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Penpot: The Open-Source Figma
- tonyhart7 10mo agoClojure huh???? never see that outside financial system
- boriskourt 10mo agohttps://pitch.com/ https://pitch.com/ is also a huge Clojure visual app. They build UIX [0] which is a really nice interface to React. [0]: https://github.com/pitch-io/uix https://github.com/pitch-io/uix
- b3ing 10mo agoI think Figma stole the grid layout idea from penpot, but it’s common in software to do that
- simulo 10mo agoPenpot took it from CSS.
- diacritica 10mo agoExactly, we took it from CSS and we have said it multiple times. The audacity of Penpot was to actually do it and accept the consequences.
- echelon 10mo agoI was immediately drawn to the emoji in the commit message titles. I love this team. It's so endearing.
- tyleo 10mo agoWhile I agree, I'm not sure it's a team, it looks like mostly one dude :)
- jhancock 10mo agoThats Clojure...one person can look like a whole team ;) couldn't help being cheeky...actually there are quite a few contributors.
- douchescript 10mo agoYeah, finally some lisp!
- 8organicbits 10mo agoI'm seeing several contributors: https://github.com/penpot/penpot/graphs/contributors https://github.com/penpot/penpot/graphs/contributors
- supercaperucita 10mo agohi! Clara from Penpot here :) we're a startup with around 44 employees (https://kaleidos.net/kaleiders https://kaleidos.net/kaleiders) ;)
- pavlov 10mo agoPenpot is a startup that raised $12M a few years back: https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/02/penpot-the-open-source-platform-for-designers-and-their-coders-draws-up-12m-as-users-jump-to-250k/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/02/penpot-the-open-source-pla...
- okhobb 10mo agoFigma is also one dude.
- kekub 10mo ago1.65k employees according to Wikipedia.
- Myzel394 10mo agoI tried to self host penpot a few months ago but the app would crash after a few minutes and not properly show the canvases. So a no for me
- zonghao 10mo agoThey seem to update very frequently; I don't know if it still crashes now — I'm planning to try it myself.
- v3ss0n 10mo agoWhat i tested happned 5 months ago. if the issue exist 1 month ago too it is the same problem. The problem lies with the whole thing is XML and SVG unlike Figma's Canvas/WebASM . The whole thing is unable to scale.
- IseardMi 10mo agoThey are actually working on a new canvas-based rendering engine in order to get away from using the DOM so that should help performance quite a bit. https://community.penpot.app/t/its-time-for-penpot-to-almost-move-away-from-the-dom/6437 https://community.penpot.app/t/its-time-for-penpot-to-almost...
- v3ss0n 10mo agothat gonna be huge effort , looking forward to that.
- zonghao 10mo agoI self-hosted Penpot, and during use I also encountered crashes — but it was my browser that crashed. I’m not sure what caused it (because I was forced to close the page).
- WillAdams 10mo agoFor folks who want a stand-alone desktop release: https://github.com/author-more/penpot-desktop/releases https://github.com/author-more/penpot-desktop/releases
- RamblingCTO 10mo agoThat's a pity: > Penpot Desktop loads the Penpot web application like a browser does. For offline use, the built-in local instance creator can set up and run a local Penpot instance via Docker (per the official self‑hosting guide).
- seu 10mo agoCame here to complain about the same. I downloaded the app, but it needs an online account. What's the whole purpose of making it open source and downloadable, if it doesn't work offline?
- v3ss0n 10mo agoUnstable, very crash prone with just a few users designing 10 plus pages. And a huge memory hog too. I run it on Dedicated server with 64GB Ram , it starts to lag as soon as a 5-6 pages and memory 20GB, lagging out the whole team and then crashes.
- shakna 10mo agoFigma is a huge memory hog, too...
- mitemte 10mo agoFigma has become absolutely shocking in the past few years. The performance is so bad these days. It doesn’t help that almost every designer doesn’t care to split things into more than one document. I’ve seen Figma documents with hundreds of screens.
- okhobb 10mo agoI'm sure if the original developer bothered to show up again he could fix it in a weekend.
- gyomu 10mo ago> It doesn’t help that almost every designer doesn’t care to split things into more than one document That’s how these tools encourage you to use them. If the tool crumbles under its own usage modalities, that’s because it’s poorly designed, not the user’s fault.
