I 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.
I 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.
At 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.
Personally, I do not understand why you think there is a bug from this screen capture alone. Maybe because I am that familiar with penpot and figma, but still, I do not find it obvious.
This is why it's important to describe explicitly the three points in text:
- steps to reproduce;
- what you expected to happen;
- what actual result you observe instead.
Something that might be obvious to you but isn't for others will just be silently ignored most of the time.
EDIT: I now see the problem after reading your other reply above:
This is why it's important to describe explicitly the difference between what you expected and what you observed. I swear I did not see the change in button width before reading the linked comment.
> There's actually a lot more visual changes than that just the button, but I will leave that to the reader as an exercise in spot-the-difference ;)
This is fair. But issues like this will never get my attention in general because I don’t have time to do this exercise - I would much rather have it all spelled out. Even if there are a bunch of related issues they won’t get fixed in a single PR, it likely will be multiple.
I guess my point is that if you really want OSS projects to improve, the issue submitter can’t just ask the maintainer “figure it out”. It totally works this way in the corporate world though (IME).
Edit: I’m sorry to have jumped to conclusions. Leaving my comment up for accountability.
I didn’t ask the maintainer to “figure it out”. I posted a thread in the forum with multiple videos to start a discussion.
People here have stated I should have filed on GitHub, and because I don’t want to link my GitHub to this account I suggested someone else do it.
That was 6 hours ago, and people are still commenting about my lack of a suitable report rather than actually reporting it correctly themselves - as is evident by the lack of a new issue on the github.
> I swear I did not see the change in button width before reading the linked comment.
I didn’t either! I stared at that gif for a few minutes and I couldn’t tell what the problem is (or what to look for). It wasn’t until you said “changing button width” I knew where to focus my attention.
I hate how every time someone even talks about an issue with an open source project, some smart alec replies "well did you raise an issue?" - or worse - "did you send a PR to fix it?".
We are all very aware how bug reporting works. And user criticism of bugs isn't somehow invalidated just because the users didn't go to the sometimes very large effort to report bugs.
I wouldn't have reported this bug either. If the example documents are getting corrupted just by navigating them that indicates that it's just a really buggy project (corroborated by other comments here) that I'm not even going to use, so why would I spend my time working on it?
I opened an issue based on the discussion here and it didn't take much time or effort.
(It was one of those form-based issue templates that requires you to explicitly list out Steps to Reproduce, Expected behavior, Actual behavior, OS version, etc. which IMO causes slightly more friction for anyone who knows how to put together a good bug report, but I've also seen enough poorly-specified issues to know that it's necessary sometimes)
I can see both sides of the dilemma and I don't necessarily like when a maintainer defaults to "open a PR" but asking for a reproducible issue wherever requested is not too much to ask.
With a PR I understand not wanting to put the effort in as it may not be merged. But offering up a reproducible example on the correct forum is the least you could do. If you want the problem fixed that's the best way forward.
Same experience here. I tried it a few months ago and even on simple use I quickly ran into so many bugs & issues I quickly gave up. I'm willing to learn a new UI, but the tool must be reliable, and it simple was not.
I've loaded an example document and do not see what you mean when navigating between pages. A problem like that should be extremely jarring and it is very hard to believe it would be ignored.
Came with receipts lol - hopefully they can repro and fix this but the fact it as omitted for 8 months kind of hints at how little people are using it.
Yeah you can really see the resize comparing the before and after.
https://jpst.it/4KgSB
Unrelated but imgur is basically malware at this point. I had to click through so many layers of nagging popups (including a “don’t support us” button, then a severely low-contrast “view in safari” button on a dialog explicitly designed to get me to accidentally click the app link), then when I finally got to your picture, any sort of interaction with the page whatsoever, including pinch-zooming to see the image, just took me away to a different page altogether.
I sincerely hate imgur and hope the whole site goes bankrupt, and I can’t stand it when anyone links to them.
Yeah, imgur had very simple & humble origins and fostered a surprisingly active, reddit-like community (though I'm sure imgurians would resent that particular comparison), and then holy shit it just turned into a bizarrely bloated overstuffed hodgepodge of fire-garbage. I just looked at the homepage for the first time in forever and—wait, what? "Arcade"?
Yeah can't see that lasting. I wish someone would make one with limited adverts that just pays for the hosting and moderation costs. How hard can it be?
I click to navigate to the "Examples" page (I am gesturing with my mouse to circle around a bit I want you to look at). Then i navigate to "Main components", and back to "Examples" and the content in that area has changed. For example, the button has changed to half the original width.
For now. Mattermost too used to be cheaper than Slack, and Gitlab too used to be cheaper than GitHub. I know the story, "look we did X, the open-source Y" and two years in you now have two versions, the free and the "enterprise" one with exclusive features.
The open core model is fine, but your community edition should be a reasonably complete product. Gitlab is a good example of this. They're not selling access, they're selling convenience.
The features that differentiate to enterprise customers don't matter to small shops anyhow: policy compliance, monitoring, fancy reporting, fine grained access control,etc. Give away tools that are useful for individuals and small teams, and charge for the features that are large team/enterprise related.
You're naive if you think those don't affect small shops.
If you want to do enterprise software, even as a small shop, things like requiring pull request approvals is an absolute must.
Our customers demand it.
Doesn't matter how many employees we have, or how profitable we are. If we want to sell software to most large CPG companies, this stuff is non-negotiable.
Blender did it by facing the industry going cutting edge for a decade or more. They somehow found enough donation to keep the thing as indie would support it just enough. Today blender is arguably better than industry standards, they just have to face the marketing wave but like Wikipedia probably got plenty of support.
