Figma vs Penpot: Open-Source Design Tool Showdown for Development Teams

In 2022, when Adobe announced its $20 billion acquisition of Figma—a deal that ultimately collapsed under regulatory pressure in late 2023—the design community collectively held its breath. For thousands of development teams, the question wasn’t about stock prices or antitrust law. It was simpler: What happens to our design-to-code pipeline if Figma changes its pricing, its licensing, or its roadmap?

That anxiety opened a door for Penpot, an open-source design tool that had been quietly building momentum since its launch in 2021. By early 2025, Penpot had crossed 100,000 self-hosted instances and secured a $9 million Series A round. But is it actually ready to replace Figma in a production environment? Or is it still a promising alternative that belongs in a side project rather than a sprint backlog?

This comparison digs into the practical differences—performance, collaboration, developer handoff, and total cost—to help your team decide which tool deserves a place in your workflow.

The Core Difference: Ownership vs. Ecosystem

Before diving into feature-by-feature comparisons, it’s worth understanding the fundamental philosophical split.

Figma is a proprietary, cloud-based platform. Your designs live on Figma’s servers, and your team’s workflow depends on Figma’s continued existence and pricing structure. The free tier is generous, but professional teams quickly hit the $15–$45 per editor/month price point. For a 50-person team, that’s $9,000–$27,000 annually—before you factor in enterprise plans.

Penpot is open-source (MPL 2.0 license). You can self-host it on your own infrastructure, which means your design files never leave your servers. The software itself is free; you only pay for the hardware and maintenance if you self-host, or a modest per-seat fee if you use their hosted service (Penpot Cloud starts at $5 per user/month).

For development teams, this distinction matters beyond ideology. Self-hosting Penpot means your design data is subject to your own security policies, compliance requirements, and backup procedures. If your organization deals with HIPAA, GDPR, or internal tools that can’t be exposed to third-party cloud services, Penpot’s self-hosting option is a legitimate advantage that no Figma subscription tier can match.

Design Capabilities: Where They Stand in 2025

Figma’s Maturity Advantage

Figma has spent a decade refining its design experience. The result is a tool that feels effortless: vector editing is precise, auto-layout is genuinely powerful, and the component system is robust enough to handle complex design systems like Google’s Material Design or IBM’s Carbon.

Figma also benefits from a massive plugin ecosystem—over 1,000 plugins and widgets. Need to pull real data into a prototype? There’s a plugin. Need to generate accessibility contrast reports? There’s a plugin. Need to sync designs to Jira or Linear? Native integrations exist.

Penpot’s Modern Architecture

Penpot’s key technical advantage is that it’s built on web standards. It uses SVG natively, not a proprietary rendering engine. This means designs created in Penpot are inherently more compatible with the code that developers write. The tool also uses CSS Grid and Flexbox for its layout engine, which means what you design in Penpot maps more directly to how you’ll build it in React, Vue, or Angular.

Penpot has also introduced features that Figma lacks. For example, Penpot’s flex layout and grid layout systems are more sophisticated than Figma’s auto-layout, which can feel limiting when you’re trying to replicate complex responsive behaviors. Penpot also supports design tokens natively—something Figma only added recently and still handles somewhat awkwardly.

However, Penpot’s component system is less mature. Variants, interactive components, and advanced prototyping features are still being developed. For simple UI design, Penpot is competitive. For complex, interactive prototypes with conditional logic and animation timelines, Figma remains ahead.

Developer Handoff: The Real Test

For development teams, the handoff process is where design tools succeed or fail. A beautiful design file is useless if developers can’t extract accurate specs, assets, and code snippets.

Figma’s Developer Mode

Figma’s developer handoff is polished. Developers can inspect any element, copy CSS, Swift, or XML code snippets, and export assets at the correct resolution. The Dev Mode (launched in 2023) adds a focused interface that strips away design tools and shows only what developers need: measurements, spacing, and code.

The downside? Dev Mode is a paid feature. On the free tier, developers can still inspect files, but the experience is less streamlined. On paid plans, Figma’s handoff is arguably the best in the industry.

