Figma raised its prices by up to 33% in early 2025. It bundled FigJam and Slides into every paid seat whether teams wanted them or not. It paywalled Dev Mode features that were previously free. And it removed monthly billing for Organization and Enterprise plans, locking larger teams into annual contracts with no flexibility.
For many teams, that was the inflection point. Penpot — the open-source, self-hostable design platform built by Spanish company Kaleidos — had been maturing quietly in the background. By 2026, it has real-time collaboration, native design tokens, CSS/SVG code output, interactive prototyping, and a Figma import plugin. The feature gap that once made switching impractical has narrowed considerably.
This article breaks down why teams are making the move, what Penpot actually delivers today, where it still falls short, and how to approach a migration if you decide to go ahead.
1. What Figma Costs in 2026 (And Why It Pushed Teams to Look)
Figma's pricing as of August 2026 (always confirm current rates at figma.com/pricing before budgeting):
- Starter: Free — up to 3 design files and 3 FigJam boards, unlimited personal drafts
- Professional: $16/editor/month (annual) or $20/month (monthly) — unlimited files, team libraries
- Organization: $55/editor/month (annual only) — design system branching, org-wide libraries, private plugins
- Enterprise: $90/editor/month (annual only) — SSO, advanced security, dedicated support
The per-seat model means costs scale linearly with headcount. A 10-person design team on Professional runs $1,920/year. A 20-person team on Organization hits $13,200/year. At Enterprise, a 50-seat contract starts at $54,000/year before negotiation.
Three specific changes drove the most frustration. First, the Professional full seat price rose from $12 to $16/month (annual) — a 33% increase — with some users reporting even more depending on their renewal timing. Second, Dev Mode, which previously allowed developers to inspect design files for free, was folded into paid seats. Developer teams that had been using inspect-only access without paying editor fees suddenly faced a $12/month Dev seat per developer. Third, FigJam and Figma Slides were force-bundled into every paid seat, meaning teams pay for tools they don't use.
The combination of forced bundling and meaningful price increases, arriving within a short window, pushed procurement teams at budget-conscious organizations to evaluate alternatives for the first time since Figma became the dominant tool.
2. What Penpot Actually Offers Today
Penpot is not a hobbyist tool that happens to be free. It is a full-featured, web-based design and prototyping platform with a genuine engineering team behind it, funded through enterprise self-hosted licensing and cloud subscriptions.
The feature set as of 2026 is substantial:
Design and layout: Vector editing, components with variants, shared libraries, and — critically — CSS Grid and Flex Layout support that maps directly to how interfaces are actually built in code. This is one of Penpot's genuine differentiators: the layout engine is built around web standards, not an approximation of them.
Design tokens: Penpot has native, first-class design token support — not a plugin, not a workaround. Teams can define and manage color, typography, spacing, and shadow tokens that serve as a single source of truth across projects, with programmatic sync capabilities for design systems at scale.
Developer handoff: The Inspect panel outputs CSS, HTML, SVG, and design token information. Developers get code-ready output without needing a separate Dev Mode subscription. This is the single most commercially significant difference from Figma's current pricing model for engineering-heavy teams.
Prototyping: Interactive flows, animations, and conditional logic are built in. No plugins required for standard prototyping use cases.
Collaboration: Real-time multi-user editing with live cursors and low-latency sync. The cloud version supports unlimited team members on the free tier — no seat limits.
Self-hosting: Penpot runs on Docker Compose with three containers (frontend, backend, exporter) plus PostgreSQL. The minimum requirement is a Linux server with 2GB+ RAM. For teams with existing server infrastructure or a cloud instance already running, the incremental hosting cost is minimal.
3. Who Is Actually Switching — And Why
The teams migrating to Penpot in 2026 fall into a few distinct categories.
Cost-driven teams are the most common. A design studio with eight designers paying $15/seat on Figma Professional spends $1,440/year. On Penpot cloud, that same team pays zero. For a studio running lean, that is a real budget line reclaimed. One documented case from a Pune-based studio estimated saving the equivalent of roughly $2,200/year after migrating eight designers, with the migration itself taking nine working days from setup to full team transition.
Compliance and data sovereignty teams are the fastest-growing segment. Healthcare organizations, financial services firms, and government contractors face regulations that restrict where design assets — which often contain sensitive product wireframes or user data mockups — can be stored. Figma is a US-based SaaS product. Penpot self-hosted means design files never leave the organization's own infrastructure. Several fintech companies have cited this as the primary reason for migration, enough that some are now listing "Figma or Penpot" in design job postings.
Open-source and developer-centric teams are the natural audience. Teams already running their own infrastructure, already comfortable with Docker, and already philosophically aligned with open-source tooling find Penpot a natural fit. The MCP server support — which allows AI tools and code editors like Cursor to read Penpot design files directly — is particularly compelling for teams that have integrated AI into their development workflow.
