the design, copies the CSS, and hopes the code is clean.
Penpot is built on the premise of “Design to Code” in the truest sense. Because the underlying engine is web-native (it uses SVG and CSS), the code output is incredibly clean. It natively supports:
- Design Tokens: Penpot has first-class support for design tokens, allowing you to define colors, spacing, and typography as variables that can be exported directly to JSON or CSS custom properties.
- Real CSS Layout: When you use Penpot’s auto-layout, you are literally creating flexbox or grid layouts. The exported code doesn’t need heavy refactoring to work in a React or Vue component.
Figma has improved its Dev Mode, but it still requires a paid “Full Seats” license for developers to access it. In Penpot, developers can access everything for free, making it much easier to involve engineers early in the design process without budget pushback.
The Verdict: If your organization struggles with “design debt” or has a strong developer-led culture, Penpot offers a tangible workflow advantage that Figma cannot match without significant manual effort.
4. Enterprise Readiness and Security
For large organizations, the decision often boils down to security and compliance.
Figma offers SOC 2 Type II compliance, SSO, and granular permission controls on its Organization and Enterprise plans. It is a closed-source, SaaS-only platform, which means your data lives on Amazon Web Services servers managed by Figma.
Penpot offers SSO and is compliant with GDPR, but its primary enterprise draw is self-hosting. You can deploy Penpot on your own Kubernetes cluster or bare-metal server, ensuring that your proprietary design assets never leave your network perimeter. This is crucial for government contracts, defense tech, or finance companies with strict data residency laws.
The trade-off is operational overhead. Running a self-hosted Penpot instance requires a DevOps resource to manage updates and backups. However, for organizations with existing infrastructure, this is a negligible cost compared to the per-seat licensing fees of Figma.
The Verdict: Figma is easier to adopt instantly. Penpot is more secure and flexible for the long term, provided you have the engineering chops to support it.
5. The Community and Future Trajectory
Figma’s community is vast and mature. You can find templates for almost anything, and the user base ensures that hiring designers familiar with the tool is easy.
Penpot’s community is smaller but intensely passionate. It is backed by a strong open-source ethos, which means features are often developed in response to direct user feedback on GitHub. The roadmap is public, and the development velocity has been impressive—the team has shipped major features like Penpot’s grid layout and advanced typography controls within a single year.
There is also the “risk factor.” Figma, despite being the market leader, faces the constant threat of feature creep and pricing changes driven by shareholder pressure. Penpot, as a community-driven project, is less susceptible to sudden commercial pivots.
The Bottom Line: Is 2025 the Year to Switch?
The decision isn’t binary. Here is a pragmatic framework for adoption:
- Stay with Figma if your team is deeply embedded in its ecosystem, relies heavily on a specific set of plugins, and your budget can absorb the cost increases. The collaboration polish and hiring pool are still unmatched.
- Switch to Penpot if you are a startup or a mid-sized company with a strong engineering culture, if data sovereignty is a non-negotiable requirement, or if you are looking to slash SaaS costs without sacrificing core design functionality.
For many teams, the winning strategy in 2025 is a hybrid approach. Use Figma for complex, high-fidelity marketing prototypes, and use Penpot as the source of truth for the actual product UI, leveraging its superior code handoff. The import/export capabilities between the two are good enough to make this workflow viable.
The open-source revolution in design tools is no longer a promise—it is a reality. Penpot has proven that a free, open-source tool can compete on technical merit. The only question left is whether your team is ready to challenge the status quo.