Penpot’s Developer-First Approach

Penpot’s handoff is built into the core tool, not as a separate mode. Developers can inspect any element, copy CSS, and export SVG assets directly. Because Penpot uses web-native technologies, the CSS it generates is often more accurate than Figma’s—Figma’s CSS output sometimes requires manual adjustment for complex layouts, while Penpot’s output tends to be closer to what a developer would write by hand.

Penpot also supports code generation for multiple frameworks. You can export components as React, Vue, or Angular code, which Figma does not do natively (you’d need a third-party plugin like Anima or Builder.io).

For teams that prioritize clean handoff over design polish, Penpot’s approach is compelling. But it’s not without friction: the inspect mode lacks some of the polish of Figma’s Dev Mode, and the code snippets, while accurate, are less comprehensive.

Collaboration and Real-Time Editing

Both tools support real-time multiplayer editing. Multiple designers can work on the same file simultaneously, with cursor presence and live updates.

Figma’s collaboration is more mature. Comments, mentions, and version history are all well-implemented. The comment system integrates with Slack and other communication tools, which keeps feedback loops tight.

Penpot’s collaboration is functional but less refined. Comments exist, but they’re less discoverable. Version history is available, but it’s not as granular as Figma’s. For small teams, this difference is negligible. For larger organizations where design reviews involve stakeholders from multiple departments, Figma’s collaboration features save real time.

Performance and Infrastructure

One area where Figma consistently struggles is performance with large files. A design file with hundreds of frames and complex components can become sluggish, especially on older hardware. Figma’s web-based architecture means your browser is doing heavy lifting, and there’s a limit to how much optimization can fix that.

Penpot, being self-hosted, has a different challenge. Performance depends entirely on your infrastructure. On a well-configured server, Penpot can handle large files smoothly. On a modest setup, it can be slower than Figma. The upside is that you control the resources—if your team needs more performance, you can allocate more CPU and memory.

Penpot also offers a desktop app (Electron-based) that performs better than the browser version for complex files. Figma has a desktop app too, but it’s essentially a wrapper around the web version.

Cost Analysis: The Total Picture

Let’s break down the actual costs for a hypothetical 20-person team (10 designers, 10 developers).

Figma:

  • Professional plan: $15/editor/month (annual billing)
  • 10 designers × $15 = $150/month
  • 10 developers × $15 (if they need Dev Mode) = $150/month
  • Total: $300/month or $3,600/year

Penpot Cloud:

  • $5/user/month (all features included)
  • 20 users × $5 = $100/month
  • Total: $1,200/year

Penpot Self-Hosted:

  • Software: Free
  • Server costs: ~$50–100/month for a small team (2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM)
  • Maintenance: 2–4 hours/month of a DevOps engineer’s time
  • Total: ~$600–1,200/year in infrastructure, plus labor

Over a three-year period, switching to Penpot could save a 20-person team anywhere from $7,200 (Cloud) to $10,000+ (self-hosted) compared to Figma. For enterprise teams with 100+ users, the savings are even more dramatic.

The Migration Reality

Here’s the honest truth: migrating from Figma to Penpot isn’t a weekend project. Penpot has an importer for Figma files, but it’s not perfect. Complex components, auto-layout constraints, and interactive prototypes often require manual rebuilding. For teams with large, established design systems, the migration cost can be significant.

That said, Penpot’s Figma importer has improved substantially in recent releases. Simple UI files transfer cleanly, and the tool preserves most layer structure and styling. The gap is narrowing, but it’s not zero.

The Verdict: Which Should Your Team Choose?

There’s no universal answer—but there are clear signals for when each tool makes sense.

Choose Figma if:

  • Your team relies on a large plugin ecosystem
  • You need advanced prototyping with complex interactions
  • Your design system is already deeply embedded in Figma
  • You value polished collaboration features and don’t mind the subscription cost

Choose Penpot if:

  • Data privacy or compliance requires self-hosting
  • Your team is cost-sensitive (startups, non-profits, agencies)
  • You want design output that maps more cleanly to web code
  • You’re building a new design system from scratch and don’t have legacy files to migrate

For many development teams, the pragmatic move is a hybrid approach: keep Figma for complex design work and prototyping, but use Penpot for internal tools, documentation, and projects where data sovereignty matters. As Penpot continues to mature—and it’s maturing quickly—the gap is closing. By 2026, the answer might be different. For now, the choice comes down to what your team values more: ecosystem polish or ownership and control.