Teams hit by the Dev Mode paywall are a newer category. Organizations where developers regularly inspected Figma files without paying editor fees found that Figma's seat restructuring added unexpected cost. Penpot's developer handoff is free at every tier, which makes the comparison straightforward for engineering-led organizations.
4. Where Penpot Still Falls Short
A fair assessment requires being direct about the gaps.
Plugin ecosystem: Figma's plugin marketplace has thousands of community-built extensions. Penpot's plugin system is newer and the catalog is smaller. Teams that depend heavily on specific Figma plugins — for icon libraries, content generation, accessibility checking, or third-party integrations — should audit which plugins they actually use before migrating.
Advanced prototyping: Figma's prototyping has more mature support for complex interaction patterns, multi-state components, and variable-driven flows. Penpot's prototyping is solid for standard use cases but is not yet at full parity for highly interactive prototype work.
Mobile app design: Figma has better tooling for iOS and Android-specific design patterns. Penpot's strength is web UI — teams designing primarily for mobile should evaluate carefully.
FigJam equivalent: There is no Penpot equivalent to FigJam for whiteboarding and team ideation. Teams that use FigJam heavily would need a separate tool (Miro, Excalidraw, or similar) to replace that workflow.
Learning curve for existing teams: The interface is familiar enough — keyboard shortcuts are largely the same — but component naming conventions, the design token system, and the self-hosting setup require time investment. Experienced Figma users generally reach productivity within one to two weeks, but budget for that transition period.
5. The Migration Path: What a Realistic Switch Looks Like
Switching a working design team is a project, not an afternoon task. Here is a realistic breakdown of what the process involves.
Step 1: Export from Figma. Figma allows SVG export at the file level. There is also a community-built Figma-to-Penpot plugin that uses the Figma export API to transfer files more completely. Complex components and certain interaction types may not convert perfectly — plan for manual cleanup on imported files.
Step 2: Set up Penpot. For the cloud-hosted version, this is account creation. For self-hosted, the official Docker Compose setup is well-documented and takes a few hours for a competent DevOps person. The three-container architecture (frontend, backend, exporter) with PostgreSQL is standard infrastructure.
Step 3: Rebuild your design system in Penpot tokens. Do not try to reconstruct your Figma styles directly. Use the migration as an opportunity to rebuild your design system using Penpot's native tokens system, which is more powerful than Figma's styles and maps better to code variables. This is the highest-value investment in the migration.
Step 4: Run both tools in parallel during transition. For active client projects, finish them in Figma. Start new projects in Penpot. Attempting to migrate a live project mid-flight adds risk without benefit.
Step 5: Train the team on differences. The main learning moments are the tokens system, component variants behavior, and the Inspect panel workflow for developers. A focused half-day session is usually sufficient for designers who already know Figma.
Teams report that the migration timeline — from decision to full cutover — typically runs two to four weeks for a team of five to ten designers, depending on design system complexity.
6. Penpot vs. Figma: A Direct Comparison
| Factor | Figma | Penpot |
|---|---|---|
| Base cost (team of 10) | $1,800/year (Professional) | $0 (cloud free tier) |
| Developer inspect access | $12/seat/month (Dev seat) | Free at all tiers |
| Self-hosting | Not available | Docker Compose, 2GB+ RAM server |
| Design tokens | Plugin-dependent | Native, first-class |
| CSS/code output | Dev Mode (paid) | Free in Inspect panel |
| Plugin ecosystem | Thousands of plugins | Growing, smaller catalog |
| FigJam equivalent | Included | Not available |
| Data residency | US-based SaaS | Full control (self-hosted) |
| Figma import | — | Via community plugin |
| Real-time collaboration | Yes | Yes |
| Prototyping | More mature | Solid for standard use |
7. Should Your Team Switch?
The honest answer is: it depends on what you actually use Figma for.
Switch to Penpot if your team is paying for seats primarily to collaborate on UI design, you have developers who need inspect access, you have compliance requirements around data residency, or your budget is under real pressure. The free tier is genuinely unlimited — no seat caps, no file limits, no arbitrary walls — and the self-hosted option gives a level of control that no SaaS tool can match.
Stay on Figma if your team is deeply dependent on specific plugins, does significant mobile app design work, relies heavily on FigJam for team ideation, or is at enterprise scale where the procurement and training cost of switching outweighs the savings.
The decision is easier than it used to be. Penpot in 2026 is a legitimate professional tool, not a proof of concept. The teams that have made the move are largely not looking back — particularly those for whom the cost savings are real and the compliance benefits are concrete.
For teams sitting on the fence: the cloud free tier costs nothing to try. Spin up an account, import a test file using the Figma plugin, and spend a week working in it before committing either direction.
OSALFinder tracks open-source alternatives to popular SaaS tools. See our Figma vs Penpot comparison page for a regularly updated feature and pricing breakdown.
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