Penpot: The Open Source Figma Alternative from Europe

When Adobe announced its acquisition of Figma for USD 20 billion in September 2022, a wave of anxiety swept through the design community. Even though the deal ultimately collapsed under regulatory pressure, it raised a question that many designers and product teams had been ignoring: what happens when the tool at the centre of your design workflow is controlled by a single American corporation? For European teams already grappling with data sovereignty and GDPR compliance, the question cut even deeper. The answer, increasingly, is Penpot.

What Is Penpot?

Penpot is an open-source design and prototyping platform developed by Kaleidos, a company based in Madrid, Spain. First released in 2021, Penpot has quickly become the most credible open-source alternative to Figma. It is a browser-based tool that supports real-time collaboration, component libraries, interactive prototyping, and a workflow that will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has used Figma or Sketch.

What makes Penpot architecturally distinct is its decision to use SVG as the native file format. While Figma uses a proprietary binary format that locks your designs inside its platform, every element in Penpot is standard SVG. This means your designs are inherently portable. You can open them in any SVG-compatible tool, manipulate them programmatically, or integrate them directly into web applications without export steps. For teams that value interoperability and long-term access to their own work, this is a fundamental advantage.

Open Source, Self-Hostable, European

Penpot is released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, which means the source code is freely available, auditable, and forkable. You can use Penpot’s managed cloud service (hosted on European infrastructure) or deploy it on your own servers. Self-hosting gives organisations complete control over their design data — an option that Figma simply does not offer.

For European businesses concerned about GDPR compliance, Penpot’s architecture is ideal. The managed cloud service keeps data within the EU. Self-hosting on a provider like Hetzner Cloud or Scaleway gives you the ability to specify exactly where your data resides, down to the data centre. No American parent company can be compelled to hand over your design files under the US CLOUD Act because no American company is involved in the stack.

This matters more than many design teams realise. Design files frequently contain unreleased product interfaces, client branding, confidential roadmap details, and user research findings. Treating them as non-sensitive simply because they are “just designs” is a data governance oversight.

Feature Parity: How Close Is It?

Penpot has made remarkable progress, but honesty demands acknowledging where it still lags behind Figma. Real-time collaboration, auto-layout, components with overrides, and interactive prototyping are all present and functional. The Penpot team ships updates frequently, and the pace of improvement has been impressive.

Where Figma still holds an edge is in its plugin ecosystem, advanced prototyping interactions (like smart animate), and the sheer depth of its developer handoff tools. Figma’s community library of shared components is also vastly larger, simply due to its longer time in market and larger user base.

However, for many teams, Penpot already covers the features they actually use daily. If your design workflow centres on component-based UI design, layout, and prototyping — and you are not deeply reliant on Figma-specific plugins — the transition is more straightforward than you might expect. Our Figma vs Penpot comparison provides a detailed feature-by-feature breakdown.

The Strategic Case for Switching

Beyond features, choosing Penpot is a strategic decision about vendor independence. Figma’s pricing has increased steadily, and its terms of service grant broad rights over content uploaded to its platform. As a proprietary SaaS tool, Figma can change its pricing, features, or data handling policies at any time, and your only recourse is to accept or leave.

With Penpot, the dynamics are reversed. The open-source licence guarantees that the software cannot be taken away, relicensed, or locked behind a paywall. If Kaleidos were to disappear tomorrow, the community could fork the project and continue development. Your design files, stored in open SVG format, remain yours regardless of what happens to the company.

For European organisations building products, this combination of data sovereignty, open standards, and vendor independence is increasingly valuable. Public sector organisations in the EU, where open-source procurement policies are gaining traction, are natural early adopters. But any team that has experienced the friction of vendor lock-in or the anxiety of a surprise acquisition announcement has reason to evaluate Penpot seriously.

Getting Started

You can start using Penpot today at penpot.app with a free account — no credit card required. For teams ready to self-host, the Docker-based deployment is well-documented and can be running in under an hour. Explore the full Penpot profile on our site, browse the design tools category for other European options, or read our Figma alternatives page to understand the full landscape of options beyond American design tools.

The open-source design era is here, and it speaks European.