Figma revolutionized design by making it collaborative, browser-based, and accessible to entire product teams — not just designers. Its real-time multiplayer editing, robust component system, and extensive plugin ecosystem have made it the industry standard for UI/UX design. Penpot is the open source alternative that brings many of these same capabilities — real-time collaboration, browser-based editing, and a component system — without the proprietary lock-in or escalating subscription costs.

The key differences are in ecosystem maturity and specific feature depth. Figma has years of development invested in advanced prototyping, Auto Layout, variables and design tokens, Dev Mode for developer handoff, and a marketplace of thousands of plugins and templates. Penpot is newer and still building out some of these advanced features, but it offers something Figma cannot: open standards. Penpot uses SVG as its native format, meaning your design files are in an open, portable format rather than locked into a proprietary system. It also supports CSS Grid and Flexbox layouts natively, aligning design output more closely with how developers actually build.

Choose Figma if your team needs the most feature-complete design tool available, with the best prototyping, handoff workflows, and plugin ecosystem. Choose Penpot if open source values matter to your organization, you want to self-host your design infrastructure, or you're working on projects where SVG-native output and CSS-aligned layouts provide a more efficient design-to-development pipeline.