These are the rare examples of Linux going through the torrent, typically emerges as proud victorious, with reasonably low profile
> What would be a better way to fund large-scale open source projects in your opinion?
Same price for same core feature set would be a good start. Or lower price for smaller feature set.
Having a premium price for a reduced product means your target audience is limited to people willing to pay a premium for a lesser product to support open source. There are some groups willing to do this, but most simply want a tool that does the job without adding too much to their already huge SaaS budget.
I’m extremely sensitive to core workflow tools for a company these days. It only takes a few days of lost work because some tool corrupted your design or the engineers have to spend a few days working around an issue in a tool to make the effective cost of using that tool extremely high.
Engineering time is expensive. If a tool that costs $20 per person per month causes even one issue per month that potentially produces hours of work and rework (like the spontaneously resizing element a commenter above noted) then the true cost is going to be in the hundreds or thousands of dollars per month in lost productivity.
1. Like Sentry - open source all the features, provide the cloud (hosted) version. Most businesses don't want to self-host, but want a bit cheaper alternative
2. Paid tier, buy once - own forever with 1 year update support. Later you can charge lower price to extend the update cycle.
3. Blender model - donations. Very hard to get it right.
4. Laravel/Next.js model - Open source the tooling, monetize the platform
That's the beauty of the open source, self-hosted option then, no? If they radically change pricing one day, pick up your ball and self-host without any limits.
And that's exactly why they don't do radical changes, because people hate those. They do slow, small and insidious changes over a long time period. And then it isn't as easy to simply "pick up your ball" and be on your way.
It's a little like "unlimited holidays". If you turn up on day 1 and then say "Right, I'm off on my unlimited holidays! See you never!" and disappeared, they would stop paying you. There is an implicit fair use clause in all unlimited offers - I know a guy who pushed back on "unlimited holidays" because he didn't want to get penalised in performance reviews and it turns out that in his UK-based org it was 29 days a year, or one day more than the legal statutory minimum.
Firms like penpot are basically saying "look, if you pay us this much, we're not going to put hard quotas on you, just get on with it", but if you then try storing backups of annas archive on it, they are probably going to suggest that you are not operating within the spirit of the agreement, even if you're within the letter of it: fair use will apply.
Some people like to know where they stand. They want hard quotas. So fine, ask them for hard quotas. Ask for the fair use clause and understand it.
Most of us know what it means (it's a soft quota with fair use limitations), and are happy with not abusing the tier and having a bit more freedom, though.
Hah. I'm a self employed freelancer, but a friend works for (MegaCorp Intl) and every time we go for beers he mentions that he has "Unlimited Paid Time Off". But whenever I ask if that means he could take a few months to hike the Andes with me, he says.... well, no, actually they'd fire him if he took too much time. How much is too much? I ask. Well basically anything that would make them notice his absence, apparently.
And there's a problem in the other direction too - I don't expect people who really can leave for a few months without their absence being noticable to have much job security.
This is a corporate culture thing. I can be in the middle of nowhere for months, and it makes no difference to my clients. No one even notices. I have a phone that always rings, and laptop. I don't have a corporate health plan or a 401k but I don't have to ask permission..
The issue is that if storage is too cheap, people will inevitably mine filecoin on it. Additionally, promising "unlimited storage" and not holding that promise might be a legal liability.
Does 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"
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.
Can confirm. Worked at a startup with some very generous (though not “unlimited”) limits designed to allow for bursts and spikes of usage.
Some people took it upon themselves to try to abuse and saturate the limits to “prove” that we couldn’t handle it.
We could actually handle it, but it wasn’t worth offering it to this small number of users who were trying to prove a point by abusing it to the max without an actual use case. They just wanted to show off on Reddit that the were making our servers suffer.
Travel to high trust societies if you don't get what I mean.
Things would be so much easier if we could expect human decency and ethics, even if there is no law against it, because it goes against our values as humans.
If there is a limit then it isn't unlimited. That's what the word unlimited means.
Either it is unlimited or it is not. If you call something unlimited then there should not be a limit. You cant abuse it, it's unlimited. There is no limit, so you can never go beyond the limit which means you can never abuse it.
That's what unlimited means. If you mean something else then use a different word.
It absolutely is a lie, but you might live in a society where constant lying has been normalized. Personally, I believe that society would be better off if companies were held to the letter of their words.
Because that’s not a lie; under special circumstances, it can be true.
For example, consider a restaurant that offers free rice refills because Asian people love eating rice to fill up. An employee working overtime who really needs it can get as many refills as they want.
Of course, this system falls apart if everyone starts doing it, as the restaurant would need to bake that cost into the price to sustain the business.
But my point is: you can have nice things in society, or you can have a dystopia where people take advantage of each other at every single opportunity.
A dystopia is where people lie about free rice bowls to get people in the door but can't deliver. That's not nice things its taking advantage of a lie and blaming people who take up the offer.
Yes because you build it with trust, I trust you to not ruin this things so everyone can enjoy it
I can understand where you coming from because when I watch YT videos about people that exploit the loophole or game the system, people literally praise them for "beating the game" and this is happen mostly with US where everyone is materialistic
but my counter argument is game theory, where everyone can cooperate for betterment of your environment
In my experience the SaaS unlimited abusers often aren’t even trying to do capitalism things. They’re just abusing the systems for the thrill of it.
They go on Reddit and brag and compete about doing useless things to store files on these services, like a competition. They’re bragging on HN about GitHub tools that force files into a non-file service and have rate limiters tuned to upload right at the server’s rate limit.
It’s not capitalism, it’s people thinking they’re winning points against capitalism by abusing a corporation. Even if that corporation is a small startup trying to offer a product on a small budget.