- 542458 10mo agoYou don't need to split into multiple files to make large documents manageable, multiple pages works just fine (pages you're not using aren't loaded). But even still, I have absolutely massive pages with ~100 screens on them that work just fine on this base-tier M2 MBA. Honestly given the complexity of the screens involved I feel Figma's performance is pretty reasonable. (Now, library publish and update - that's still unreasonably slow IMO)
- 10mo ago
- vsviridov 10mo agoHave been self-hosting this on Docker/Portainer for several weeks for a few people. Works fine so far.
- Alupis 10mo agoYou don't just have to self-host, they offer a hosted version that's far more reasonably priced than Figma[1]. Their free tier supports up to 8 members, limited to 10GB of storage. The next tier supports unlimited members, and is price-capped at $175 a month, but is limited to 25GB of storage. The final tier is price-capped at $950 a month, with unlimited storage. [1] https://penpot.app/pricing https://penpot.app/pricing
- poly2it 10mo ago> unlimited storage Surely it's not actually unlimited. I wish such claims wouldn't be as common in the industry.
- walski 10mo agoDoes it really matter if in real-world-use 99% of the users never hit any limit? And I cannot blame anyone to use "unlimited" instead of "fair use, with reasonably large limits so that you will (probably) never see any restrictions in your use of the product"
- okhobb 10mo agoHN users want to know if you're allowed to host the whole Internet on it.
- reddalo 10mo agoCreative people could start encoding terabytes of movies inside of Penpot documents.
- tonyhart7 10mo agoThis is why we can't have nice things. People see 'unlimited' and will do everything in their power to 'fact-check' it, forcing the producer to place a 'hard cap' and making everyone's life worse.
- 10mo ago
- givemeethekeys 10mo agoWith the integration of AI, people are using Figma for more than just design. A recent use-case that a friend was gushing about: - Input notes, data into Figma and ask its AI to summarize it into presentation worthy slides with built-in games to keep meeting members engaged, and host them to a website.
- rubenvanwyk 10mo agoWhat? That’s crazy.
- explodes 10mo agoFrom a comment above, this should be, at least partially, doable with MCP: https://github.com/penpot/penpot-mcp https://github.com/penpot/penpot-mcp
- nullzzz 10mo agoIt’s indeed a reasonably usable tool. Gets very slow with large canvases though, so don’t put everything into a single canvas.
- boriskourt 10mo agoPenpot has been invaluable! A very nice system and team. 'On prem' Figma has a lot of unique possibilities.
- aedis 10mo agoLunacy is amazing for me. Very fast and intuitive. Tried Penpot, it was laggy and non usable.
- rc1 10mo agohttps://icons8.com/lunacy https://icons8.com/lunacy Not open source however
- barrenko 10mo agoThank you both, had no idea about existence of lunacy (the app).
- rubenvanwyk 10mo agoI found out about Lunacy because it uses AvaloniaUI; have been a fan of it so far.
- hbcondo714 10mo agoFirst discussed here 3 years ago: Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32851262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32851262 1145 points, 128 comments
- cyberax 10mo agoDo you support MCP? I really want to be able to do conversation-based UI design!
- lejalv 10mo agohttps://github.com/penpot/penpot-mcp https://github.com/penpot/penpot-mcp
- boriskourt 10mo agoAlso, when it comes to UI elements this is my go to vector editor. Keeps things simple, has good ways of handling units and layout. A pleasure designing custom icons, or quick graphical elements. Plus a great export system to keep things organized. There are many things you can do besides full app flows, it doesn't dictate how you use it. Really reminds me of early Sketch and how productive I was with it. Its wild that this is open source.
- arcastroe 10mo agoIt is my go-to vector editor as well. But a large pain point is that text elements cannot be vectorized or converted to paths or shapes. So your designs cannot be exported meaningfully because there is no guarantee that the receiving end will have the same fonts you designed with. Exporting to svg may look completely different when opened elsewhere if your designs have any text elements.
- nirv 10mo agoThis is why I dismissed Penpot as even the simplest tool for quick, basic prototyping. I could tolerate some visual and workflow bugs, but encountering this limitation was a deal breaker.
- comezkandirali 10mo agoWhy don’t they provide a desktop version, similar to software such as GIMP, Inkscape, and others? Do they believe they cannot achieve the desired revenue through crowdfunding? Many projects—most notably Blender—have been highly successful using this approach. It seems unreasonable that an average designer should be required to learn server administration
- wltr 10mo agoThe closest analogy would be Sketch for macOS, which Figma simply copied at first, and then mostly replaced. I would love to see open source Sketch for open source systems.
- Valodim 10mo agoYou mean which Figma replaced in the market, because they were not limited to a native app? This is imo a cautionary tale that being a native app primarily is a bad idea in this year.
