Penpot vs Figma
Choose Penpot when design assets must stay on infrastructure you control, when you want a fully featured tool at $0, or when a large team needs cost to stop tracking headcount — its Unlimited plan is capped at $175 per month regardless of team size. Choose Figma when you need the breadth of an integrated product suite, published enterprise certifications, and SCIM-based seat governance.
Penpot is open source under MPL-2.0 and ships official Docker and Kubernetes installation paths, so the whole tool can run inside your own network; its Professional tier is $0 per user with no feature limits. Figma is cloud-only and sold by seat type — Full, Dev and Collab — across Starter, Professional, Organization and Enterprise tiers, with a product surface spanning Design, Make, Draw, Dev Mode, FigJam, Slides, Motion, Specs, Sites and Buzz. The two then diverge on evidence: Figma publishes SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO 27001, ISO 27701 and GDPR on its security page, while this review found no comparable published certification list on Penpot's side.
Ideal For: Teams that must keep design data on their own infrastructure, that want no cost floor, or whose headcount makes per-seat pricing stop making sense.
Ideal For: Organisations that want one integrated suite across design, prototyping, Dev Mode handoff and adjacent products, with published enterprise certifications.
Interactive Constraint Matcher
Calibrate your operational trade-offs below. Sliders automatically normalize to 100% to reflect strict zero-sum engineering tradeoffs.
Whether the tool can run entirely inside your own network, and what that costs to operate
What a growing team actually pays, and whether the bill has a ceiling
Centralised administration, permissions and seat lifecycle once many teams share one tool
How much of the workflow is covered by one vendor, and how far you can extend it yourself
Based on your allocated weights, Penpot offers superior durability. Figma remains applicable for alternative secondary constraints.
| Evaluation Pillar / Focus | Penpot (Qualitative Assessment) | Figma (Qualitative Assessment) |
|---|---|---|
Deployment Model & Data Sovereignty Whether the tool can run entirely inside your own network, and what that costs to operate Baseline Weight:30% Design assets cannot leave your infrastructure:Structural difference | PenpotRecommended Penpot publishes an official self-hosting path: a Docker installation guide and a Kubernetes installation guide, plus a configuration reference for post-install customisation. Running it on your own machine or cluster keeps every design asset inside your own network boundary. The trade-off is that you operate it — logs and troubleshooting are documented, but the ops burden is yours. | FigmaConditional Figma is delivered as a cloud service; the pricing page sells seats across Starter, Professional, Organization and Enterprise with no self-hosted option listed. Enterprise adds custom team workspaces, design system theming and APIs and SCIM seat management, but control stops at configuration — the data stays in Figma's cloud. |
Seat Cost & Team-Scale Economics What a growing team actually pays, and whether the bill has a ceiling Baseline Weight:25% Team size is large, or budget must be capped:Ceiling vs no ceiling | PenpotRecommended Penpot's Professional tier is $0 per user per month and described as fully featured with no limits and no missing tools. The Unlimited tier is $7 per editor per month and is explicitly capped at $175 per month no matter the team size — the bill stops growing with headcount. Enterprise is $25 per member per month. | FigmaConditional Figma bills per seat with no stated ceiling: Professional is $16/mo for a Full seat, $12/mo Dev and $3/mo Collab; Organization is $55 / $25 / $5; Enterprise is $90 / $35 / $5. Starter is free but is described as limited access rather than fully featured, so a real team lands on the paid tiers and cost scales linearly with seats. |
Governance & Fleet Control at Scale Centralised administration, permissions and seat lifecycle once many teams share one tool Baseline Weight:25% Multiple teams, central IT admin, seat provisioning:SCIM is the dividing line | PenpotConditional Penpot's Enterprise tier is described as providing advanced governance, centralized administration, team permissions and secure collaboration, at $25 per member per month. In the sources reviewed for this comparison, no SCIM-equivalent seat provisioning is documented, so automated joiner-mover-leaver handling is not evidenced. | FigmaRecommended Figma separates governance by tier and documents it: Organization brings centralized admin tools, shared libraries and fonts, and publishing resources across teams; Enterprise adds custom team workspaces, design system theming and APIs, and SCIM seat management — the specific mechanism that lets IT provision and deprovision seats automatically. |
Product Surface & Extensibility How much of the workflow is covered by one vendor, and how far you can extend it yourself Baseline Weight:20% Breadth of adjacent products vs ability to modify the tool:Breadth vs malleability | PenpotConditional Penpot is malleable rather than broad: it is open source under MPL-2.0, ships a Developer Guide for setting up a development environment, extending functionality and contributing, and an Integration Guide for wiring external apps to Penpot events. The ecosystem around it is far smaller than Figma's, so most adjacent workflows you assemble yourself. | FigmaRecommended Figma covers more of the workflow under one roof — the pricing page lists Figma Design, Make, Draw, Dev Mode, FigJam, Slides, Motion, Specs, Sites and Buzz, with AI credits attached to every paid seat type and AI add-ons available on all plans. Professional adds advanced Dev Mode inspection and an MCP Server. You cannot modify the product, but you rarely need to. |
When You Should NOT Adopt Either System
Every architectural choice introduces structural compromises. If your team matches these trigger conditions, adoption will create engineering debt rather than leverage.