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Design & Media

An open-source alternative to Figma

Penpot is the one project in our catalog listed as a replacement for Figma. It is design software with 61.9K GitHub stars. Below is how it measures against the questions people usually ask first.

Penpot

Design

Design and prototype interfaces your developers can build from.

Penpot is a design platform built around open standards and ownership. Designers and developers work in the same files, layouts behave like CSS, and teams can host the whole platform themselves instead of keeping their design system in someone else's cloud.

  • Design with native design tokens, components and variants as one source of truth.
  • Build responsive layouts with CSS Grid and Flex that behave like real code.
  • Hand off through inspect mode, plugins, an open API and an MCP server.

What people use it for

Build and maintain a design system

Define design tokens, components and variants once, then reuse them across projects so colours, typography and spacing stay consistent between design and code.

Prototype a responsive interface

Lay out screens with CSS Grid and Flex, work on them in real time with other designers, and share an interactive prototype for feedback.

Hand a design over to developers

Developers open the same file in inspect mode to copy SVG, CSS and HTML, or connect the design to code and AI tools through the API and MCP server.

61.9K starsMPL-2.0ClojureLatest release 5 days agoWebsite ↗Full profile →

Fact checklist

The same questions the pages with more alternatives let you sort by, answered for Penpot.

  • Does not meet: Permissive licence (MIT, Apache, BSD)Licence: MPL-2.0 (copyleft)
  • Open-source licence (copyleft or permissive)Licence: MPL-2.0 (copyleft)
  • Released in the last 90 daysLatest GitHub release Oct 26, 2026 (5 days ago)
  • Does not meet: Gaining stars this weekNot enough star history yet to tell
  • Written in ClojureMain language on GitHub
  • Recommended in a stackIn Marketing agency, Content creator

Data from GitHub and our catalog. Every listing is hand-approved. List prices are what the vendor publishes, not a quote, and self-hosting has its own running costs.