head to head
Canva vs Penpot
Penpot is the open source alternative to Canva — graphic design and template tool. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — Penpot is a viable free replacement for Canva. Penpot is open source under MPL-2.0, written in Clojure, with 60,094 GitHub stars, 4,108 forks and 777 open issues; it was last pushed 7 hours ago. Canva costs from $15, while self-hosting Penpot carries no licence fee — the trade is your operational time instead of a subscription. 1 other open source Canva alternative is tracked here, led by Excalidraw at 132,233 stars. Penpot ranks #2 of 2 tracked open source Canva alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: Excalidraw (132,233 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to Penpot and 3 reasons to stay on Canva.
choose Penpot if
- Your Canva bill is growing with seats or usage
- You need your data in a format and server you control
- Your compliance posture requires auditing the code that touches sensitive data
- You have (or can rent) a server and basic Docker comfort
stick with Canva if
- You need the polished onboarding and support SLAs of a commercial vendor
- Your team has zero capacity to operate software, even self-hosted-simple
- You depend on a Canva integration ecosystem that the OSS alternatives have not replicated
Side by side
| Penpot (open source) | Canva | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | Free / $15-30/user/month |
| License | MPL-2.0 | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — penpot/penpot | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 60K · ⑂ 4.1K | — |
| Built with | Clojure | — |
Why people look for a Canva alternative
About Penpot
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.
read the full Penpot overview →
Other open source alternatives to Canva
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is Penpot a good replacement for Canva?
Penpot is an open source alternative to Canva (Graphic design and template tool). It is written in Clojure and licensed under MPL-2.0, with 60,094 GitHub stars.
Is Penpot free compared to Canva?
Yes. Penpot is open source — there is no licence fee, and you can self-host it. Canva is typically a paid subscription, so the trade-off is licence cost against the operational work of running it yourself.
How do I migrate from Canva to Penpot?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check Penpot's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.