User experience and user interface design is prevalent throughout our modern day experience, as we access web designs from our computers and phones all day, every day. Good UX/UI designs need savvy developers to implement them into code. Penpot makes collaborative design and developer handover a total breeze. Not only does it have great design features, but it is cost-effective and has a great community of help available. Penpot is in constant open-source development, bringing it toe-to-toe with the industry’s best alternative: Figma.

8 Extensive free plan

With affordable paid plans

Penpot is an open-source UX/UI tool. Although it is open-source, which usually means software is free for all to use, it does offer some paid plans too. Penpot Premium or Enterprise plans receive more support for larger teams, with a locked-in price for yearly billing. Other than premium or priority support, there aren’t many reasons you’d benefit from a Premium plan, since it offers all the same features of the free plan.

Penpot Premium is available for $175 per month, no matter how many people are in your team. Enterprise plans are $950 for a month, regardless of team size, and you receive more security and support, plus US or EU cloud hosting.

Penpot’s free plan is free forever for all users, individuals and teams. It includes an unlimited amount of design files and draft projects, and your account can have an unlimited number of designers and developers working on your projects. Free plans are limited to only community support rather than premium support, but with the future of creative open-source tools, online communities are large and helpful.

7 Self-hosted or hosted by Penpot

Your choice

Free plans can host via Penpot’s site penpot.app, or you can self-host on your own servers. Paid plans have better cloud-hosting options from Penpot too.

Self-hosting is a little more complex than Penpot’s own hosting, so it requires some self-hosting knowledge and development experience. You can use Docker or Elastic for self-hosting, among a few other options. Each has its own benefits or difficulties, as covered in our self-hosting guide.

If you want to benefit from Penpot’s open-source model but don't feel confident or have the ability to self-host, then hosting via penpot.app works as well as using Figma directly in the browser. Just sign up, sign in, and find your project library ready to create.

6 More features than Figma

You’re not missing out on UX/UI features

Figma and Penpot are the biggest competitors for UX/UI design and development tools. While Figma is usually considered the industry standard — one of the only creative industries not dominated entirely by Adobe — Penpot actually has more features than Figma.

Figma is focused solely towards the design side of UX/UI, whereas Penpot is created with designers and developers in mind, with features to make both jobs easier.

You can design directly in Penpot using layers and linked design assets. The interface is similar to Figma’s, so it’s easy to swap if you decide that Penpot might be better than Figma for your workflow. You’ll find your Projects, Drafts, and Libraries easily, as well as a Fonts library.

Penpot announced Plugins in 2024 — a feature that is prevalent in Figma and many other design tools. Plugins allow even more features to appear within Penpot. Penpot contributors can now be even more community-driven by building and adding their own plugins to boost users’ experiences in the app.

Penpot automatically adds HTML and CSS code to your assets as you create your designs, allowing you to see the developer’s code form in front of your eyes. Even though designers and developers have different roles, it’s not a bad thing to learn the coding side if you’re a designer, as it helps build an understanding of how your design translates.

5 Better handoff control

Penpot is built for both developers and designers

The automation of HTML and CSS code when you design is a great feature in Penpot, but it’s also part of the reason that handoffs are so smooth when designers pass their visuals on to web developers to turn it into a live website or app. As well as CSS and HTML, Penpot also expresses designs as SVG — which is the best format for web-based illustration and vector imagery.

Developers are magicians in the way that they can take a visual board and turn it into an interactive and live website for thousands (or millions) of users to interact with. But Penpot just makes that process even easier. Give the magicians some time off.

The interface is built with developers in mind while making it easy for designers to use. Due to the way Penpot natively expresses designs into code directly, the formal handoff process is no longer required. It becomes a seamless experience for everyone. Developers can select a visual element under the Code or Inspect tabs to reveal the automated coding for that element.

4 Unlimited seats for all plan types

There’s no pay-per-seat system

No matter what Penpot plan you decide to use, whether it’s the free-forever plan or one of the premium options, you’re never restricted by how many people you can invite to your team.

This is a problem found in most design software, especially those with team options in creative apps such as Adobe Express Teams or Canva Teams. You’re often either limited in the team size or you’re expected to pay extra per team member involved. For smaller organizations or community-run projects, this can bring havoc to budgeting.

Penpot allows unlimited team members on all projects. You could have a dozen designers and two dozen developers, and you still pay (or not, if you’re on the free plan) the exact same amount. This potentially makes it more cost-effective to use Penpot over other design tools like Figma, which charges $15 per seat monthly on a Professional plan.

3 Real-time collaboration

Work with your team directly

Like most of the best design tools in the modern era, Penpot allows for real-time collaboration. This allows multiple team members to work on any project at the same time, whether they’re collaboratively adding design elements or leaving comments with tips, criticism, or praise as the design is created.

Using a collaborative cloud environment, no one has to install clunky software to collaborate in Penpot. Simply invite via email and share the stage. Remember, there’s no limit to how many stakeholders or team members there can be in your Penpot projects.

Updates can happen live, without projects needing to stop and start or log people out for others to jump in. Penpot makes project collaboration a smooth and inviting process for designers, developers, and stakeholders to be involved with.

2 Open API

Customization and automation

Penpot’s API allows you to integrate it into your DesignOps or GitOps workflow. You’ll receive extensive access to Penpot properties and objects, allowing external rendering, workflow automation, as well as enhanced app functionality.

Access tokens can be used as alternative login authentication for access to Penpot’s API. This lets other apps access Penpot’s API.

With outbound webhooks, external applications can call Penpot when there are file changes. This happens, for example, if files are updated, changed, removed, or created, and even if collaborative features like comments are added.

1 CSS flex and grid layouts

Intuitive layout design

You can draw boards using a grid layout or a flex layout, which self-codes into CSS as you design. Each of the layout grids can be individually selected for intuitive design and editing. With grid settings, there’s plenty of customization during the design process. You can easily add more columns and rows to your grids.

This is an incredibly helpful tool when designing for responsive design. In the modern world, almost all designs need to be intuitively responsive, so it makes sense to use flex grids in the design process so you can resize and adapt your designs during creation rather than afterward.

Save money and time with Penpot

Not only is Penpot cost-effective compared to all of its alternative tools such as Figma, Adobe, Sketch, or Canva; it’s also incredibly time-saving with its inclusive collaboration tools and ready-to-go coded elements. There’s no swapping or waiting around wasting time when using Penpot. All team collaborators can work together in the same project documents, and developers can source the code instantly under the Inspect tab. No other tool flows as seamlessly for designer and developer teams to work this successfully together.