Penpot: The Open-Source Figma
github.com
github.com
EDIT: still broken 8 months later :(
- steps to reproduce from scratch;
- what you expected to happen;
- what you actually observed (include the screenshot or video capture in addition to a textual description).
Otherwise, you might risk your report being ignored due to a silent misunderstanding about the mismatch between your expectations and the actual results.
If anyone is interested in opening a bug report you can see the issue here: https://imgur.com/a/hZ1ja9o
This is why it's important to describe explicitly the three points in text:
- steps to reproduce;
- what you expected to happen;
- what actual result you observe instead.
Something that might be obvious to you but isn't for others will just be silently ignored most of the time.
EDIT: I now see the problem after reading your other reply above:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46064757#46069546
This is why it's important to describe explicitly the difference between what you expected and what you observed. I swear I did not see the change in button width before reading the linked comment.
That is a fair point. I will take it on board when giving people screenshots and videos of bugs in future.
> I did not see the change in button width
There's actually a lot more visual changes than that just the button, but I will leave that to the reader as an exercise in spot-the-difference ;)
This is fair. But issues like this will never get my attention in general because I don’t have time to do this exercise - I would much rather have it all spelled out. Even if there are a bunch of related issues they won’t get fixed in a single PR, it likely will be multiple.
I guess my point is that if you really want OSS projects to improve, the issue submitter can’t just ask the maintainer “figure it out”. It totally works this way in the corporate world though (IME).
Edit: I’m sorry to have jumped to conclusions. Leaving my comment up for accountability.
People here have stated I should have filed on GitHub, and because I don’t want to link my GitHub to this account I suggested someone else do it.
That was 6 hours ago, and people are still commenting about my lack of a suitable report rather than actually reporting it correctly themselves - as is evident by the lack of a new issue on the github.
I didn’t either! I stared at that gif for a few minutes and I couldn’t tell what the problem is (or what to look for). It wasn’t until you said “changing button width” I knew where to focus my attention.
So, given that Penpot appears to mostly be developed in the EU, you'd need to fix that part first.
I just checked using nordVPN for Austria and Finland and it's working there too, so maybe you have some other issue going on?
I am assuming you are in the UK, as Imgur are specifically blocking the UK: https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/41592665292443-Imgu...
Imgur isn't my site, and I don't vote in the UK, so Im not sure how you expect me to resolve that.
We are all very aware how bug reporting works. And user criticism of bugs isn't somehow invalidated just because the users didn't go to the sometimes very large effort to report bugs.
I wouldn't have reported this bug either. If the example documents are getting corrupted just by navigating them that indicates that it's just a really buggy project (corroborated by other comments here) that I'm not even going to use, so why would I spend my time working on it?
With a PR I understand not wanting to put the effort in as it may not be merged. But offering up a reproducible example on the correct forum is the least you could do. If you want the problem fixed that's the best way forward.
I suggested someone do that 8 hrs ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46069471
So far no takers. Just people saying what they would do instead of actually doing it :)
https://github.com/penpot/penpot/issues/7850
Thanks for sharing all the details about the issue, and shame on all the armchair critics :D
(It was one of those form-based issue templates that requires you to explicitly list out Steps to Reproduce, Expected behavior, Actual behavior, OS version, etc. which IMO causes slightly more friction for anyone who knows how to put together a good bug report, but I've also seen enough poorly-specified issues to know that it's necessary sometimes)
Yes, it is.
Agreed - I don't see how its not glaringly obvious to anyone who uses the app:
I sincerely hate imgur and hope the whole site goes bankrupt, and I can’t stand it when anyone links to them.
Here's a comparison of alternatives
Bleh.
Yeah you can really see the resize comparing the before and after. https://jpst.it/4KgSB
Hopefully they've improved a lot recently?
Their free tier supports up to 8 members, limited to 10GB of storage.
The next tier supports unlimited members, and is price-capped at $175 a month, but is limited to 25GB of storage.
The final tier is price-capped at $950 a month, with unlimited storage.
Surely it's not actually unlimited. I wish such claims wouldn't be as common in the industry.
People see 'unlimited' and will do everything in their power to 'fact-check' it, forcing the producer to place a 'hard cap' and making everyone's life worse.