It might have become socially acceptable to lie when everyone else is, but it is still a lie. Back in my days, you at least had to put an asterisk behind such outrageous claims.
I would say it's the opposite. If there is moral compass and we don't get high-up if someone tries to store their Linux isos on pen pot and gets a ban.
Also, 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.
It 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.
This 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.
Figma 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.
> 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.
You 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)
> 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).
Came 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?
What exactly sucks about it? If it's integrated well enough, why do you care? If anything, it's nice to know it's sandboxed by default.
The installer could pull the images, create the stack and run migrations, then shut down. The app could then up the stack, show a loading screen that would likely be shorter than any Adobe program, then open a webview. When the last window is closed, down the stack.
You wouldn't be able to tell the difference. And what is the difference exactly? Most big apps are composed of multiple components doing IPC, it just so happens to be TCP/IP here.
Not sure if your serious? I don't want a fucking SaaS stack running on my macbook for a small graphics tool? It's about the resource, the power, the battery, the heat, the CPU I care about. I don't want that.
What SaaS stack? The backend and frontend are just doing their job, so they're about as heavy as they would be if it was, let's say, an electron app, and the only other services are minio (a glorified web server) and Postgres, which a "normal" app would probably replace with sqlite and save a hundred or two megabytes of RAM. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if using Postgres was more resource efficient than having your engineers come up with a custom ad-hoc datastore.
All in all, the overhead would probably be equal to two tabs in Chrome.
And calling it a "small graphics tool" is just nonsense. If you're doing UI/UX design, this is THE thing you spend your time in. It's like Premiere for a video editor or AutoCAD for an engineer. If it takes 30 seconds to load and eats half your system memory, who cares, it's what you bought the computer for.
Besides a specific subset of programmers that only use Vim or Emacs, every other professional is used to giving whatever tool they're using to do their job all the resources their computer has. You don't see video editors complaining Davinci Resolve runs a whole PostgreSQL instance in the background.
Good that it works for you. I don't care about it enough to run a bunch of docker images (which need docker to run) which have a bigger impact on performance than two chrome tabs for sure.
davinci resolve doens't need docker. Or any of the other examples you used.
Imagine you're running a local supabase stack, zed, chrome and then try to spawn this thing on a regular laptop. It's not about postgres natively.
> davinci resolve doens't need docker. Or any of the other examples you used.
You're really focusing on the docker part, huh? You know containers are just a four namespaces in a trenchcoat, right? They don't actuall, have meaningful performance overhead... The only waste is some disk space.
I'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).
Exactly.
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.
Why 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
I am not sure what you are really asking here. They have almost 20k commits of frontend and server code [0] over half a decade of development. What would a desktop version of this look like outside of a bundled Tauri/Electron wrapper?
The 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.
From 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.
Very 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.
Figma has set an expectation for designers that their projects support multi-user editing by default and are available to clients, teammates and stakeholders without having to install anything. Its hard to go against that kind of productivity in any org.
Sketch copied Fireworks, which Adobe abandoned after buying out Macromedia. I knew XD would fail, which is funny because Adobe had the best UI tool but didn’t know what to do with it.
They still are really clueless, Animate has had hardly any updates in 13yrs, yet other animation tools offer a lot of innovative features.
As a pro user of Flash (pre-Adobe) I don’t even surprised Animate is dead. ‘Why bother renaming it?’ was my initial thought back then. I was very good at the instrument, but the instrument was so bad (imo it got even worse when Adobe bought Macromedia), that I was among those who expected the inevitable death of the instrument. I’m happily using open source instruments these days, and while not everything is as easy as it was with the Flash (here I mean rather the web, not animation as a whole), the ability to work comfortably and pick my instruments as much as I like, it makes all the difference in the world.
I am referring to the convenience of being able to download it from the store and start using it immediately. If it were as effortless as I described, they would reach a much larger number of users
> If it were as effortless as I described, they would reach a much larger number of users
Almost certainly not. If you need this kind of tool, you'll either self-host it, use the hosted version or use Figma. There are no comparable offline-only alternatives. What users are they using exactly?
I 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).
- Our business model is Open Nitrate (see 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/ If you want to understand how we think about Penpot, design and platforms, read it.
- 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
Hello. I was delighted to see Penpot get a lot of traction when Adobe were going to buy Figma. I'm not a fan of Adobe because they killed so many of my favourite products. I switched from Macromedia (acquired by Adobe) Fireworks to Sketch to Figma and probably would have moved from Figma to Penpot already but I simply don't need Figma anymore. I use Shadcn UI and Claude Code to do my design these days without every having to touch Figma. All I need is a lightweight image editor that can crop and optimise some vectors and bitmaps now and again. I'd like if I had a lightweight design system that syncs designs with my code and the code with my design but I don't really need it. It looks like you are building something like this. Your MCP should be more usable with the new Claude Opus model and their new advanced tool use https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use but it would be useful to package that functionality into a tool that can call servers without needing MCP. Then I would give it to my Claude Code design subagent without worrying about it polluting my context window. I took the time to write this because I really like what you are trying to do and your new Open Nitrate business model is wonderful. I wish you lots of luck. If you ever want to chat about AI feel free to get in touch at tony@one.ie
Thanks for you comment! I might reach out to you for some AI chat, sure! Can I ask you a question? What's the size of your team, the team uses Shadcn UI and Claude Code?
See, when you said "I don't need Figma anymore" I thought "that's why I don't really like the open-source Figma label" because we're building a different UI design tool, more like a platform, that's so close to code (also, open source, self-hostable, etc, etc) that you might want to use Penpot for the same reasons you didn't want to use Figma.
