I really wanted to like penpot, but when I tried a few months ago, simply navigating between pages (even on the example documents) was causing parts of the document to change in bizarre ways. I didn't want that level of risk with documents I actually cared about, so continued to use figma. I guess it's time to give it another shot.
Same experience here. I tried it a few months ago and even on simple use I quickly ran into so many bugs & issues I quickly gave up. I'm willing to learn a new UI, but the tool must be reliable, and it simple was not.
I've loaded an example document and do not see what you mean when navigating between pages. A problem like that should be extremely jarring and it is very hard to believe it would be ignored.
For now. Mattermost too used to be cheaper than Slack, and Gitlab too used to be cheaper than GitHub. I know the story, "look we did X, the open-source Y" and two years in you now have two versions, the free and the "enterprise" one with exclusive features.
That's the beauty of the open source, self-hosted option then, no? If they radically change pricing one day, pick up your ball and self-host without any limits.
It's a little like "unlimited holidays". If you turn up on day 1 and then say "Right, I'm off on my unlimited holidays! See you never!" and disappeared, they would stop paying you. There is an implicit fair use clause in all unlimited offers - I know a guy who pushed back on "unlimited holidays" because he didn't want to get penalised in performance reviews and it turns out that in his UK-based org it was 29 days a year, or one day more than the legal statutory minimum.
Firms like penpot are basically saying "look, if you pay us this much, we're not going to put hard quotas on you, just get on with it", but if you then try storing backups of annas archive on it, they are probably going to suggest that you are not operating within the spirit of the agreement, even if you're within the letter of it: fair use will apply.
Some people like to know where they stand. They want hard quotas. So fine, ask them for hard quotas. Ask for the fair use clause and understand it.
Most of us know what it means (it's a soft quota with fair use limitations), and are happy with not abusing the tier and having a bit more freedom, though.
Does it really matter if in real-world-use 99% of the users never hit any limit? And I cannot blame anyone to use "unlimited" instead of "fair use, with reasonably large limits so that you will (probably) never see any restrictions in your use of the product"
Also, when it comes to UI elements this is my go to vector editor. Keeps things simple, has good ways of handling units and layout. A pleasure designing custom icons, or quick graphical elements. Plus a great export system to keep things organized.
There are many things you can do besides full app flows, it doesn't dictate how you use it. Really reminds me of early Sketch and how productive I was with it. Its wild that this is open source.
It is my go-to vector editor as well. But a large pain point is that text elements cannot be vectorized or converted to paths or shapes. So your designs cannot be exported meaningfully because there is no guarantee that the receiving end will have the same fonts you designed with.
Exporting to svg may look completely different when opened elsewhere if your designs have any text elements.
This is why I dismissed Penpot as even the simplest tool for quick, basic prototyping. I could tolerate some visual and workflow bugs, but encountering this limitation was a deal breaker.
Figma has become absolutely shocking in the past few years. The performance is so bad these days. It doesn’t help that almost every designer doesn’t care to split things into more than one document. I’ve seen Figma documents with hundreds of screens.
> Penpot Desktop loads the Penpot web application like a browser does. For offline use, the built-in local instance creator can set up and run a local Penpot instance via Docker (per the official self‑hosting guide).
Came here to complain about the same. I downloaded the app, but it needs an online account. What's the whole purpose of making it open source and downloadable, if it doesn't work offline?
I'm willing to pay the "performance tax" of the web stack/self-hosting if it means my design files aren't held hostage in a proprietary cloud silo.
Figma is fantastic software, but it has become a single point of failure for entire product orgs. If Penpot is "laggy" right now but gives me a docker-compose up guarantee that I own the pipeline, that's a trade-off I'll take.
Performance can be optimized eventually (it's code); closed-source licensing terms cannot be optimized by users (it's legal).
Exactly.
I'm a little interested to see if perhaps designer's eyes will continue to open to the power of licensing terms and control of their work with the whole AI conversation. The only designers i've heard say they care about open source are on the web side of design.
Readit News
EDIT: still broken 8 months later :(
Hopefully they've improved a lot recently?
Agreed - I don't see how its not glaringly obvious to anyone who uses the app:
https://imgur.com/a/hZ1ja9o
Deleted Comment
Their free tier supports up to 8 members, limited to 10GB of storage.
The next tier supports unlimited members, and is price-capped at $175 a month, but is limited to 25GB of storage.
The final tier is price-capped at $950 a month, with unlimited storage.
[1] https://penpot.app/pricing
1. Slightly worse product than Slack (if just for lack of connect) yet they're charging more for the cheapest license.
2. Gating reasonable OAuth support behind the paid version is crippleware
IMO they're gonna get forked, and they'll deserve it.
Please don’t say donations because that doesn’t work for something as complex as the projects you mentioned
Edit: ok there are some where it works like Blender - no idea how they do it though…
Surely it's not actually unlimited. I wish such claims wouldn't be as common in the industry.
Firms like penpot are basically saying "look, if you pay us this much, we're not going to put hard quotas on you, just get on with it", but if you then try storing backups of annas archive on it, they are probably going to suggest that you are not operating within the spirit of the agreement, even if you're within the letter of it: fair use will apply.
Some people like to know where they stand. They want hard quotas. So fine, ask them for hard quotas. Ask for the fair use clause and understand it.
Most of us know what it means (it's a soft quota with fair use limitations), and are happy with not abusing the tier and having a bit more freedom, though.
Even though your Linux iso's are called "images", they can not be added to a penpot design file - sorry to say.
There are many things you can do besides full app flows, it doesn't dictate how you use it. Really reminds me of early Sketch and how productive I was with it. Its wild that this is open source.
Exporting to svg may look completely different when opened elsewhere if your designs have any text elements.
I run it on Dedicated server with 64GB Ram , it starts to lag as soon as a 5-6 pages and memory 20GB, lagging out the whole team and then crashes.
> And a huge memory hog
On the server side or the frontend side?
https://github.com/author-more/penpot-desktop/releases
> Penpot Desktop loads the Penpot web application like a browser does. For offline use, the built-in local instance creator can set up and run a local Penpot instance via Docker (per the official self‑hosting guide).
Figma is fantastic software, but it has become a single point of failure for entire product orgs. If Penpot is "laggy" right now but gives me a docker-compose up guarantee that I own the pipeline, that's a trade-off I'll take.
Performance can be optimized eventually (it's code); closed-source licensing terms cannot be optimized by users (it's legal).
Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platformhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32851262
1145 points, 128 comments