Penpot advances design and developer collaboration

New tools for teams

Penpot recently launched Penpot Enterprise, a paid plan that adds advanced permissions, identity provider choices, and an admin panel. The update also includes stroke-to-path functionality and new drawing tools in the toolbar. Users now preview font families within the font selector list. This release follows $12 million in equity funding to support 250,000 users and 20,000 GitHub stars. While the platform remains free for others, the new Enterprise tier provides control for organizations that need to govern workflows or content. The company also saw sign-ups grow 5,600% following news of Adobe’s move to acquire Figma. This momentum helps the startup scale its development of tools that support both designers and developers. Such adoption includes 10,000 companies including Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Tencent, ByteDance, and Mozilla. Pablo Ruiz-Muzquiz, the CEO, notes that developers outnumber designers 10 to 1, making the collaboration between these two groups a major opportunity. The $12 million round was led by Decibel, with participation from Athos and individuals such as Eric Wittman and Grace Francisco. Before the Adobe news, sign-ups grew at 40% per month, but that figure jumped to 5,600% and has stayed consistent. On-premise deployments grew 400% during this period.

Cost and layout differences

Penpot manages design systems through native design tokens based on the W3C DTCG specification. This allows users to import and export JSON files without needing third-party plugins. Unlike Figma, which often requires paid plugins for advanced token management, Penpot builds these features into the core platform. For teams managing complex layouts, the Flex Layout tools provide CSS-based responsive design. A new tool also allows users to tap browser memory to boost memory caches for collaborative projects up to 16 GB.

You probably know that Figma paywalls features like theming and advanced token workflows. Penpot provides these capabilities for free. For agencies, Penpot allows adding unlimited seats without increasing the bill, which helps manage costs when scaling project teams. Penpot Enterprise pricing starts at $950 per month for organizations that need higher levels of control. Figma uses a per-seat subscription model where a full seat costs $90 per user. Figma’s professional tier for teams starts at $15 per editor per month once a team exceeds three files. Sketch sits between these options, costing $9 per month or $99 per year. Penpot’s 250,000 users show a user growth rate of 500%. There are now more than 20,000 teams using the product, including groups at Mozilla, Accenture, ByteDance, IBM, Google, and Microsoft.

Figma remains the leader for teams needing high-speed, real-time collaboration on massive files with hundreds of frames. Sketch continues to serve Mac-only teams that want native performance and offline work. For organizations that need to manage large, distributed teams across different geographies, the ability to self-host Penpot via Docker or Kubernetes provides the level of data sovereignty that proprietary cloud-only tools cannot match.

Performance and handoff realities

Penpot bridges the gap between design and engineering by using open web standards like SVG, CSS, and HTML. Designers use actual CSS Flexbox and Grid, which matches the code developers write in production environments. This capability allows for a more direct transition from design to code. However, Penpot relies on ClojureScript and DOM elements, which can cause lag when moving elements or handling complex, multi-layered files. Figma uses C++ and WebAssembly to maintain higher performance on large files with many objects.

The Inspect tab in Penpot generates code directly from selected elements without requiring a paid developer seat. This provides a free way to handle code inspection, whereas Figma charges for its Dev Mode. Penpot also allows for easy migration via a dedicated plugin that converts Figma files into Penpot files. While the plugin handles components and auto layout, users may still need to fix minor details manually. The conversion process for a single page can take roughly 40 minutes. Does the benefit of open standards outweigh the speed of proprietary engines?