I'm afraid it depends on whom you ask. Some devs really like it, some others don't. As we move towards a more multilingual stack, everyone will be happy and the product will shine even brighter. I don't code in ClojureScript (or Clojure) so I can't answer directly. Here's a nice blog post though (on why Penpot chose Clojure) https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-chose-clojure-as-its-l...
The new rendering engine is wasm + rust + skia, in case you're curious.
I 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.
So, 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.
Penpot 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 :)
Perhaps 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.
There 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).
I 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.
For 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?
Sorry (maybe fall some negative karma points to me) but I tell that Penpot remembers to me to 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).
It'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.
With 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.
I 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 :(
I think you should post a issue at this point D:
I raised the issue in the forums at the time, with video captures demonstrating the issue(s).
I 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.
At 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
Personally, I do not understand why you think there is a bug from this screen capture alone. Maybe because I am that familiar with penpot and figma, but still, I do not find it obvious.
This is why it's important to describe explicitly the three points in text:
- steps to reproduce;
- what you expected to happen;
- what actual result you observe instead.
Something that might be obvious to you but isn't for others will just be silently ignored most of the time.
EDIT: I now see the problem after reading your other reply above:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46064757#46069546
This is why it's important to describe explicitly the difference between what you expected and what you observed. I swear I did not see the change in button width before reading the linked comment.
> This is why it's important to describe explicitly
That is a fair point. I will take it on board when giving people screenshots and videos of bugs in future.
> I did not see the change in button width
There's actually a lot more visual changes than that just the button, but I will leave that to the reader as an exercise in spot-the-difference ;)
> There's actually a lot more visual changes than that just the button, but I will leave that to the reader as an exercise in spot-the-difference ;)
This is fair. But issues like this will never get my attention in general because I don’t have time to do this exercise - I would much rather have it all spelled out. Even if there are a bunch of related issues they won’t get fixed in a single PR, it likely will be multiple.
I guess my point is that if you really want OSS projects to improve, the issue submitter can’t just ask the maintainer “figure it out”. It totally works this way in the corporate world though (IME).
Edit: I’m sorry to have jumped to conclusions. Leaving my comment up for accountability.
I didn’t ask the maintainer to “figure it out”. I posted a thread in the forum with multiple videos to start a discussion.
People here have stated I should have filed on GitHub, and because I don’t want to link my GitHub to this account I suggested someone else do it.
That was 6 hours ago, and people are still commenting about my lack of a suitable report rather than actually reporting it correctly themselves - as is evident by the lack of a new issue on the github.
I’m sorry for jumping at you like that.
No problem :)
> I swear I did not see the change in button width before reading the linked comment.
I didn’t either! I stared at that gif for a few minutes and I couldn’t tell what the problem is (or what to look for). It wasn’t until you said “changing button width” I knew where to focus my attention.
"Content not available in your region"
So, given that Penpot appears to mostly be developed in the EU, you'd need to fix that part first.
I’m not sure what you are referring to. If you mean the video link, I am in the EU and can see it.
Doesn't work in Austria, doesn't work from the UK, doesn't work from Finland.
I am physically in the EU and its working for me.
I just checked using nordVPN for Austria and Finland and it's working there too, so maybe you have some other issue going on?
I am assuming you are in the UK, as Imgur are specifically blocking the UK: https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/41592665292443-Imgu...
Imgur isn't my site, and I don't vote in the UK, so Im not sure how you expect me to resolve that.
This might help you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46081188
Not being able view imgur in the UK is a pain.
I hate how every time someone even talks about an issue with an open source project, some smart alec replies "well did you raise an issue?" - or worse - "did you send a PR to fix it?".
We are all very aware how bug reporting works. And user criticism of bugs isn't somehow invalidated just because the users didn't go to the sometimes very large effort to report bugs.
I wouldn't have reported this bug either. If the example documents are getting corrupted just by navigating them that indicates that it's just a really buggy project (corroborated by other comments here) that I'm not even going to use, so why would I spend my time working on it?
I opened an issue based on the discussion here and it didn't take much time or effort.
(It was one of those form-based issue templates that requires you to explicitly list out Steps to Reproduce, Expected behavior, Actual behavior, OS version, etc. which IMO causes slightly more friction for anyone who knows how to put together a good bug report, but I've also seen enough poorly-specified issues to know that it's necessary sometimes)
"And user criticism of bugs isn't somehow invalidated just because the users didn't go to the sometimes very large effort to report bugs."
Yes, it is.
No it isn't.
Yeah, just let everyone else do the work while you sit back and gripe.
I can see both sides of the dilemma and I don't necessarily like when a maintainer defaults to "open a PR" but asking for a reproducible issue wherever requested is not too much to ask.
With a PR I understand not wanting to put the effort in as it may not be merged. But offering up a reproducible example on the correct forum is the least you could do. If you want the problem fixed that's the best way forward.
> offering up a reproducible example on the correct forum is the least you could do
I suggested someone do that 8 hrs ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46069471
So far no takers. Just people saying what they would do instead of actually doing it :)
I've done it:
https://github.com/penpot/penpot/issues/7850
Thanks for sharing all the details about the issue, and shame on all the armchair critics :D
Thank you :)
Same experience here. I tried it a few months ago and even on simple use I quickly ran into so many bugs & issues I quickly gave up. I'm willing to learn a new UI, but the tool must be reliable, and it simple was not.
Hopefully they've improved a lot recently?
Same, but the lack of Sketch import was a deal-breaker. It shouldn't have launched without that. Has that been fixed?
I've loaded an example document and do not see what you mean when navigating between pages. A problem like that should be extremely jarring and it is very hard to believe it would be ignored.
