Figma vs Penpot
Both are design tools. Here is what separates them.
What Figma is
Figma is a design tool that runs in the browser. The product family covers Figma Design, Figma Make, Figma Weave, Dev Mode, Figma Motion, FigJam, Figma Slides, Figma Draw, Figma Sites and Figma Buzz, so interface work, whiteboarding, slides, websites and marketing assets sit inside one account. Figma Design carries auto layout, variables, components, slots, brushes, textures, grid layout, multi-edit, and branching and merging. Prototyping on top of it supports Smart Animate, interactive components, conditional logic and mathematical expressions, which is enough to demonstrate state changes rather than only screen-to-screen transitions. Files auto-save a version every 30 minutes. Dev Mode handles the handoff. Selecting a layer exposes code snippets, component properties and structured layer data, and a compare changes view shows two versions of a design side by side. Code Connect maps Figma components to their counterparts in production code, dev resources link a layer out to GitHub files, Jira tickets and Storybook stories, and a Figma MCP server pulls design system components into a codebase. The rest of the family covers adjacent work. FigJam ships more than 300 ready-made templates, integrates with Asana, Jira and GitHub, and offers 24 hour guest access without a login. Figma Slides imports PowerPoint files and supports live audience polls and an alignment scale. Figma Buzz generates images through OpenAI and Gemini models, removes image backgrounds, and imports, trims and exports video. Figma Make accepts text prompts, voice input, and attached designs, images, videos, audio, PDFs and text files. Figma Sites includes a CMS view for adding, editing and publishing page content. FigJam and Figma Slides are included with every seat on every plan. Seats come in three kinds, and the gap between them is the main budgeting lever. On Professional a Full seat is $16 per month, a Dev seat $12 and a Collab seat $3. On Organization those become $55, $25 and $5, and on Enterprise $90, $35 and $5. Organization and Enterprise are sold on annual billing only. The free Starter plan gives a single team with one folder and three files, while Professional gives a single team with unlimited folders. AI usage is metered in credits. A Professional Full seat carries 3,000 per month, Organization 3,500 and Enterprise 4,250, while Dev and Collab seats carry 500 each. Starter allows 150 a day up to 500 a month. Enterprise plans can allocate credits across teams, departments or cost centres and read usage through an AI credit usage API. Variable modes are capped at 10 on Starter and Professional and 20 on Organization, and are unlimited on Enterprise through extended collections.
What Penpot is
Penpot is an open-source design and prototyping tool that runs in a browser and can be hosted on your own infrastructure. It is aimed at teams who want their design files on hardware they control, and at designers and developers who would rather work in the same file format than hand work across a wall. The distinguishing decision is that Penpot builds on open web standards rather than a proprietary rendering model. Layouts follow CSS behaviour, so what a designer arranges on the canvas corresponds to how a browser will lay it out. Designs can be expressed directly as HTML, CSS, JSON and SVG, and the tool generates code in those formats, which makes the handoff a matter of reading the file rather than reinterpreting a picture of it. Developers can pull detailed specifications of styles and content from any object. Several people can work on the same file at once, in real time. Projects and files are unlimited on every plan. Custom fonts can be uploaded and managed as a shared team library. Objects export to PDF, SVG, PNG and JPG. Wireframing and prototyping are built in and work on any device, since the whole thing is a web application. It extends through a built-in plugin system, with community plugins available and the option to write your own. There is an open API, webhooks for integrating with external applications, and a GitHub integration for teams keeping design and code alongside each other. Pricing is unusually simple. The Professional plan is free at zero dollars per user per month and is the one most individuals and small teams will use. The Unlimited plan adds 30 days of autosaved version history. Enterprise extends that to 90 days and adds single sign-on. Because the project is open source, the self-hosted route is available at any of these sizes, and a team that outgrows the hosted service or needs its files inside its own network can move without changing tools.
We are not affiliated with either product. Upvote counts come from the published formula and neither position was paid for.