replacing Figma
Open Source Figma Alternatives
Collaborative design and prototyping tool — Figma pricing: $15-$75/editor/month. Below: 2 free,
self-hostable open source projects that cover the same ground, ranked by real GitHub adoption.
There are 2 open source Figma alternatives tracked on this registry, against Figma pricing of $15-$75/editor/month. The most-adopted is Excalidraw with 135,053 GitHub stars under MIT, written in TypeScript. Together the set has 197,048 stars across 2 languages and 2 licences. All 2 are free to self-host with no licence fee, and 2 of 2 received a commit in the last 90 days. 2 head-to-head Figma comparisons are available.
Figma's acquisition by Adobe raised concerns about long-term pricing independence. The professional plan costs $15/editor/month; Organization runs $45/editor/month. All design files live on Figma's servers.
Other hosted options
The open source projects below are free to self-host. If you would rather pay for a managed
service, these are the hosted products in the same space — listed with the vendor's own pricing.
Our top 2 Figma alternatives
Excalidraw is an open-source virtual whiteboard application built in TypeScript, designed for sketching hand-drawn style diagrams, wireframes, and freeform ideas. It lives within the web-based productivity and design visualization ecosystem, offering a lightweight alternative to commercial tools like Figma, Miro, and Canva. The project includes both a standalone web app at excalidraw.com and an embeddable npm package for integration into third-party applications.
MIT · TypeScript · Figma vs Excalidraw →
Penpot is an open-source design platform written in Clojure and ClojureScript and released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. It is deployment agnostic: teams can use it in the browser through the hosted service, or deploy it on their own servers. It works with open standards including SVG, CSS, HTML, and JSON, and it treats design as code so that developers can read and ship what designers produce. Penpot organizes work through native Design Tokens, Components, and Variants, giving teams a single source of truth for scalable design systems.
MPL-2.0 · Clojure · Figma vs Penpot →
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
What is the best open source alternative to Figma?
Excalidraw is the most-starred open source alternative to Figma in this registry, with 135,053 GitHub stars. 2 alternatives are compared here in total.
Are there free alternatives to Figma?
Yes. Every project listed on this page is open source and free to self-host — there is no licence fee. Some projects also sell a managed hosted version, but the self-hosted path costs nothing.
What should I look at when replacing Figma?
Compare licence terms, community size (stars), primary language and release activity. A fast-moving project with a compatible licence and an active maintainer base matters more than raw star count when you are committing to a migration.