> A problem like that should be extremely jarring
Agreed - I don't see how its not glaringly obvious to anyone who uses the app:
https://imgur.com/a/hZ1ja9o
Came with receipts lol - hopefully they can repro and fix this but the fact it as omitted for 8 months kind of hints at how little people are using it.
Yeah you can really see the resize comparing the before and after. https://jpst.it/4KgSB
Wow you're right. I've tried again with the same wireframing kit and it happened to me too! That's unbelievable.
Unrelated but imgur is basically malware at this point. I had to click through so many layers of nagging popups (including a “don’t support us” button, then a severely low-contrast “view in safari” button on a dialog explicitly designed to get me to accidentally click the app link), then when I finally got to your picture, any sort of interaction with the page whatsoever, including pinch-zooming to see the image, just took me away to a different page altogether.
I sincerely hate imgur and hope the whole site goes bankrupt, and I can’t stand it when anyone links to them.
Yeah, imgur had very simple & humble origins and fostered a surprisingly active, reddit-like community (though I'm sure imgurians would resent that particular comparison), and then holy shit it just turned into a bizarrely bloated overstuffed hodgepodge of fire-garbage. I just looked at the homepage for the first time in forever and—wait, what? "Arcade"?
Bleh.
Can you suggest a low-effort alternative I can use in future?
https://catbox.moe/
Yeah can't see that lasting. I wish someone would make one with limited adverts that just pays for the hosting and moderation costs. How hard can it be?
I mean nothing is guaranteed to last in the future, but catbox.moe has been around for like a decade already.
https://alternativeto.net/software/imgur/
Here's a comparison of alternatives
I didn’t experience any of that, using an iPad. There were ads above and to the right of the OP video, but it displayed the video with no popups.
I'm glad that at times like these, I switched to Brave browser on all of my platforms (desktop and mobile). I can't recommend it enough.
Also it's not accessible in the UK without workarounds that I'm not going to bother with for that dumpster fire of a site.
strange, I got no pop ups at all
Genuinely asking - what's the issue? I don't see it.
I click to navigate to the "Examples" page (I am gesturing with my mouse to circle around a bit I want you to look at). Then i navigate to "Main components", and back to "Examples" and the content in that area has changed. For example, the button has changed to half the original width.
It's that very bottom button you're referring to, right?
Thats the one I specifically mention, sure, but there are many more changes to the page overall if you compare the before and after.
You 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
For now. Mattermost too used to be cheaper than Slack, and Gitlab too used to be cheaper than GitHub. I know the story, "look we did X, the open-source Y" and two years in you now have two versions, the free and the "enterprise" one with exclusive features.
Mattermost is nice but I lost some respect for them for a couple reasons:
1. Slightly worse product than Slack (if just for lack of connect) yet they're charging more for the cheapest license.
2. Gating reasonable OAuth support behind the paid version is crippleware
IMO they're gonna get forked, and they'll deserve it.
What would be a better way to fund large-scale open source projects in your opinion?
Please don’t say donations because that doesn’t work for something as complex as the projects you mentioned
Edit: ok there are some where it works like Blender - no idea how they do it though…
The open core model is fine, but your community edition should be a reasonably complete product. Gitlab is a good example of this. They're not selling access, they're selling convenience.
The features that differentiate to enterprise customers don't matter to small shops anyhow: policy compliance, monitoring, fancy reporting, fine grained access control,etc. Give away tools that are useful for individuals and small teams, and charge for the features that are large team/enterprise related.
You're naive if you think those don't affect small shops.
If you want to do enterprise software, even as a small shop, things like requiring pull request approvals is an absolute must.
Our customers demand it.
Doesn't matter how many employees we have, or how profitable we are. If we want to sell software to most large CPG companies, this stuff is non-negotiable.
So I just use GitHub.
The workflow I like in Gitlab is protected branches. This lets you go fast on a dev trunk then pull changes over intentionally.
Blender did it by facing the industry going cutting edge for a decade or more. They somehow found enough donation to keep the thing as indie would support it just enough. Today blender is arguably better than industry standards, they just have to face the marketing wave but like Wikipedia probably got plenty of support.
These are the rare examples of Linux going through the torrent, typically emerges as proud victorious, with reasonably low profile
> What would be a better way to fund large-scale open source projects in your opinion?
Same price for same core feature set would be a good start. Or lower price for smaller feature set.
Having a premium price for a reduced product means your target audience is limited to people willing to pay a premium for a lesser product to support open source. There are some groups willing to do this, but most simply want a tool that does the job without adding too much to their already huge SaaS budget.
I’m extremely sensitive to core workflow tools for a company these days. It only takes a few days of lost work because some tool corrupted your design or the engineers have to spend a few days working around an issue in a tool to make the effective cost of using that tool extremely high.
Engineering time is expensive. If a tool that costs $20 per person per month causes even one issue per month that potentially produces hours of work and rework (like the spontaneously resizing element a commenter above noted) then the true cost is going to be in the hundreds or thousands of dollars per month in lost productivity.
There are multiple models:
1. Like Sentry - open source all the features, provide the cloud (hosted) version. Most businesses don't want to self-host, but want a bit cheaper alternative
2. Paid tier, buy once - own forever with 1 year update support. Later you can charge lower price to extend the update cycle.
3. Blender model - donations. Very hard to get it right.
4. Laravel/Next.js model - Open source the tooling, monetize the platform
Sentry isn't open source, it's source available.
That's the beauty of the open source, self-hosted option then, no? If they radically change pricing one day, pick up your ball and self-host without any limits.
And that's exactly why they don't do radical changes, because people hate those. They do slow, small and insidious changes over a long time period. And then it isn't as easy to simply "pick up your ball" and be on your way.
