Penpot

Penpot's core argument is that a design file should be readable by the people who ship the code. Instead of an abstract layout model that a plugin later translates, you build with CSS Grid and Flexbox primitives, so wrapping and alignment behave the way the browser will render them. Export runs on open standards — CSS, HTML, SVG, JSON — and the Penpot file format is itself open, which matters if you have ever had to negotiate with a vendor to get your own design files out. The design-system tooling is genuinely built in rather than bolted on: design components, shared libraries, and native design tokens covering typography tokens, token autocomplete and a color picker list view. For a team maintaining one system across several product squads, that is the part that compounds. The AI story is where Penpot is placing its 2026 bets. Its open MCP server lets any agent, any LLM and any AI tooling connect to the core across code-to-design, design-to-code and design-to-design loops. That is a real architectural commitment, not a chat sidebar — but it is early, and you should pilot it against your own pipeline before standardising on it. Where Penpot is weaker: the community plugin and library ecosystem is smaller than Figma's, so a specific plugin equivalent may simply not exist. Motion design and choreographed prototyping are basic. Self-hosting is genuinely supported but assumes someone can run infrastructure and handle updates. On money, the shape of the plans rewards headcount. Professional is $0/user/month with no missing tools but caps at 8 team members plus unlimited viewers and 10GB of storage, with 7 days of autosaved versions and file recovery. Unlimited is $7/editor/month and capped at $175 per month no matter how large the team, with 25GB storage and 30 days of versions and recovery — past roughly 25 editors the cap is the whole point. Enterprise, introduced in 2.18 at $25/member/month, is where SSO with your choice of identity provider, team permissions, IP whitelisting, choice of hosting region and 90 days of version history live. Private Server at $50k/year is dedicated infrastructure with custom hosting. Non-profit, education and open-source discounts are published on the pricing page. The honest framing: pick Penpot if your handoff is code and your priorities include hosting sovereignty or avoiding file lock-in. Pick Figma if plugin breadth and animation depth are load-bearing for how your team actually works.