Penpot

Market position

Penpot positions itself as the open-source alternative in a design-tool market dominated by proprietary products, most directly Figma (acquired by Adobe) and Adobe's design suite. Its emergence was accelerated by the Adobe-Figma deal, and Runa Capital's ROSS Index identified it as one of the fastest-growing open-source projects at the time. By early 2023 it reported more than 20,000 teams using the product, including groups at Mozilla, Accenture, ByteDance, IBM, Google and Microsoft.

Penpot differentiates through open source licensing, deployment-agnostic hosting (SaaS or self-hosted), use of open web standards (SVG, CSS, HTML, JSON) and an open file format, and a code-based approach that makes designs readable by developers and by AI via an MCP server. Management frames the target audience as developers as well as designers, arguing that developers outnumber designers roughly ten to one and have been excluded by incumbent design tools. Additional differentiators cited include native design tokens as a single source of truth, CSS Grid and Flex Layout, a plugin system and open API, and a read-only mode for developers.

Technology

The platform runs in the browser and is written in Clojure, JavaScript and SCSS, with a repository organized into backend, frontend, common, exporter, plugins, render-wasm, MCP and media-processor components. It relies on open standards including SVG, CSS, HTML and JSON, plus Penpot's own open file format. Features include real-time collaboration, CSS Grid and Flex Layout, native design tokens, components and variants, an inspect mode producing code, webhooks and a token-authenticated API, a plugin system, and an MCP server for design-code-AI workflows. Self-hosting is supported via Docker, Kubernetes and Elestio; documented minimum self-host requirements are 1-2 CPUs and 4 GB of memory. A community-maintained Electron-based desktop application also exists.

Go-to-market

Distribution combines a free hosted SaaS sign-up, self-hosted installation, and open-source community growth via GitHub, a public community forum, ambassador and translator programs, and social channels. Early traction came from Product Hunt and Hacker News features, and the company points enterprises with scaling needs toward direct contact. Libraries, templates, a learning center and educational content support adoption.

Product teams that need scalable collaboration, comprising designers, developers, product managers and, more recently, AI agents. The platform also serves organizations with strict compliance, governance or data-ownership requirements that prefer self-hosting, as well as individual users and the open-source community.

Geography

The team describes itself as based in Europe with global and inclusive aspirations; Kaleidos, the parent company, is associated with Spain, and third-party listings identify the developer as Kaleidos Inc. Users and contributors span a global open-source community, with the platform localized through community translators.

History

Penpot was initially released in February 2021 and later exited beta with external QA support from QAwerk. In September 2022, following Adobe's announced acquisition of Figma, interest in Penpot surged and its user base grew rapidly, reaching about 100,000 users within a couple of weeks. Penpot announced an $8 million Series A led by Decibel in September 2022, followed by a $12 million round, again led by Decibel, in February 2023, at which point the company reported 250,000 users and 20,000 GitHub stars. The product has since expanded into design systems, design tokens, plugins, an MCP server and AI workflows.

Risks & controversies

At the time of its February 2023 raise, Penpot had no paid features or revenue, leaving open the question of whether it can monetize its user base; the CEO acknowledged that open-source monetization requires creating substantial value before capturing any of it. The company also competes against much larger, well-capitalized incumbents in Adobe and Figma, and a significant share of its early growth was attributable to external events, namely the Adobe-Figma acquisition announcement.