> unlimited storage
Surely it's not actually unlimited. I wish such claims wouldn't be as common in the industry.
It's a little like "unlimited holidays". If you turn up on day 1 and then say "Right, I'm off on my unlimited holidays! See you never!" and disappeared, they would stop paying you. There is an implicit fair use clause in all unlimited offers - I know a guy who pushed back on "unlimited holidays" because he didn't want to get penalised in performance reviews and it turns out that in his UK-based org it was 29 days a year, or one day more than the legal statutory minimum.
Firms like penpot are basically saying "look, if you pay us this much, we're not going to put hard quotas on you, just get on with it", but if you then try storing backups of annas archive on it, they are probably going to suggest that you are not operating within the spirit of the agreement, even if you're within the letter of it: fair use will apply.
Some people like to know where they stand. They want hard quotas. So fine, ask them for hard quotas. Ask for the fair use clause and understand it.
Most of us know what it means (it's a soft quota with fair use limitations), and are happy with not abusing the tier and having a bit more freedom, though.
Hah. I'm a self employed freelancer, but a friend works for (MegaCorp Intl) and every time we go for beers he mentions that he has "Unlimited Paid Time Off". But whenever I ask if that means he could take a few months to hike the Andes with me, he says.... well, no, actually they'd fire him if he took too much time. How much is too much? I ask. Well basically anything that would make them notice his absence, apparently.
Every company is different. I’ve had the “unlimited time off” company where the CEO would go after anyone who took a week or more.
I’ve also had the unlimited time off company where I took an actual month off and it was fine because I got my work done.
And there's a problem in the other direction too - I don't expect people who really can leave for a few months without their absence being noticable to have much job security.
This is a corporate culture thing. I can be in the middle of nowhere for months, and it makes no difference to my clients. No one even notices. I have a phone that always rings, and laptop. I don't have a corporate health plan or a 401k but I don't have to ask permission..
But if you are still reachable you aren’t on time off… I also work remotely from anywhere; doesn’t mean I’m constantly on vacation
The issue is that if storage is too cheap, people will inevitably mine filecoin on it. Additionally, promising "unlimited storage" and not holding that promise might be a legal liability.
I laughed but also hate the fact that the world needs to worry about "file coin" ruining it for us.
Tbh if it wasn’t crypto it would be something else - people always find a way. Tragedy of the commons or something like that
It likely is as it is not general purpose storage.
Even though your Linux iso's are called "images", they can not be added to a penpot design file - sorry to say.
Can penpot import images? Given enough time, anything that can store PNG will become an automated backup backend
Does 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"
HN users want to know if you're allowed to host the whole Internet on it.
This 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.
Can confirm. Worked at a startup with some very generous (though not “unlimited”) limits designed to allow for bursts and spikes of usage.
Some people took it upon themselves to try to abuse and saturate the limits to “prove” that we couldn’t handle it.
We could actually handle it, but it wasn’t worth offering it to this small number of users who were trying to prove a point by abusing it to the max without an actual use case. They just wanted to show off on Reddit that the were making our servers suffer.
I still remember people abusing Claude Code, they even had a leaderboard for who spent the most tokens.
Billions of tokens wasted for nothing
Don’t use the unlimited lie then, I assume.
It's not a lie if no one is abusing it.
Travel to high trust societies if you don't get what I mean.
Things would be so much easier if we could expect human decency and ethics, even if there is no law against it, because it goes against our values as humans.
I understand that, but the phrasing is just wrong. Unlimited is unlimited. Otherwise it’s just doublespeak.
If there is a limit then it isn't unlimited. That's what the word unlimited means.
Either it is unlimited or it is not. If you call something unlimited then there should not be a limit. You cant abuse it, it's unlimited. There is no limit, so you can never go beyond the limit which means you can never abuse it.
That's what unlimited means. If you mean something else then use a different word.
> It's not a lie if no one is abusing it.
It absolutely is a lie, but you might live in a society where constant lying has been normalized. Personally, I believe that society would be better off if companies were held to the letter of their words.
Because that’s not a lie; under special circumstances, it can be true.
For example, consider a restaurant that offers free rice refills because Asian people love eating rice to fill up. An employee working overtime who really needs it can get as many refills as they want.
Of course, this system falls apart if everyone starts doing it, as the restaurant would need to bake that cost into the price to sustain the business.
But my point is: you can have nice things in society, or you can have a dystopia where people take advantage of each other at every single opportunity.
The choice is yours.
A dystopia is where people lie about free rice bowls to get people in the door but can't deliver. That's not nice things its taking advantage of a lie and blaming people who take up the offer.
read again, its not lie
its like giving up your seat when there is pregnant woman on the train
if you really need it then its okay, but I know why you don't believe this because its hard to have this policy in US where everyone weight 200 lbs
Someone will abuse it though, so why bother with the bullshit
You don't build high trust societies with lies
"You don't build high trust societies with lies"
Yes because you build it with trust, I trust you to not ruin this things so everyone can enjoy it
I can understand where you coming from because when I watch YT videos about people that exploit the loophole or game the system, people literally praise them for "beating the game" and this is happen mostly with US where everyone is materialistic
but my counter argument is game theory, where everyone can cooperate for betterment of your environment
Things would be so much easier if there weren’t a super small minority of extremely greedy rich and powerful people who ruin it for everyone…
Alas we decided collectively that money trumps(sic) everything so low trust society is the natural consequence of this.
At its core it’s a spiritual problem. Capitalism is cool but making it a religion has its trade offs.
In my experience the SaaS unlimited abusers often aren’t even trying to do capitalism things. They’re just abusing the systems for the thrill of it.
