When Figma raised its Pro plan to $15/editor/month in 2024, the question of whether open-source design tools could finally replace it became urgent for a lot of small studios. We decided to find out by running a real client project — a 40-screen mobile app for a fintech startup — entirely in Penpot, the open-source Figma alternative, for six months. This is an honest comparison based on that experience, not a marketing pitch for either tool. Both have genuine strengths and genuine weaknesses, and the right choice depends on your team, your project, and your budget.
Let's start with what Penpot does well. It's genuinely open-source (MPL 2.0 license), self-hostable, and uses SVG as its native file format — meaning everything you design in Penpot is portable, inspectable, and editable in any vector tool. Figma's proprietary .fig format is opaque; if Figma shuts down tomorrow or raises prices 10x, your designs are locked in. Penpot's SVG-native approach means your design files are just a folder of SVGs you can open in Illustrator, Inkscape, or any text editor. For teams that value data ownership, this is a non-trivial advantage. Penpot also handles real-time multiplayer collaboration as smoothly as Figma — multiple designers editing the same canvas, live cursors, comments, the works.
Where Penpot falls short is polish and ecosystem. Figma's auto-layout is more refined and predictable than Penpot's flex layout. Figma's component variants system is more powerful than Penpot's component system (though Penpot is catching up). Figma's plugin ecosystem has hundreds of useful tools — icon libraries, content generators, accessibility checkers, animation tools — while Penpot's plugin ecosystem is still in its infancy. The Figma community has thousands of free templates, UI kits, and design systems you can copy with one click; Penpot's community templates are growing but still a fraction of the size. For a designer who's used to Figma's polish, switching to Penpot feels like going back two years in tooling quality.
The performance comparison is interesting. Figma's web app is famously fast — it uses WebGL for rendering and feels like a native app even on a 5-year-old laptop. Penpot's rendering is also web-based but uses SVG, which is slower for very large files. Our 40-screen project, with 200+ components and a full design system, started to feel sluggish in Penpot on a 2020 M1 MacBook Air, while the equivalent Figma file stayed smooth. For smaller projects (under 20 screens), Penpot's performance was fine. For a 200-screen enterprise app, Figma is still the better choice — at least until Penpot ships its planned GPU renderer.
The collaboration story is more nuanced. Both tools support real-time editing, comments, and version history. Penpot's self-hosted option is a real advantage for teams that can't send client data through Figma's US-based servers — we worked with a healthcare client whose compliance team required on-prem hosting, and Penpot was the only modern design tool that could accommodate that. Figma's enterprise plan supports SSO and SOC 2 compliance, but you can't run it on your own infrastructure. For regulated industries, government, or clients with strict data residency requirements, Penpot is genuinely the only option.
The pricing math is brutal in Penpot's favor. A 5-person design team on Figma Pro costs $75/month, $900/year. Penpot's self-hosted version is free; Penpot Cloud's free tier covers up to 3 designers and unlimited viewers; the paid tier is $10/editor/month for unlimited projects. For a 5-person team, that's $50/month vs Figma's $75. For a 20-person team, it's $200/month vs $300. The savings aren't transformative, but they're real — and they compound with the data-ownership benefit. For a solo designer or a 2-person team, the free tiers of both tools are equivalent, and the choice comes down to which workflow you prefer.
So what's the verdict? For most professional design teams in 2026, Figma is still the better tool — its polish, plugin ecosystem, and rendering performance justify the cost for any project that's paying designers' salaries. But for three specific scenarios, Penpot is the right choice: first, teams with strict data-residency or self-hosting requirements (government, healthcare, regulated industries); second, large organizations where the Figma bill has gotten genuinely painful (50+ editors); third, design teams that prioritize open standards and want their design files to be portable forever. The gap between the two tools is closing rapidly, and by 2027 the choice may genuinely come down to preference rather than feature gaps. For now, try both on a real project and pick based on your team's actual needs, not on either tool's marketing.