head to head · open source
Penpot vs pencil
Penpot has 62,042 GitHub stars, 4,369 forks, 777 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. pencil has 9,896 stars, 794 forks, 533 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. Penpot leads on adoption by 527% (62,042 vs 9,896 stars). Penpot is written in Clojure under MPL-2.0; pencil is written in JavaScript under GPL-2.0. Penpot has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, pencil 8%. Penpot was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (prototyping), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Penpot | pencil | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 62K | ★ 9.9K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Clojure | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-10-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.4K | ⑂ 794 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Penpot if
- You weight community size — 62K stars and counting
- You want the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Clojure
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick pencil if
- You want the pencil feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and pencil fits your workflow better
About Penpot
[uri license]: [uri license image]: Website • User Guide • Learning Center • Community Youtube • Peertube • Linkedin • Instagram • Mastodon • Bluesky • X Penpot video Penpot is the open source design platform for teams that build digital products at scale. Penpot’s key strength lies in giving you full ownership of your design infrastructure . Built on open source and designed for self hosting, it puts teams in complete control of their design environment supporting strict compliance and governance requirements. Whether used in the browser or deployed on your own servers , Penpot works with open standards like…
read the full Penpot overview →
About pencil
About The Next Version ========== Pencil V3 is a rewrite of Pencil that aims to fix major performance and scalability issues of the application. The new version is under heavy development and we are expecting GA builds in June. The following list summarizes important changes in the new version: Pencil V3 uses Electron instead of Mozilla XULRunner as the runtime. We expect that by moving into this Nodejs based environment, the Pencil source code can be much easier for all fellow developers to play with. The fact that Mozilla XULRunner is outdated is also a reason for the movement. A new, zip based file format was…
read the full pencil overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Penpot or pencil more popular?
Penpot has 62,042 GitHub stars and pencil has 9,896. Penpot has the larger community by that measure.
Are Penpot and pencil free?
Both are open source. Penpot is licensed under MPL-2.0 and pencil under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Penpot and pencil?
Penpot is written in Clojure and pencil in JavaScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Penpot or pencil?
Choose Penpot if you want the larger community (62,042 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose pencil if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.