There's never been any real beef on my end with Figma. Most of my personal design experiments as well as all my coursework lives in it, and if someone handed me a Pro seat I'd probably take it. But for whatever tool I'm using, I'm equally poking around in its open-source equivalents. Beyond escaping a vendor lock-in and proprietary formats and all that, open-source also tends to have weird little ideas in them that the bigger tools never bother with, because the people building them aren't always optimising for retention.

Design also has way more genuinely usable open-source options than any other category worth hunting in - more than video editing or note-taking in my opinion. The past couple of weeks, I've uncovered several new (new to me, at least) open source UX design tools, and I wanted to see if any of them could actually hold up for real work beyond the demos.

OpenPencil leads with AI

The newcomer

OpenPencil is an open-source, MIT-licensed design editor that's only been in active development since around January 2026, so it's very new and the team is open about not being production-ready yet. It's built on CanvasKit and the Yoga layout engine, and ships either as a 7MB Tauri desktop app or a browser version with no install. Side note worth flagging: there's an unrelated project sharing the same name by a developer called ZSeven-W, the one here is at openpencil.dev.

The hook is the AI though, and the real advantage it has over Figma. It's BYOK, so you connect your own API key from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google AI, OpenRouter, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and the model operates directly on the canvas through about 90 tools wired into the chat. So it's a full chat panel inside your design workspace and the AI is context-aware, it thinks beyond the elements on the design canvas. My Anthropic API key didn't play nice initially so I switched to OpenRouter, and from there it ran without a hitch.

The vector editor itself is decent with a proper pen tool with bezier curves, rich text editing, components with instance overrides, design variables, and auto-layout via flexbox and CSS Grid. The bones of a real design tool are there. It also reads and writes .fig files natively using the same codec Figma uses, so copy-paste between the two apps works both ways without losing anything, which is honestly the most underrated feature for an open-source design app when users are coming from Figma.

Where Figma still wins is plugins, prototyping (which is still on OpenPencil's roadmap and not shipped), and rendering parity. This is probably the closest Figma-shaped tool I've used to doing something Figma actually can't.

Quant-UX leans into user testing

Where prototyping actually leads to tangible results

Quant-UX is a free, open-source design tool that bundles prototyping, user testing, and analytics into one place. That combination is what makes it different from anything else in this list, or any other design tool I've even tried, actually. It runs in the browser with the option to self-host and it's actually been around since 2017, so it's not a new project, but I only stumbled across it recently.

It's aimed at solo designers, product managers, and UX research teams - pretty much anyone who'd otherwise be paying for Maze on top of Figma to conduct user research for their products. Speaking of, it also supports Figma import, but only as reference files because it flattens all the layers.

Here's where it gets weird though: the design canvas is probably the weakest part of the tool. The feature set is maybe half of what Figma gives you, typography controls are thin, and there's no advanced vector editing. But I noticed I wasn't actually reaching for the missing stuff as much as I expected. The canvas covers enough ground to put together real screens, and what's missing on the design side gets more than made up for once you cross into prototyping and testing.

Prototyping is actually better than Figma's; it's not click-through frames, the widgets are real and inputs also accept typing, plus different states persist across screens. So instead of being a Figma replacement, the more useful framing is that this is the open-source Figma-plus-Maze combo. Basically, if you want to test the viability and usability of your designs, this is where you go to do it for free.

Does Penpot even need an introduction at this point?

It's not going anywhere

Bit of a disclaimer here - I've written about Penpot so many times at this point that including it in another list almost feels redundant, but leaving it out of an open-source Figma alts list wouldn't be right. For anyone who hasn't met it yet, Penpot is an open-source design and prototyping tool built for UI/UX work, runs in the browser, fully self-hostable, and uses SVG as its native format.

The reason it's the one I keep ending up back in is almost embarrassingly mundane - it's a near-mirror of Figma in terms of where everything sits on screen. The muscle memory transfers, which matters more for tool retention than people give it credit for. Because it's built on open web standards, designs are inherently portable too. Devs can pull measurements and code straight from the inspect panel without exporting anything.

Where Figma still pulls ahead is on big-file performance (Penpot's improving but isn't quite as snappy), FigJam-style whiteboarding (you have to download a separate kit in Penpot), Smart Animate, and the plugin ecosystem. None of which I find myself missing that much anyway, but it might matter to your workflow.

It's not that Penpot does anything Figma can't, it's that it does enough of what Figma does well enough that I forget I'm not in Figma.

Plasmic is the odd one out

It's more of a visual builder than a design tool

Plasmic is the odd one out in this list because it isn't really a Figma equivalent at all - it's a visual builder for the web that outputs production-ready React code rather than designs you'd hand off to someone else to rebuild. It's open-source, self-hostable, and there's a Figma-to-code plugin too, so you can paste Figma layers into Plasmic Studio and they come out as actual React components.

I didn't know about this tool a week ago so this is more "what I noticed" than "what I've mastered." The visual editor itself is comfortable and familiar; if you've ever opened Figma you'll know your way around within five minutes. There's a proper component library with text, layout primitives, form fields, plus a Section Templates pane for whole pre-built page sections. So plenty of design depth even before you get to the inspector controls for image handling, transitions, and spacing.

The thing it has over Figma is what happens after - Figma stops at the design, Plasmic carries it into something hostable, with a built-in CMS and data source integrations. But if you're never going to publish anything yourself, Plasmic is probably overkill for what you actually need.

A week later and the rotation settled itself

Penpot stays the keeper, mostly because the muscle memory factor is hard to beat when you're already familiar with it. OpenPencil is the one I'll be keeping a much closer eye on though - if the prototyping piece lands and the rendering tightens up, it's the most exciting Figma-shaped thing I've come across in a while. Quant-UX and Plasmic both stay in the rotation but for specific jobs rather than general design work.