Figma vs Penpot

At a Glance

Interface design has a monopoly question. Figma is the industry default — the tool job listings assume, the format agencies exchange, and since July 2025 a public company trading on the NYSE as FIG. Penpot is the counter-argument: an open-source, SVG-native platform you can run on your own servers without paying per-seat rent. This is not a comparison between two similar products. It is a choice between the deepest tool in the category and the only one you can fully own.

One disclosure applies to both sides of this page. Per Penpot's own terms of service, the contracting entity is "Kaleidos Inc, Sucursal en España, S.L." — a Spanish-registered branch of the US-incorporated Kaleidos Inc. EuropeanStack therefore lists Penpot under our European Project tier — European-born, MPL-licensed, fully EU-self-hostable — rather than as an EU-headquartered company.

Design Capability and Ecosystem

Honesty first: Figma is the deeper, more polished product, and the gap is not small. Its prototyping supports advanced interactions Penpot has not matched. Dev Mode gives developers a dedicated inspection workspace. Auto-layout, variables, and multi-mode design tokens are mature. The Community platform hosts thousands of plugins, UI kits, and templates. Figma has also been shipping AI features at a pace only a company of its size can fund, with metered AI credits now built into every plan.

Penpot covers the core competently. Vector tools, components with overrides, shared libraries, interactive prototyping, and real-time multiplayer all work. Its CSS Grid and Flexbox layout engine is genuinely distinctive, because designers manipulate the same layout primitives developers will ship. But its plugin system is young, its integration list is short, and performance degrades on very complex files. Teams migrating from Figma will notice missing conveniences within the first week.

Edge: Figma, clearly, on capability depth, polish, and ecosystem breadth. Penpot is sufficient for standard product design work; Figma is ahead everywhere else.

Openness and Lock-In

Here the positions reverse. A Figma design lives in a proprietary .fig format on Figma's servers, readable only by Figma. Leaving means exporting through converters and accepting losses. Every year of design-system investment deepens the dependency — which is precisely what a public company's revenue model rewards.

Penpot stores every design as standard SVG. A file made in Penpot is a valid web document that any browser can render and any Git repository can version. The entire platform is open source under MPL 2.0, so the code can be audited, forked, or kept running even if Kaleidos disappeared tomorrow. Self-hosting via Docker takes the exit question off the table entirely: your files sit on infrastructure you control, with no contract required.

Worth noting: the dependency runs one way. Penpot publishes an official Penpot Exporter plugin for migrating Figma files out; Figma offers no equivalent path in.

Edge: Penpot, decisively. Open standards, open source, and self-hosting are structural properties Figma cannot offer without changing its business model.

Pricing and Seat Economics

Figma repriced in March 2025 and went public four months later. A Professional full seat now costs $16 per month billed annually ($20 month-to-month), Organization full seats cost $55, and Enterprise full seats reach $90. Cheaper Dev ($12-$35) and Collab ($3-$5) seat types soften the total, but a 20-designer team on Organization still pays over $13,000 a year. Shareholders now expect that number to grow.

Penpot's cloud is free for teams of up to 8 members with 10 GB of storage. Its paid Unlimited tier costs $7 per user per month, capped at $175 monthly regardless of team size, and Enterprise runs $25 per user starting at $950 monthly. Self-hosters pay nothing in licence fees at any scale — only their own compute. No design tool matches those economics, because no proprietary vendor can afford to.

Edge: Penpot. Figma's per-seat model compounds exactly where Penpot's cap and free self-hosting flatten the curve.

Jurisdiction and Hosting

Figma, Inc. is a US public company, and its default data hosting is AWS in the US. EU data residency exists but is restricted to the Enterprise plan, hosted in Frankfurt with Dublin backups — and it covers file contents only, not metadata, billing data, or activity logs. For most Figma customers, design files containing unreleased products or client work cross the Atlantic as a matter of course.