They go on Reddit and brag and compete about doing useless things to store files on these services, like a competition. They’re bragging on HN about GitHub tools that force files into a non-file service and have rate limiters tuned to upload right at the server’s rate limit.
It’s not capitalism, it’s people thinking they’re winning points against capitalism by abusing a corporation. Even if that corporation is a small startup trying to offer a product on a small budget.
"starbucks says there is no limit on how many napkins I can use but they got mad when I took the whole container, liars"
It might have become socially acceptable to lie when everyone else is, but it is still a lie. Back in my days, you at least had to put an asterisk behind such outrageous claims.
Heck, adding a word like ‘almost’ would make it rather truth.
Creative people could start encoding terabytes of movies inside of Penpot documents.
Perhaps "uncapped" rather than "unlimited" would be a better term for us to start using
I would say it's the opposite. If there is moral compass and we don't get high-up if someone tries to store their Linux isos on pen pot and gets a ban.
Also, 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.
It 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.
This 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.
Unstable, 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.
Figma is a huge memory hog, too...
Figma 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.
> 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.
You 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)
I'm sure if the original developer bothered to show up again he could fix it in a weekend.
Figma can handle unlimited amount of screens in one huge canvas
> very crash prone
> And a huge memory hog
On the server side or the frontend side?
What we tested is both. It start to choke on Browser and then server side.
For folks who want a stand-alone desktop release:
https://github.com/author-more/penpot-desktop/releases
That'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).
Came 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?
The self hosted version needs an account outside your network?
Apparently.
I'm stuck at waiting for a confirmation e-mail.
Which file needs that?
That sounds like an environment variable to set when you start it.
That was it.
I'm in!
Thanks!
> built-in local instance creator
Yes, and? I quoted that part. But why do I want a full backend stack running via docker on my machine for this? That sucks.
What exactly sucks about it? If it's integrated well enough, why do you care? If anything, it's nice to know it's sandboxed by default.
The installer could pull the images, create the stack and run migrations, then shut down. The app could then up the stack, show a loading screen that would likely be shorter than any Adobe program, then open a webview. When the last window is closed, down the stack.
You wouldn't be able to tell the difference. And what is the difference exactly? Most big apps are composed of multiple components doing IPC, it just so happens to be TCP/IP here.
Not sure if your serious? I don't want a fucking SaaS stack running on my macbook for a small graphics tool? It's about the resource, the power, the battery, the heat, the CPU I care about. I don't want that.
What SaaS stack? The backend and frontend are just doing their job, so they're about as heavy as they would be if it was, let's say, an electron app, and the only other services are minio (a glorified web server) and Postgres, which a "normal" app would probably replace with sqlite and save a hundred or two megabytes of RAM. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if using Postgres was more resource efficient than having your engineers come up with a custom ad-hoc datastore.
All in all, the overhead would probably be equal to two tabs in Chrome.
And calling it a "small graphics tool" is just nonsense. If you're doing UI/UX design, this is THE thing you spend your time in. It's like Premiere for a video editor or AutoCAD for an engineer. If it takes 30 seconds to load and eats half your system memory, who cares, it's what you bought the computer for.
Besides a specific subset of programmers that only use Vim or Emacs, every other professional is used to giving whatever tool they're using to do their job all the resources their computer has. You don't see video editors complaining Davinci Resolve runs a whole PostgreSQL instance in the background.
Good that it works for you. I don't care about it enough to run a bunch of docker images (which need docker to run) which have a bigger impact on performance than two chrome tabs for sure.
davinci resolve doens't need docker. Or any of the other examples you used.
Imagine you're running a local supabase stack, zed, chrome and then try to spawn this thing on a regular laptop. It's not about postgres natively.
> davinci resolve doens't need docker. Or any of the other examples you used.
You're really focusing on the docker part, huh? You know containers are just a four namespaces in a trenchcoat, right? They don't actuall, have meaningful performance overhead... The only waste is some disk space.
I'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).
Exactly. 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.
Do you mean you would want to self-host apps like penpot if it was easy to do so?
It’s indeed a reasonably usable tool. Gets very slow with large canvases though, so don’t put everything into a single canvas.
First discussed here 3 years ago:
Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32851262
1145 points, 128 comments
Why 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
I am not sure what you are really asking here. They have almost 20k commits of frontend and server code [0] over half a decade of development. What would a desktop version of this look like outside of a bundled Tauri/Electron wrapper?
[0]: https://github.com/penpot/penpot
I am not a software developer. There are many people who think like me...
The 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.
You 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.
From 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.
Very 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.
Thanks for your input. Personally, I wildly agree, but I couldn’t write it better myself.
Figma has set an expectation for designers that their projects support multi-user editing by default and are available to clients, teammates and stakeholders without having to install anything. Its hard to go against that kind of productivity in any org.
Penpot provides the same.
I’m actually surprised it delivers on the promise. Last time I checked it a couple of years back, it was nowhere near.
Sketch copied Fireworks, which Adobe abandoned after buying out Macromedia. I knew XD would fail, which is funny because Adobe had the best UI tool but didn’t know what to do with it.
They still are really clueless, Animate has had hardly any updates in 13yrs, yet other animation tools offer a lot of innovative features.
As a pro user of Flash (pre-Adobe) I don’t even surprised Animate is dead. ‘Why bother renaming it?’ was my initial thought back then. I was very good at the instrument, but the instrument was so bad (imo it got even worse when Adobe bought Macromedia), that I was among those who expected the inevitable death of the instrument. I’m happily using open source instruments these days, and while not everything is as easy as it was with the Flash (here I mean rather the web, not animation as a whole), the ability to work comfortably and pick my instruments as much as I like, it makes all the difference in the world.
