EDIT: still broken 8 months later :(
Hopefully they've improved a lot recently?
Agreed - I don't see how its not glaringly obvious to anyone who uses the app:
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.
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.
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…
Surely it's not actually unlimited. I wish such claims wouldn't be as common in the industry.
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.
Even though your Linux iso's are called "images", they can not be added to a penpot design file - sorry to say.
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.
> 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).
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.
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...
The problem lies with the whole thing is XML and SVG unlike Figma's Canvas/WebASM . The whole thing is unable to scale.
- 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
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!
AFAIK, no account requirement. Download & install instructions here https://help.penpot.app/technical-guide/getting-started/dock...
The new rendering engine is wasm + rust + skia, in case you're curious.
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.
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.