Travel to high trust societies if you don't get what I mean.
Things would be so much easier if we could expect human decency and ethics, even if there is no law against it, because it goes against our values as humans.
It absolutely is a lie, but you might live in a society where constant lying has been normalized. Personally, I believe that society would be better off if companies were held to the letter of their words.
For example, consider a restaurant that offers free rice refills because Asian people love eating rice to fill up. An employee working overtime who really needs it can get as many refills as they want.
Of course, this system falls apart if everyone starts doing it, as the restaurant would need to bake that cost into the price to sustain the business.
But my point is: you can have nice things in society, or you can have a dystopia where people take advantage of each other at every single opportunity.
The choice is yours.
its like giving up your seat when there is pregnant woman on the train
if you really need it then its okay, but I know why you don't believe this because its hard to have this policy in US where everyone weight 200 lbs
You don't build high trust societies with lies
Yes because you build it with trust, I trust you to not ruin this things so everyone can enjoy it
I can understand where you coming from because when I watch YT videos about people that exploit the loophole or game the system, people literally praise them for "beating the game" and this is happen mostly with US where everyone is materialistic
but my counter argument is game theory, where everyone can cooperate for betterment of your environment
Alas we decided collectively that money trumps(sic) everything so low trust society is the natural consequence of this.
At its core it’s a spiritual problem. Capitalism is cool but making it a religion has its trade offs.
They go on Reddit and brag and compete about doing useless things to store files on these services, like a competition. They’re bragging on HN about GitHub tools that force files into a non-file service and have rate limiters tuned to upload right at the server’s rate limit.
It’s not capitalism, it’s people thinking they’re winning points against capitalism by abusing a corporation. Even if that corporation is a small startup trying to offer a product on a small budget.
Either it is unlimited or it is not. If you call something unlimited then there should not be a limit. You cant abuse it, it's unlimited. There is no limit, so you can never go beyond the limit which means you can never abuse it.
That's what unlimited means. If you mean something else then use a different word.
Some people took it upon themselves to try to abuse and saturate the limits to “prove” that we couldn’t handle it.
We could actually handle it, but it wasn’t worth offering it to this small number of users who were trying to prove a point by abusing it to the max without an actual use case. They just wanted to show off on Reddit that the were making our servers suffer.
Billions of tokens wasted for nothing
Even though your Linux iso's are called "images", they can not be added to a penpot design file - sorry to say.
Firms like penpot are basically saying "look, if you pay us this much, we're not going to put hard quotas on you, just get on with it", but if you then try storing backups of annas archive on it, they are probably going to suggest that you are not operating within the spirit of the agreement, even if you're within the letter of it: fair use will apply.
Some people like to know where they stand. They want hard quotas. So fine, ask them for hard quotas. Ask for the fair use clause and understand it.
Most of us know what it means (it's a soft quota with fair use limitations), and are happy with not abusing the tier and having a bit more freedom, though.
I’ve also had the unlimited time off company where I took an actual month off and it was fine because I got my work done.
Please don’t say donations because that doesn’t work for something as complex as the projects you mentioned
Edit: ok there are some where it works like Blender - no idea how they do it though…
The features that differentiate to enterprise customers don't matter to small shops anyhow: policy compliance, monitoring, fancy reporting, fine grained access control,etc. Give away tools that are useful for individuals and small teams, and charge for the features that are large team/enterprise related.
If you want to do enterprise software, even as a small shop, things like requiring pull request approvals is an absolute must.
Our customers demand it.
Doesn't matter how many employees we have, or how profitable we are. If we want to sell software to most large CPG companies, this stuff is non-negotiable.
So I just use GitHub.
1. Like Sentry - open source all the features, provide the cloud (hosted) version. Most businesses don't want to self-host, but want a bit cheaper alternative
2. Paid tier, buy once - own forever with 1 year update support. Later you can charge lower price to extend the update cycle.
3. Blender model - donations. Very hard to get it right.
4. Laravel/Next.js model - Open source the tooling, monetize the platform
Same price for same core feature set would be a good start. Or lower price for smaller feature set.
