11 ms·

Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform

1145 points by wiradikusuma 4y ago

pietroppeter 4y ago
so, who has actually tried this and has anything to say about it? (besides the fact that is very funny to see it #2 with the sale of figma being #1)
- simulo 4y ago
  I tried it! Good: - It is a good copy of figmas UI. With much open source software, it often seems the UI comes last in priority and interest; Penpot’s UI is well working and looks good. - Basic features are all there - The team has build an open source online platform before, so they know what they do. Bad: - In design systems particularly at variants and states of components, it is not on figma’s level yet Interesting: - You can self-deploy (cause open) or use their free instance - Front- and backend are written in clojure/clojure script
- hectormalot 4y ago
  I’ve used it for some designs and found it quite easy to work with. UI is very good (vs typical open source) Challenging is the Figma ecosystem taking most mindshare. Eg trying to find someone on Fiverr to create PenPot designs is hard.
wanderingmind 4y ago
This is the beauty of FOSS. It might be rough at the edges but you can always have access to it and not have to worry about losing your daily driver (talking to you Figma). Every organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business continuity risk.
- jbaczuk 4y ago
  FOSS has risks too.
  - type0 4y ago
    Yes, it can even cause you to drop out of college https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32799090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32799090
    - Existenceblinks 4y ago
      Yeah I feel sick every time people pride FOSS/OSS only from consumers' perspective. While there's just a few way to financially sustain projects.
      - Existenceblinks 4y ago
        Congratulation downvoters you've successfully used free software on the back of people for a long time and don't want changes.
    - jbaczuk 4y ago
      lol
  - marcodiego 4y ago
    Specially the risk of becoming a much better alternative.
    - jbaczuk 4y ago
      until users get too dependent on it and the maintainers stop maintaining it... or the maintainer goes rogue... or there is a vulnerability/bug introduced by someone... and you can't easily switch to another platform
  - NayamAmarshe 4y ago
    Yeah, risk for the proprietary competition.
- bolt7469 4y ago
  rough at the edges That part is the deal-breaker for many people who actually use these tools for work. It's difficult to daily drive an objectively worse software, when your pay depends on producing value with it.
  - dmantis 4y ago
    If you are a company and not an individual, nobody prohibits you to pay bounties to maintainers to focus on your needs instead of paying some try-to-hook-you-up-with-subscriptions company. Moreover, lots of OSS contributors are from China, Russia, India, Ukraine, etc - so a company may spend even less paying them for particular commits than buying software from bay area company. It's more about management mindset rather than insolvable problem. upd: And everybody wins - more quality OSS code, help developers in poor countries, less money to shitty companies like Adobe.
    - lowercased 4y ago
      > nobody prohibits you to pay bounties to maintainers to focus on your needs company or individual, that's true. but there's still big opportunity costs and time factors. Pay someone $1000 now to perhaps get some polish/bugfixes in a release 2 months from now... and do what in the meantime? Deal with 15% more time spent in sub-par-for-my-needs software? You can, but it's not a slam dunk decision, and just because you paid that money, you may still not get things as you want (or when you want).
      - newsclues 4y ago
        Hire devs and use OSS as a base to create the tools you need!
        moonchrome 4y ago
        Hire dairy farmers to get the milk for your coffee - absolute insight into how it's produced. Also they got to raise cows from calves so no milk in the office for a while. But once you get it you can be sure it's organic ! That's not even going into the dev market situation right now ... I mean seriously have you people ever been near a situation where these kind of decisions are made ?
- bearmode 4y ago
  >It might be rough at the edges Often it's not just "rough around the edges", but fully missing features that are necessary (or STRONGLY desired) for a regular professional's workflow
- acomjean 4y ago
  In biology almost nobody pays for software. A lot of it is really rough around the edges (I have to install and try to run some of it as part of my job). It’s kinda interesting, most development is by grants and such, they don’t offer much in the way of support funding. A lot of development is fooling around taking output from a and making it work for b.
