by supermatt
4 subcomments
- 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 :(
- 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
by boriskourt
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by WillAdams
1 subcomments
- For folks who want a stand-alone desktop release:
https://github.com/author-more/penpot-desktop/releases
- It’s indeed a reasonably usable tool. Gets very slow with large canvases though, so don’t put everything into a single canvas.
by comezkandirali
3 subcomments
- 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
by hbcondo714
0 subcomment
- First discussed here 3 years ago:
Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32851262
1145 points, 128 comments
- 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).
- I think Figma stole the grid layout idea from penpot, but it’s common in software to do that
- Have been self-hosting this on Docker/Portainer for several weeks for a few people. Works fine so far.
by diacritica
4 subcomments
- 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
by closingreunion
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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
- 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...
by boriskourt
0 subcomment
- Penpot has been invaluable! A very nice system and team. 'On prem' Figma has a lot of unique possibilities.
by sreekanth850
0 subcomment
- 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.
by mdtrooper
1 subcomments
- 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).
by singpolyma3
0 subcomment
- 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.
- Lunacy is amazing for me. Very fast and intuitive.
Tried Penpot, it was laggy and non usable.
by wildmXranat
0 subcomment
- 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
- 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.
by lexicality
0 subcomment
- 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.
by insane_dreamer
0 subcomment
- 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?
- 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.
by tonyhart7
1 subcomments
- Clojure huh???? never see that outside financial system
- [dead]
by tony-john12
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- Do you support MCP? I really want to be able to do conversation-based UI design!
- I was immediately drawn to the emoji in the commit message titles.
I love this team. It's so endearing.
by givemeethekeys
1 subcomments
- 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.
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