Having a premium price for a reduced product means your target audience is limited to people willing to pay a premium for a lesser product to support open source. There are some groups willing to do this, but most simply want a tool that does the job without adding too much to their already huge SaaS budget.
I’m extremely sensitive to core workflow tools for a company these days. It only takes a few days of lost work because some tool corrupted your design or the engineers have to spend a few days working around an issue in a tool to make the effective cost of using that tool extremely high.
Engineering time is expensive. If a tool that costs $20 per person per month causes even one issue per month that potentially produces hours of work and rework (like the spontaneously resizing element a commenter above noted) then the true cost is going to be in the hundreds or thousands of dollars per month in lost productivity.
These are the rare examples of Linux going through the torrent, typically emerges as proud victorious, with reasonably low profile
1. Slightly worse product than Slack (if just for lack of connect) yet they're charging more for the cheapest license.
2. Gating reasonable OAuth support behind the paid version is crippleware
IMO they're gonna get forked, and they'll deserve it.
There are many things you can do besides full app flows, it doesn't dictate how you use it. Really reminds me of early Sketch and how productive I was with it. Its wild that this is open source.
Exporting to svg may look completely different when opened elsewhere if your designs have any text elements.
I run it on Dedicated server with 64GB Ram , it starts to lag as soon as a 5-6 pages and memory 20GB, lagging out the whole team and then crashes.
That’s how these tools encourage you to use them. If the tool crumbles under its own usage modalities, that’s because it’s poorly designed, not the user’s fault.
Honestly given the complexity of the screens involved I feel Figma's performance is pretty reasonable. (Now, library publish and update - that's still unreasonably slow IMO)
> And a huge memory hog
On the server side or the frontend side?
> Penpot Desktop loads the Penpot web application like a browser does. For offline use, the built-in local instance creator can set up and run a local Penpot instance via Docker (per the official self‑hosting guide).
I'm stuck at waiting for a confirmation e-mail.
PENPOT_FLAGS=disable-email-verificationI'm in!
Thanks!
The installer could pull the images, create the stack and run migrations, then shut down. The app could then up the stack, show a loading screen that would likely be shorter than any Adobe program, then open a webview. When the last window is closed, down the stack.
You wouldn't be able to tell the difference. And what is the difference exactly? Most big apps are composed of multiple components doing IPC, it just so happens to be TCP/IP here.
All in all, the overhead would probably be equal to two tabs in Chrome.
And calling it a "small graphics tool" is just nonsense. If you're doing UI/UX design, this is THE thing you spend your time in. It's like Premiere for a video editor or AutoCAD for an engineer. If it takes 30 seconds to load and eats half your system memory, who cares, it's what you bought the computer for.
Besides a specific subset of programmers that only use Vim or Emacs, every other professional is used to giving whatever tool they're using to do their job all the resources their computer has. You don't see video editors complaining Davinci Resolve runs a whole PostgreSQL instance in the background.
davinci resolve doens't need docker. Or any of the other examples you used.
Imagine you're running a local supabase stack, zed, chrome and then try to spawn this thing on a regular laptop. It's not about postgres natively.
You're really focusing on the docker part, huh? You know containers are just a four namespaces in a trenchcoat, right? They don't actuall, have meaningful performance overhead... The only waste is some disk space.
Figma is fantastic software, but it has become a single point of failure for entire product orgs. If Penpot is "laggy" right now but gives me a docker-compose up guarantee that I own the pipeline, that's a trade-off I'll take.
Performance can be optimized eventually (it's code); closed-source licensing terms cannot be optimized by users (it's legal).
Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32851262
1145 points, 128 comments
This is imo a cautionary tale that being a native app primarily is a bad idea in this year.
Figma lost over 1bn in Q3 on revenues of 274m. Share price is down 70% from IPO 3 months ago.
It's also clear from Figma's latest product releases - a grab bag of unfinished AI tools and a laughably shoddy website builder - that their primary audience is investors and not end users. I don't think the market of product designers is large enough to support their valuation and have any hope of making a decent return unless they diversify rapidly into other areas and try to become the next Adobe. Meanwhile Canva and more AI native tools are busy biting at their heels.
Speaking as a daily user, I hope they stay around long-term and don't enshittify themselves too much. But I'm not optimistic.