- that_guy_iain 4y ago
  > Every organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business continuity risk. As far as a business is concerned, Figma is still available. There is no business continuity risk. I personally, would say open source provides a much larger business continuity risk. There are many open source projects that are basically dead. They're widely used and quite crucial but development and support has basically stopped the maintainer has moved on with their lifes and have other things they want to do. A good example would be the Gorilla libraries in Go, it is still being maintained but the fact the maintainer has been looking for such a long time for someone else to take over because they don't have the time really means the library is just kinda existing. There is a popular User library for the Symfony framework in PHP, it literally says in the docs that people are expected to move off of it because they won't maintain it and lists a bunch of reasons why. How many teams using that library would even know that? One of the biggest complaints I've seen open soure maintainers complain about is people asking if their project is dead or not. As far as the maintainer is concerned it's maintained, when they have time. But it looks to the world that it is dead. Just because you can get the source code and use it at any time because the license allows it doesn't mean you're able to depend on it. In fact, since you're often paying no one for it and most often not even said thanks to anyone (myself included). You're entitled to nothing, no support, no note that they won't be maintaining it, etc. It annoys me when people think that FOSS means it's something you can depend on, when it literally comes with a license that makes sure you understand there is no warranty. That's how much you can depend on it. The person giving it to you says use at your own risk.
  - infamia 4y ago
    > I personally, would say open source provides a much larger business continuity risk. I feel the opposite, open source gives people and companies options and the ability to soldier on if someone loses interest in a technology. This site is littered with notices from companies that they intend to discontinue some paid product or service suddenly with very little notice. If a group of people or companies really care about an open source technology, it's easy enough for them to ensure the continued maintenance of something they're getting for free. Also, if you care deeply about a technology, chances are others do as well and those projects will continue well past what a commercial vendor would maintain.
rapnie 4y ago
If you want to ask questions, have feedback, Penpot recently started a community on this Discourse forum: https://community.penpot.app https://community.penpot.app
- mdaniel 4y ago
  holy bright pink, batman :-(
js4ever 4y ago
It's really a fantastic tool, we are using it since several months in replacement of figma and Adobe XD. The prototype feature is working great as well.
- NaN1352 4y ago
  Can you do auto layouts? And components like figma?
  - TuringTest 4y ago
    It has some support for reusable components, just not interactive ones (that's on the roadmap).
  - simulo 4y ago
    It can do components like figma, it does not have autolayout and component variants yet.
  - wildrhythms 4y ago
    It seems like no :( I'm a big fan of the auto layout feature in Figma and Framer, in fact I've started getting the designers at my workplace to use it in lieu of fixed pixel values. Would love to switch to a FOSS solution, but that one missing feature is a blocker for me, for now.
jameschensmith 4y ago
While I find it awesome to see Penpot getting some recognition right now, it is not at the point of being a Figma replacement just yet. But I'm very hopeful that it will eventually be. Once they get a plugin system implemented, I'll be recommending it to all my colleagues.
devteambravo 4y ago
I'm dismayed at the Figma news. I do not like Adobe. Hi PenPot, will be switching to you. I wish your name wasn't so close sounding to polpot.
gardaani 4y ago
How they pay the hosting and storage fees? What is the business model?
- kozhevnikov 4y ago
  https://help.penpot.app/faqs/#how-is-penpot-sustainable https://help.penpot.app/faqs/#how-is-penpot-sustainable
- simulo 4y ago
  I guess they will offer premium accounts for a fee at some point, just like they do for their other project, Taiga.io There is an interview on the company’s sustainability and strategy with its founder at https://opensource.com/article/21/9/open-source-design https://opensource.com/article/21/9/open-source-design
joelrunyon 4y ago
Is there a FOSS version of webflow?
- hiidrew 4y ago
  curious about this as well. hopefully it's next. webflow is pretty nice to use for a non-developer but the subscription pricing is hefty.
- matdehaast 4y ago
  Oleg is creating https://webstudio.is/ https://webstudio.is/ which I think is that.
pjmlp 4y ago
As usual, when money talks, we get FOSS posts with a subset of the capabilities of the real thing. Naturally everyone will do donations to support the upstream development going forward.