There is in fact an effort to make a desktop application!
Source (& releases): https://github.com/author-more/penpot-desktop
Topic on penpot forum: https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-desktop-road-to-1-0/72...
I am referring to the convenience of being able to download it from the store and start using it immediately. If it were as effortless as I described, they would reach a much larger number of users
https://penpot.app/ you don't have to download it at all :)
Thanks for the information, but I was talking about the advantage of local usability.
> If it were as effortless as I described, they would reach a much larger number of users
Almost certainly not. If you need this kind of tool, you'll either self-host it, use the hosted version or use Figma. There are no comparable offline-only alternatives. What users are they using exactly?
I think Figma stole the grid layout idea from penpot, but it’s common in software to do that
Penpot took it from CSS.
Have been self-hosting this on Docker/Portainer for several weeks for a few people. Works fine so far.
I 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
They seem to update very frequently; I don't know if it still crashes now — I'm planning to try it myself.
I 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).
What 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.
They 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...
that gonna be huge effort , looking forward to that.
Hi, Pablo from Penpot here.
- New rendering engine should fix the performance issues. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciG0U5jJtHY (older reference 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-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/ 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-as... but see also our internal folder with 1min clips here 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
Hello. I was delighted to see Penpot get a lot of traction when Adobe were going to buy Figma. I'm not a fan of Adobe because they killed so many of my favourite products. I switched from Macromedia (acquired by Adobe) Fireworks to Sketch to Figma and probably would have moved from Figma to Penpot already but I simply don't need Figma anymore. I use Shadcn UI and Claude Code to do my design these days without every having to touch Figma. All I need is a lightweight image editor that can crop and optimise some vectors and bitmaps now and again. I'd like if I had a lightweight design system that syncs designs with my code and the code with my design but I don't really need it. It looks like you are building something like this. Your MCP should be more usable with the new Claude Opus model and their new advanced tool use https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use but it would be useful to package that functionality into a tool that can call servers without needing MCP. Then I would give it to my Claude Code design subagent without worrying about it polluting my context window. I took the time to write this because I really like what you are trying to do and your new Open Nitrate business model is wonderful. I wish you lots of luck. If you ever want to chat about AI feel free to get in touch at tony@one.ie
Thanks for you comment! I might reach out to you for some AI chat, sure! Can I ask you a question? What's the size of your team, the team uses Shadcn UI and Claude Code?
See, when you said "I don't need Figma anymore" I thought "that's why I don't really like the open-source Figma label" because we're building a different UI design tool, more like a platform, that's so close to code (also, open source, self-hostable, etc, etc) that you might want to use Penpot for the same reasons you didn't want to use Figma.
Anyway, thanks for the nice words!
Looking forward to the new rendering engine. Very exciting work!
Hi, any plans to release an installable offline desktop version with no account requirement, similar to Inkscape? That would be great.
Does a docker image work for you? once running, you connect to http://localhost:9001/ and off you go!
AFAIK, no account requirement. Download & install instructions here https://help.penpot.app/technical-guide/getting-started/dock...
thank you, i will take a look, but im a designer, not a dev, im afraid that it will be much complex to me than install a .exe file
are you happy with ClojureScript?
I'm afraid it depends on whom you ask. Some devs really like it, some others don't. As we move towards a more multilingual stack, everyone will be happy and the product will shine even brighter. I don't code in ClojureScript (or Clojure) so I can't answer directly. Here's a nice blog post though (on why Penpot chose Clojure) https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-chose-clojure-as-its-l...
The new rendering engine is wasm + rust + skia, in case you're curious.
I 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.
So, 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.
Penpot 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 :)
Perhaps 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.
There 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).
At least the linked repository contains 0% Java.
Clojure 79.2%
JavaScript 7.2%
SCSS 6.0%
Rust 4.7%
HTML 1.4%
Shell 0.4%
Other 1.1%
They are referring the Clojure, which is hosted on the JVM.
In this case it compiles to JS
There'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-1-0/72...
Penpot has been invaluable! A very nice system and team. 'On prem' Figma has a lot of unique possibilities.
I 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.
For 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?
Lunacy is amazing for me. Very fast and intuitive.
Tried Penpot, it was laggy and non usable.
https://icons8.com/lunacy
Not open source however
Thank you both, had no idea about existence of lunacy (the app).
I found out about Lunacy because it uses AvaloniaUI; have been a fan of it so far.
I want to like penpot, but on even my beefiest computers it causes the whole system to slow to a crawl when opening anything complex.
Interesting. 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
Sorry (maybe fall some negative karma points to me) but I tell that Penpot remembers to me to 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).
Just for curiosity, what lang would you have picked for YaCy in 2003, and which one for the Penpot today?
For YaCy python. And Penpot typescript.
It'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.
In 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.
I 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.
Clojure huh???? never see that outside financial system
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
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Do you support MCP? I really want to be able to do conversation-based UI design!
https://github.com/penpot/penpot-mcp
I was immediately drawn to the emoji in the commit message titles.
I love this team. It's so endearing.
While I agree, I'm not sure it's a team, it looks like mostly one dude :)
Thats Clojure...one person can look like a whole team ;)
couldn't help being cheeky...actually there are quite a few contributors.
Yeah, finally some lisp!
Penpot is a startup that raised $12M a few years back:
https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/02/penpot-the-open-source-pla...
I'm seeing several contributors: https://github.com/penpot/penpot/graphs/contributors
Figma is also one dude.
1.65k employees according to Wikipedia.
With 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.
From a comment above, this should be, at least partially, doable with MCP: https://github.com/penpot/penpot-mcp
What? That’s crazy.