Penpot provides the same.
They still are really clueless, Animate has had hardly any updates in 13yrs, yet other animation tools offer a lot of innovative features.
Source (& releases): https://github.com/author-more/penpot-desktop
Topic on penpot forum: https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-desktop-road-to-1-0/72...
Almost certainly not. If you need this kind of tool, you'll either self-host it, use the hosted version or use Figma. There are no comparable offline-only alternatives. What users are they using exactly?
The problem lies with the whole thing is XML and SVG unlike Figma's Canvas/WebASM . The whole thing is unable to scale.
https://community.penpot.app/t/its-time-for-penpot-to-almost...
- New rendering engine should fix the performance issues. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciG0U5jJtHY (older reference https://community.penpot.app/t/its-time-for-penpot-to-almost...) Open beta coming in the next few weeks, finally!
- Our business model is Open Nitrate (see https://community.penpot.app/t/penpots-upcoming-business-mod...). For the impatient, think of it as a reverse open-core. The current pricing model for SaaS is quite straightforward. The "unlimited storage" for Enterprise on SaaS is fine, believe me.
- This is a European startup that was founded in 2011 and pivoted to a product-centric actvity in 2021. We're 45 people. We believe open source is the right social contract. All employees use Linux as their operating system. Yes.
- In terms of our vision of AI, I published this whitepaper in August https://penpot.app/blog/penpot-ai-whitepaper/ If you want to understand how we think about Penpot, design and platforms, read it.
- 3 months later, we can demo our MCP server capabilities here https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-mcp-server-showcase-as... but see also our internal folder with 1min clips here https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1CCuBqHEevWsp15bY... (my favourite is the flat design to design tokens and back to design). "design as a graph" is our ML-based applied research. We hope to have something cool ready at some point next year.
- The whole point of building Penpot was to unite designers and developers. New tools and platforms can play a role. We focused on declarative and semantic design paradigms departing from imperative design paradigms.
- We have 1.2M users, 25k Penpot new deployments every month, 30k new SaaS signups every month and a growing community of contributors and partners. Ironically, the early adopters are Fortune 500 companies knowing that a cycle is over and that they need to own their design assets. UI design is now as valuable as code, if not more.
- I don't like the "Open-Source Figma" label as we're building a superior tool but I understand it's a nice shorcut for now :)
- DM me on Linkedin if you have a couple of millions to spare :P
The new rendering engine is wasm + rust + skia, in case you're curious.
AFAIK, no account requirement. Download & install instructions here https://help.penpot.app/technical-guide/getting-started/dock...
See, when you said "I don't need Figma anymore" I thought "that's why I don't really like the open-source Figma label" because we're building a different UI design tool, more like a platform, that's so close to code (also, open source, self-hostable, etc, etc) that you might want to use Penpot for the same reasons you didn't want to use Figma.
Anyway, thanks for the nice words!
I'm going to try to run an instance for my local creative community. If everyone chips in server costs and donation, then it would be huge savings for everyone.
>Clojure is a dynamic and functional dialect of the programming language Lisp on the Java platform.
So I thought this is built on Java, or like that. I’d love if someone could explain it in simple terms, as I’d love to drop the ‘Java = bad’ attitude. It’s just that my prior experience taught me to stay away from Java.
“Java = bad” is also something that you should probably drop. The JVM in particular is a very robust host and there’s a large ecosystem for it. Java the language has also improved over the years, but the JVM is great (and has a large market share as a result).
Clojure 79.2%
JavaScript 7.2%
SCSS 6.0%
Rust 4.7%
HTML 1.4%
Shell 0.4%
Other 1.1%
[1] https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-desktop-road-to-1-0/72...
Tried Penpot, it was laggy and non usable.
Not open source however
Open vs. closed source is a secondary consideration outside tech circles, and often within.
I love this team. It's so endearing.
couldn't help being cheeky...actually there are quite a few contributors.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/02/penpot-the-open-source-pla...
A recent use-case that a friend was gushing about:
- Input notes, data into Figma and ask its AI to summarize it into presentation worthy slides with built-in games to keep meeting members engaged, and host them to a website.