Penpot's jurisdiction picture needs the same precision. Contracting with Penpot's cloud means contracting with a structure ultimately under US jurisdiction, including CLOUD Act reach, even though the cloud service processes data within EU infrastructure. The self-hosted option is what changes the analysis: your design files never leave infrastructure you control, and no contract with Kaleidos is involved at all. That option exists on no Figma plan at any price.

Edge: Penpot — but specifically self-hosted Penpot. Between the two cloud offerings, Penpot's EU processing beats Figma's US default, while neither entity is free of US jurisdiction.

When to Choose Figma

Choose Figma if design capability is the deciding factor and budget is not. Agencies exchanging files with clients, teams hiring from a Figma-trained talent pool, and organisations whose design systems depend on advanced prototyping or a specific plugin all have rational reasons to pay the default's premium. Figma's polish also lowers training costs: most designers already know it.

Enterprise buyers with EU residency requirements can get file contents hosted in Frankfurt, provided they accept the Enterprise price tier and the exclusion of metadata from that guarantee.

Figma is the right pick if you want the most capable tool in the category and can live with proprietary lock-in and per-seat pricing that trends upward.

When to Choose Penpot

Choose Penpot if sovereignty, openness, or scale economics outrank feature depth. Government agencies, healthcare providers, and financial institutions can self-host it and remove third-party processing from the compliance analysis altogether. Large teams escape per-seat costs that compound annually. Design-to-development teams get SVG output and real CSS layout primitives instead of an approximation layer.

It also suits organisations making a longer bet: that design tooling, like version control before it, ends up on open standards. No other serious design tool is positioned for that outcome today.

Penpot is the right pick if you want a capable, standards-based design platform you can fully own, and can accept a feature set still catching up to the incumbent.

The Verdict

Figma's dominance is deserved. It is the better design tool by most measures a working designer applies day to day, and pretending otherwise would help nobody. The real question is what the default now costs: rising per-seat prices set by a public company, a proprietary format that penalises leaving, and US-hosted data unless you pay for Enterprise.

Figma wins on capability, ecosystem, and polish. Penpot wins on price, openness, lock-in, and — self-hosted — on data sovereignty, while carrying its own asterisk as a US-incorporated entity with a Madrid team. For teams whose work depends on Figma's advanced features, switching today means real friction. Everyone else can pilot the Figma alternative that costs nothing to trial, imports existing files, and cannot raise the rent. Monopolies persist until the alternative is good enough; Penpot is closer to that line than most incumbents' customers realise.

FAQ

Is Penpot as good as Figma?

Not feature for feature. Figma leads on prototyping depth, plugin ecosystem, AI features, performance on complex files, and developer handoff via Dev Mode. Penpot covers the core design workflow well and leads on openness: SVG-native files, an MPL 2.0 codebase, free self-hosting, and CSS Grid layout that matches production code.

Can Penpot open Figma files?

Not directly — Penpot does not read .fig files. Migration runs through the official Penpot Exporter plugin, which runs inside Figma and converts a file into a .penpot package for import. Layers, components, and basic styles transfer; some advanced Figma features do not survive the conversion perfectly.

Is Figma GDPR compliant?

Figma offers a GDPR data processing agreement with Standard Contractual Clauses, so it can be used compliantly. But its default hosting is AWS in the US, and EU data residency is limited to Enterprise customers — covering file contents only, not metadata or activity logs. Organisations with strict residency requirements should verify their plan tier covers them.

Is Penpot really free?

The core is. Penpot's cloud is free for teams up to 8 members, and self-hosting is free at any team size with the full feature set. Paid cloud tiers exist for larger teams: Unlimited at $7 per user monthly (capped at $175) and Enterprise at $25 per user starting at $950 monthly.

Who owns Figma and Penpot?

Figma, Inc. is a US public company, listed on the NYSE as FIG since July 2025 after Adobe's $20 billion acquisition attempt was abandoned in December 2023. Penpot is built by a Madrid-based team, but its contracting entity is a Spanish-registered branch of the US-incorporated Kaleidos Inc. That structure is why EuropeanStack lists it as a European Project rather than an EU-headquartered company.