The economics of the open source design shift

Penpot reached 250,000 users this month and secured $12 million in funding to drive adoption. While Figma remains the industry default, Penpot signups grew 5,600% following news of Adobe’s $20 billion acquisition attempt. I find the pricing models for large teams difficult to justify when comparing the two. A team of twenty editors using Figma Organisation would pay $10,800 per year, but Penpot Enterprise costs a flat $950 per month regardless of the number of seats in your organization. You should check your current subscription totals before committing to another year of per-seat billing. Penpot currently has 20,000 teams using the product, including groups at Microsoft, Google, IBM, and ByteDance. The parent company, Kaleidos, also has 20,000 stars on GitHub. This latest funding round, led by Decibel, follows a previous $8 million Series A in September 2022 and a $2.6 million investment from Athos. Kaleidos has doubled its valuation with this round. Penpot’s user growth rate stands at 500% as the platform targets the massive developer audience that designers and developers must work with.

Practicality in the design to code workflow

I find the design-to-code workflow in Penpot more practical because the platform uses CSS Flexbox and Grid for all layouts. The new suite of Flex Layout tools helps in building responsive layouts in CSS. Figma relies on a proprietary Auto Layout system that requires manual translation to work in a browser. Penpot also includes native design tokens built to W3C standards, which lets teams export JSON to use in their existing integration pipelines. The platform’s design tokens are built to the W3C DTCG spec, making them more robust than proprietary alternatives. The platform allows users to tap into 16 GB of browser memory for collaborative projects, which surpasses the 2 GB industry standard. The tool uses a dual API system consisting of an RPC API for resource management and a Plugin API for workspace interactions. This approach allows developers to work with machine-readable code instead of proprietary representations. Since developers outnumber designers 10 to 1, this alignment with web standards helps bridge the gap between teams. A single page of Figma files can convert to a Penpot file in about 37 minutes. Figma’s variables system is primarily optimized for use inside its own ecosystem, and it requires extra configuration to use across non-Figma tools. Does the loss of certain complex prototyping features in Penpot outweigh the speed of a web-native workflow?

Security and data residency requirements

Compliance in regulated sectors like finance, healthcare, government, or law enforcement requires strict control over data residency. Penpot allows self-hosting via Docker or Kubernetes to satisfy GDPR and HIPAA requirements. Figma is cloud-only, which prevents it from working in the air-gapped environments that sensitive industries require to protect intellectual property. If your organization must keep all design data on local servers to meet regulatory standards, Penpot is the only viable option. Penpot data uses AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS 1.2+ in transit. The platform also supports SAML SSO and role-based access control to help managers enforce security policies. Because Penpot allows for local deployment, it meets the requirements for industries that cannot use third-party clouds. Data residency refers to the physical location where data is stored, and Penpot allows teams to choose their own data center locations. I would skip Figma for any project where data sovereignty is a legal mandate. The European Commission has issued adequacy decisions for jurisdictions such as the UK, Canada, Japan, and Switzerland, which allows for data to flow from the EEA without needing any additional legal safeguards. Organizations must also perform a Transfer Impact Assessment to verify that the laws of the receiving country do not prevent compliance with Standard Contractual Clauses.