- wltr 10mo agoFrom the user perspective Figma is great, and I might say it’s even better. However, all that came from throwing more money into the problem, I believe. Figma just won because they invested unlimited money into this, while Sketch might be self-funding, if I’m correct here. To me this is rather ‘money is a very nice asset to have’ kind of thing.
- mattkevan 10mo agoVery different strategies. Sketch has been self-funding and sustainable from day 1. They have had 20m funding recently, but a fraction of Figma's 749m. Figma lost over 1bn in Q3 on revenues of 274m. Share price is down 70% from IPO 3 months ago. It's also clear from Figma's latest product releases - a grab bag of unfinished AI tools and a laughably shoddy website builder - that their primary audience is investors and not end users. I don't think the market of product designers is large enough to support their valuation and have any hope of making a decent return unless they diversify rapidly into other areas and try to become the next Adobe. Meanwhile Canva and more AI native tools are busy biting at their heels. Speaking as a daily user, I hope they stay around long-term and don't enshittify themselves too much. But I'm not optimistic.
- wltr 10mo agoSo, Java instead of wasm, but open source. While LogSeq is an open source copycat (not really) of Obsidian, I simply can’t stand it. I have tried Penpot a couple of years back, so cannot say anything about it, with the exception that I noticed it’s Clojure. Would love to learn more if someone can comment on that. I guess I’m biased against Java, but I’m not experienced with it, so I may be very wrong on that one. Of course having an open-source Figma around feels empowering, so much it is ingrained into the current dev process.
- nuriaion 10mo agoPenpot is also implemented in Clojure/ClojureScript. ClojureScript is a Clojure Dialect which compiles down to JavaScript. So there is no Java involved on the frontend :)
- wltr 10mo agoPerhaps my bad. I just don’t know Clojure at all, and honestly it might be the first time I’m seeing it, hence the mistake. My quick search prior to my posting returned this: >Clojure is a dynamic and functional dialect of the programming language Lisp on the Java platform. So I thought this is built on Java, or like that. I’d love if someone could explain it in simple terms, as I’d love to drop the ‘Java = bad’ attitude. It’s just that my prior experience taught me to stay away from Java.
- sokoloff 10mo agoThere are a few things to unpack here. Clojure is a lisp hosted on the Java virtual machine (JVM). Subsequently, someone created Clojurescript which is an implementation (of the vast majority of) Clojure that compiles to JavaScript. The majority of Clojure code can run on either. “Java = bad” is also something that you should probably drop. The JVM in particular is a very robust host and there’s a large ecosystem for it. Java the language has also improved over the years, but the JVM is great (and has a large market share as a result).
- Mashimo 10mo ago
- maelito 10mo agoIt's amazing how the design world in my experience loves to use closed-source software, Figma first. The chiasm with the dev world is huge. Penpot's cool in this perspective.
- kleiba 10mo agoIn many industries, you want to use a mix of (a) the best tools available for the job, and (b) what everybody else in the same industry uses. Open vs. closed source is a secondary consideration outside tech circles, and often within.
- closingreunion 10mo agoI feel like we are in a godlden age of foss tools that are reasonably competitive with existing proprietary incumbants. I'm going to try to run an instance for my local creative community. If everyone chips in server costs and donation, then it would be huge savings for everyone.
- supermatt 10mo agoI really wanted to like penpot, but when I tried a few months ago, simply navigating between pages (even on the example documents) was causing parts of the document to change in bizarre ways. I didn't want that level of risk with documents I actually cared about, so continued to use figma. I guess it's time to give it another shot. EDIT: still broken 8 months later :(
- cirelli94 10mo agoI think you should post a issue at this point D:
- supermatt 10mo agoI raised the issue in the forums at the time, with video captures demonstrating the issue(s).
- ogrisel 10mo agoI think it would help to open an issue on github making explicit the following three points explicit in the report: - steps to reproduce from scratch; - what you expected to happen; - what you actually observed (include the screenshot or video capture in addition to a textual description). Otherwise, you might risk your report being ignored due to a silent misunderstanding about the mismatch between your expectations and the actual results.
- supermatt 10mo agoAt the time i wasn't sure if it was PEBCAK, which is why i started a discussion in the forums. As there were no replies, i received no notifications, and so I forgot all about it. If anyone is interested in opening a bug report you can see the issue here: https://imgur.com/a/hZ1ja9o https://imgur.com/a/hZ1ja9o
- stuaxo 10mo agoNot being able view imgur in the UK is a pain.
