Excalidraw
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Full Review
What Is Penpot?
Penpot is an open-source design and prototyping tool developed by Kaleidos, a Spanish cooperative software company. It launched as a serious Figma alternative at a time when Figma's acquisition by Adobe (later blocked) sent shockwaves through the design community. Penpot runs entirely in the browser, stores designs as SVG natively, and can be self-hosted on your own infrastructure.
Who Is It For?
Design teams who want to own their tools and data, developers who want to collaborate on design without a Figma seat, and organizations with data-sovereignty requirements (healthcare, government, finance) that can't put design assets in a US SaaS.
Key Strengths
- True open source: AGPL-licensed. You can inspect, modify, and host every line of code.
- SVG-native: Designs are stored as SVG, not a proprietary binary format. Handoff to developers is cleaner than most tools.
- Self-hosting: Docker Compose setup is well-documented. Run it on a $5 VPS or your corporate Kubernetes cluster.
- Free cloud tier: Penpot Cloud (penpot.app) is free with unlimited projects, unlimited collaborators, and no seat limits.
- Components & tokens: Full support for design components, shared libraries, and design tokens.
- CSS export: Generates CSS properties directly from design elements, which developers actually use.
Limitations
- Plugin ecosystem is still small compared to Figma's mature marketplace.
- Performance on very large files with hundreds of frames can lag behind Figma.
- Some advanced prototyping features (smart animate, conditional logic) are still catching up.
- Mobile apps don't exist — browser only, though mobile browsers work in a pinch.
Pricing
Penpot Cloud is completely free with no limits on collaborators or projects. The self-hosted version is also free. Enterprise support contracts are available from Kaleidos for organizations that need SLAs.
Verdict
Penpot is the most credible open-source design tool available today. It's not quite at Figma parity, but it's close enough for most product teams — and the combination of no seat costs plus full data ownership is a compelling proposition. For organizations burned by SaaS pricing surprises, Penpot is the obvious answer.
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