Figma has been my main design tool for years now and I genuinely don't have many complaints about it. But the open-source design space has been getting more interesting lately, and you'd kind of be missing out not to at least poke around in it. Penpot is the one I keep coming back to and have already written about more times than is probably reasonable - it's by far the most evolved Figma alternative out there. But it's not the only one, and a few newer ones have caught me off guard recently.

There's been one thing in particular keeping me from ever fully moving off Figma though, and it's not actually about Figma itself. It's the same thing that's stopped me from sticking with any of the alternatives I've tried before. Recently one of them changed that, and I'd say it's the most legitimate reason I've come across so far to actually consider making a move.

Why I rarely try to move away from Figma for good

It's not really about the tool

Most write-ups about Figma alternatives kind of skip past the part that actually matters when you're trying to switch, which is what happens to your existing files. The framing tends to assume you're starting from a clean slate. But anyone who's been designing for any decent amount of time has years of .fig files sitting in their Figma account, and that's the real reason most of these experiments stall out after a weekend of poking and prodding.

.fig is Figma's proprietary format and basically nothing else can read it cleanly. Take Penpot as the obvious example - the closest thing to a migration path requires installing the Penpot Exporter plugin inside Figma, which lets you export your file as a .penpot zip that you then import into Penpot. It works on smaller files but bigger ones can fail partway through, and even when it does work, things like color variables don't always come through. It's also one-way only, so once a file is in Penpot it stays there.

The other usual fallback is just exporting to SVG, but that's even more lossy and equally one-way. Anything dynamic in the design just collapses into whatever it happened to look like at export time, with your components turning into static groups and the rest of the structural information either becoming super fragile or just disappearing. So you've got the visual output but not really a workable design anymore.

For design work where you actually want to continue iterating on what you already started, this file lock-in can actually become a genuine problem. It's not really about Figma being restrictive on purpose either, the format just doesn't go anywhere else cleanly. Or at least, that's what I thought until pretty recently.

This is exactly the problem OpenPencil solves

It reads and writes .fig files natively

The tool I'm talking about here is OpenPencil, it's an open-source design editor that's only been in active development since January this year. So it's still pretty new and not production-ready. But the cool thing is that it's built on CanvasKit and Yoga, and ships as a 7MB Tauri desktop app or in-browser with no install. And the even more interesting part is what it does with .fig files. It uses the same Kiwi binary codec Figma uses internally, so it reads and writes the format natively rather than through a conversion step. The dev team is also openly opinionated about why - Figma is a closed platform with a proprietary binary, and that kind of lock-in could be a risk to design out of long-term.

There are two ways to get a file from Figma over. You can save a local copy of the .fig (File > Save local copy in Figma) and open it in OpenPencil, or copy layers in Figma with Ctrl + C and paste them straight into OpenPencil. Fills, strokes, auto-layout, text, effects, corner radii, and vector networks all come through intact. I've tested this with a bunch of older projects and it kept everything down to the pixel. And once the file's in, you're not staring at a static import. It's a real vector editor with components, instance overrides, design variables, auto-layout via flexbox and CSS Grid, plus a proper pen tool. So you can keep working on the file the way you would in Figma.

The obvious question I had was, well, why not just export the project as SVG from Figma and open that in any vector editor? OpenPencil exports SVG too (along with PNG, JPG, WEBP, JSX with Tailwind, and back to .fig), so the same question applies on its end. The answer is the one from earlier - SVG strips everything that makes the file actually workable. Native .fig is the only format that keeps your components as components and your layout system connected to whatever is behind it. That's what makes the round-trip genuinely useful, instead of a one-way migration that loses something each direction.

The .fig support is just one piece of why OpenPencil's been worth my time…

Everything else that makes OpenPencil worth trying

It has something Figma doesn't, but also lacks something important

The other reason to give OpenPencil a real look is the AI - I covered it in more detail in a separate article so I won't dwell on it here, but the short version is that it has a chat panel inside the editor with around 90 tools wired to it, all operating directly on the canvas. You bring your own API key so you only pay for what you actually use. Figma's equivalent runs on a controlled credit system behind a paid seat, which I've never really loved. OpenPencil also ships an MCP server, so you can hook up your coding agent of choice for headless .fig work too.

Where it's still catching up is prototyping - clickable flows and frame transitions aren't shipped yet, they're on the roadmap, but if that's part of your workflow today, this isn't the tool for it. The plugin ecosystem is also pretty bare right now. These functions will probably drop and evolve as the tool matures, and for now, it's worth a real try on personal projects, just perhaps not time to cancel your Figma seat over it just yet.

The first time that switching from Figma actually felt possible

I'm not going to stop using Figma anytime soon, the missing prototyping alone is keeping me there for now. But this is the first time an open-source design tool has actually felt like a real option for moving my existing work over, rather than starting again from scratch. If the rest of the roadmap lands the way the team is planning, I think the conversation around Figma alternatives genuinely changes.