- tony-john12 10mo ago[dead]
- sreekanth850 10mo agoI tried Motiff and penpot, to be framk Motif was way superior than both figma and penpot in terms of rendering and performance with large design files. unfortunately they shutdown due to lawsuits. Went back to figma.
- lexicality 10mo agoI dunno if I can move to a design platform that doesn't have a silly name. It'd ruin the joy I get every day when I open it.
- wildmXranat 10mo agoInteresting. No idea how it works, but I'm willing to try this out for a quick test as long as I can self host it
- leo_e 10mo agoI'm willing to pay the "performance tax" of the web stack/self-hosting if it means my design files aren't held hostage in a proprietary cloud silo. Figma is fantastic software, but it has become a single point of failure for entire product orgs. If Penpot is "laggy" right now but gives me a docker-compose up guarantee that I own the pipeline, that's a trade-off I'll take. Performance can be optimized eventually (it's code); closed-source licensing terms cannot be optimized by users (it's legal).
- elsa26 10mo agoDo you mean you would want to self-host apps like penpot if it was easy to do so?
- rtaylorgarlock 10mo agoExactly. I'm a little interested to see if perhaps designer's eyes will continue to open to the power of licensing terms and control of their work with the whole AI conversation. The only designers i've heard say they care about open source are on the web side of design.
- singpolyma3 10mo agoI want to like penpot, but on even my beefiest computers it causes the whole system to slow to a crawl when opening anything complex.
- Animats 10mo agoThere's an unofficial desktop version.[1] It lags the hosted version quite a bit. Anyone tried it? [1] https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-desktop-road-to-1-0/7296/27 https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-desktop-road-to-1-0/72...
- John-Tony 10mo ago[dead]
- insane_dreamer 10mo agoFor me the deciding factor is which one has access to the most free packages of already-designed objects (i.e., for making workflows, etc.). How does penpot do in that regards compared with Figma?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- diacritica 10mo agoHi, Pablo from Penpot here. - New rendering engine should fix the performance issues. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciG0U5jJtHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciG0U5jJtHY (older reference https://community.penpot.app/t/its-time-for-penpot-to-almost-move-away-from-the-dom/6437 https://community.penpot.app/t/its-time-for-penpot-to-almost...) Open beta coming in the next few weeks, finally! - Our business model is Open Nitrate (see https://community.penpot.app/t/penpots-upcoming-business-model-for-2025/7328 https://community.penpot.app/t/penpots-upcoming-business-mod...). For the impatient, think of it as a reverse open-core. The current pricing model for SaaS is quite straightforward. The "unlimited storage" for Enterprise on SaaS is fine, believe me. - This is a European startup that was founded in 2011 and pivoted to a product-centric actvity in 2021. We're 45 people. We believe open source is the right social contract. All employees use Linux as their operating system. Yes. - In terms of our vision of AI, I published this whitepaper in August https://penpot.app/blog/penpot-ai-whitepaper/ https://penpot.app/blog/penpot-ai-whitepaper/ If you want to understand how we think about Penpot, design and platforms, read it. - 3 months later, we can demo our MCP server capabilities here https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-mcp-server-showcase-ask-for-help/10040 https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-mcp-server-showcase-as... but see also our internal folder with 1min clips here https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1CCuBqHEevWsp15bYkf3W7CLXLja5R_M_ https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1CCuBqHEevWsp15bY... (my favourite is the flat design to design tokens and back to design). "design as a graph" is our ML-based applied research. We hope to have something cool ready at some point next year. - The whole point of building Penpot was to unite designers and developers. New tools and platforms can play a role. We focused on declarative and semantic design paradigms departing from imperative design paradigms. - We have 1.2M users, 25k Penpot new deployments every month, 30k new SaaS signups every month and a growing community of contributors and partners. Ironically, the early adopters are Fortune 500 companies knowing that a cycle is over and that they need to own their design assets. UI design is now as valuable as code, if not more. - I don't like the "Open-Source Figma" label as we're building a superior tool but I understand it's a nice shorcut for now :) - DM me on Linkedin if you have a couple of millions to spare :P
- dustingetz 10mo agoare you happy with ClojureScript?
- mdtrooper 10mo agoSorry (maybe fall some negative karma points to me) but I tell that Penpot remembers to me to YaCy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy . When a project is awesome but the language made it is the worse (YaCy is made of in java, and PenPot Clojure).
- kinderjaje 10mo agoGreat one! Now someone vibe code Photoshop replacement.