Penpot is an open-source design and prototyping platform for product teams that need scalable real-time collaboration, self-hosting, and full ownership of their design infrastructure.

What it is

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.

The concrete problem Penpot solves is dependence on proprietary, vendor-hosted design tooling. It positions itself as the open alternative to Figma and Canva, replacing a closed SaaS workflow with one the organization controls. The README frames this as full ownership of design infrastructure, which matters to teams facing strict compliance and governance requirements and to teams that do not want vendor lock-in over their design environment. Because the platform exposes an open API, webhooks, and access tokens, and because design is expressed in standard formats, the workspace becomes programmable rather than a sealed product.

Key capabilities

• Self-hosting and deployment-agnostic operation, documented in the technical guide at help.penpot.app/technical-guide/getting-started/, so the design environment runs under the team's own control.
• Open standards support for SVG, CSS, HTML, and JSON, which keeps design output readable by developers and portable across tools.
• Real-time collaboration on a self-hosted or hosted instance.
• Native Design Tokens, Components, and Variants for building and maintaining design systems across projects and platforms.
• CSS Grid and Flex Layout support, letting teams design responsive interfaces that behave like real code from the start.
• Inspect mode, which gives instant access to SVG, CSS, and HTML for handoff.
• A plugin system distributed through PenpotHub, plus an open API, webhooks, and access tokens for integrating with the existing development toolchain.
• An MCP server that enables multi-directional workflows between design and code, including AI-driven automation.

Who uses it and how

• Product teams that build digital products at scale and need design and development working from one shared source of truth.
• Organizations with strict compliance and governance requirements that cannot place design assets in a third-party hosted product, and therefore self-host Penpot.
• Design system teams that manage complex, reusable component libraries and rely on Design Tokens, Components, and Variants to keep them consistent.
• Developers who need ready-to-use SVG, CSS, and HTML from Inspect mode, or who extend the workspace through plugins, the API, and the MCP server.
• Larger organizations that need additional support can use Penpot Enterprise, which the README offers as a separate engagement path.

Getting started

Penpot is deployment agnostic, so a team either uses the hosted SaaS option or self-hosts by following the getting-started guide in the Penpot help documentation. The repository also links a user guide and learning center for onboarding.

How it compares

Against Figma and Canva, Penpot differs first on licence and hosting: it is MPL-2.0 open source and can be self-hosted, while both alternatives are proprietary and vendor-hosted. That changes the cost model from a subscription relationship to operating your own deployment, and it changes data ownership, since design assets stay on infrastructure the organization controls. The trade-off is that Penpot is the option for teams willing to run and maintain that infrastructure rather than outsource it.

When to use it — and when not to

Choose Penpot when self-hosting, open standards, and ownership of the design environment outweigh the convenience of a fully managed vendor service, and when the team has the capacity to operate its own deployment. Do not choose it if the team wants zero operational responsibility, since a self-hosted instance has to be run and maintained, and the reference documentation is the place to confirm the backing services required. The repository carries 777 open issues, which is worth reading as a signal of an actively developed project with a substantial open backlog rather than a finished one.