Penpot vs The New Black

The two tool sets share almost no surface area. The New Black is a generative fashion studio: a garment description or sketch becomes a photorealistic design, an existing garment photo gets fabric/print/colour changes or a clean technical flat, and product photos become on-model, ghost mannequin, or virtual try-on imagery for clothing, jewelry, bags and shoes. Its differentiator is production paperwork — an AI tech pack generator that auto-drafts measurements across sizes in your labels and units, grading, and a bill of materials with suppliers, quantities and prices, on an editable canvas with annotated flats, PDF export, and an AI review that flags inconsistencies before factory handoff. Visual DNA profiles (3 on Starter, 10 on Pro, unlimited from Business) keep brand look consistent, and HD upscale rebuilds detail to 2K/4K. Penpot is a UI/UX design platform: wireframing and interactive prototyping, real CSS Grid and Flexbox layout, design tokens, shared component libraries, and bidirectional code inspect/export in CSS, HTML, SVG and JSON. Its 2.17 release added a WebGL render engine (beta), background blur, typography tokens and composite typography input, token autocomplete, and in-canvas comments. Penpot 2.18 adds Penpot Enterprise plus stroke-to-path and new drawing tools. AI reaches Penpot through its MCP server for code-to-design, design-to-code and design-to-design loops — an engineering workflow, not image generation. One turns garments into products; the other turns interfaces into code. Overlap: effectively none.

Both are freemium, but the meters differ completely because the products do. The New Black runs on credits, and its plans are gated by how much you generate: Visual DNA caps reveal the ladder — 3 profiles on Starter, 10 on Pro, unlimited from Business. Note the sharp edge: tech packs alone open the Standard studio without an active plan, and the company's own positioning warns that brands which can't absorb credit costs are a poor fit. Per-image and per-pack costs are documented in their guides (they publish what one on-model image costs in credits). Penpot's core stays free and open source, including the free Professional tier with no per-seat cost, which is its loudest selling point. Penpot 2.18 introduces Penpot Enterprise, a paid plan adding advanced permissions, custom identity providers and an admin panel — the paid tier buys governance, not design features. Self-hosting is a real cost lever for Penpot but shifts spend from licences to infrastructure and the people to run it. So: The New Black is variable-cost, tied to output volume; Penpot is near-zero software cost until you need enterprise controls or must pay for hosting. Neither pricing model is a useful comparison anchor for the other.