Exactly, we took it from CSS and we have said it multiple times. The audacity of Penpot was to actually do it and accept the consequences.
185 karma · joined May 21, 2013
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!
The new rendering engine is wasm + rust + skia, in case you're curious.
- 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
Regarding the "isn't a realistic competitor" point. You bet we are! The only realistic competitor in a while, actually, because we come from a deep understanding of how cross-functional teams address design & code instead of doubling down on silos or "modes". To be successful you need to do things VERY differently.
- We're open source and we're enjoying an extremely active community of contributors.
- We rely on open standards so designers (and organisations) can own their future while developers can treat design files as first class citizens in a git repo if they want to.
- You can use SaaS or self-host, we don't care about your deployment strategy.
- We bring code vocabulary and abstractions to the design process (see Flex Layout or upcoming Grid Layout https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx0ufKErqVk) so we get rid of the lost in translation issues that plague teams.
- We partner with people like Design Tokens (which are also open source) to build the future of Design Decisions so we can transcend the current status quo of design systems.
Yes, of course we have performance challenges with SVG on browsers (not Figma 2MB WASM memory limits, though, since we can access DOM memory availability which is now 16GB!) but these are temporary engineering challenges and we're working super hard on cracking them.
I'm fine having these debates on whether Penpot is a viable competitor to Figma, it's healthy and I get it, it happens all the time when new tools pop up (sometimes signalling the end of a cycle, even if it's not sudden). But what really matters to us at Penpot is that this goes beyond "competing" with a particular tool, this is about a specific world vision on how designers and developers want to collaborate to scale up design and software building.
And a key ingredient to all this is "what are developers going to do?" That's the real battleground out there. Developers outnumber Designers 10 to 1. People that keep wondering why Adobe paid $20B for Figma tend to miss the point. It's the developers, obviously! Of course they are worth $20B when you're not exciting to them!
This is not a static picture, it never was and it never is. Every single day we keep working hard on building the best design & prototyping tool for designers and developers, every single day we're re-balancing the status quo. It's already paying off with 400K+ users worldwide, half of them on self-host.
To be honest, we can't be more excited about everything that's going on and what's making everything worth it's not just the growing community of users and contributors but the amazing quality of it, these are not casual users coming for the free stuff, these are forward thinkers really getting it!
I think what is key for us here is that we, as a company, don't actually own the whole thing. That our open source license and a strong community lead us to a very successful business without having to revert to traditional playbooks. TBH, my biggest concern right now is not trying to convince you that you have to trust us, that would insult your intelligence. No, my biggest concern is how to create an open source community with both designers AND developers (I touch upon this here https://community.penpot.app/t/not-all-communities-are-creat...). This is my personal dream and it has been since I sent $15 to the Free Blender Campaign in 2002 while still a Physics undergraduate. For all these years I thought someone else would create something like Penpot but it kept not happening and some us got a bit nervous, I guess. Thanks for your thoughtful post!