- rvz 4y ago
  > As usual, when money talks, we get FOSS posts with a subset of the capabilities of the real thing. This. They're right you know. The same thing happened with LibreOffice, GIMP and InkScape. Even if you have an installed version of them, they don't come any where near the features of 'the real thing' and users will complain why it is not Office® 365 or the real Photoshop®, or actually Figma®. On top of that, neither of these FOSS alternatives have done nothing to combat the move to online versions of Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Figma, etc. since there is no need for the user to install anything which will always be ahead of manually installing these apps. The only exception to this is Blender, but as always with specialist software it is used by a small amount of users compared to the applications that I have described. As for Penpot, it just tells me that the Figma users that are 'upset' over Adobe today are just going to keep using Figma anyway and are just reacting over the news of the acquisition, since Penpot still doesn't meet the requirements and vast capabilities of Figma.
  - TuringTest 4y ago
    > On top of that, neither of these FOSS alternatives have done nothing to combat the move to online versions of Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Figma, etc. since there is no need for the user to install anything which will always be ahead of manually installing these apps. The point of FLOSS software is not to prevent proprietary tools from existing, it's to make sure that a Free&Open alternative exists if you don't want them.
  - buovjaga 4y ago
    > On top of that, neither of these FOSS alternatives have done nothing to combat the move to online versions of Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Figma, etc. since there is no need for the user to install anything which will always be ahead of manually installing these apps. An online version of LibreOffice has been available since 2017 and now there is even a WebAssembly version in development.
shash7 4y ago
Thank the lord. After the acquisition, this is definitely something I'm looking into.
capableweb 4y ago
Sounds like they have a interesting history behind the creation of Penpot: > Penpot was (effectively) born in a Kaleidos personal innovation week (PIWEEK, aka recurring hackathon) in 2018. Back then we had been recently forced to break one of our sacred rules at the company “only open source tools and platforms are allowed to build technology” due to F1gm4’s overwhelmingly productivity boost for designers at the company. “We are second-class citizens in open source, it’s frustrating and it’s painful!” they cried, and they were right. https://kaleidos.net/ https://kaleidos.net/ seems like an interesting place to work as well. Gonna be exciting to see where Penpot moves from here. I'm a 100% Figma user who just signed up for Penpot and gonna see if it's possible to adopt for my own workflows. Particularly interesting for me as a Clojure/Script developer is that Penpot is written in Clojure and ClojureScript, but the average user won't care about that. But will also be interesting to see if they'll be able to keep iterating at the same speed as they currently are, and how the language will affect it.
- ithrow 4y ago
  I don't see how Clojurescript is a good thing here, it's probably the most inefficient and with the most overhead of all the compile to JS languages (with out talking too much about react with penpot uses), even highly optimized pure JS won't come anywhere near the performance of Figma's C++ engine. Yes, performance for this tools matters.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Time will tell. Currently Penpot is using SVG for rendering the canvas, while Figma is using HTML <canvas> element for rendering the canvas, with their own custom engine. I don't know anything about what Penpot is planning, but I'm still excited to see what a SVG canvas could possibly do in competition to Figmas own renderer. And then the rest of the UI is just basic HTML which any framework/compile-to-js language could handle. It's all about the canvas, and browsers are arguably pretty efficient at render SVGs so again, time will tell what happens.
    - javchz 4y ago
orliesaurus 4y ago
Adobe trying to pay $20B dollars to buy a designer tool meanwhile I am still pushing in prod code I wrote using vim
- riddleronroof 4y ago
  Haha this. And now someone put copilot in vim.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Copilot have existed in vim since the public launch, or am I missing something?
  - polyamid23 4y ago
    https://github.com/github/copilot.vim https://github.com/github/copilot.vim
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Is it code for a designer tool that Adobe just paid $20B for?
timetraveller26 4y ago
I was just thinking that I should finally learn to use Figma, but now I think that I might as well learn PenPot, hopefully the recent news will make this open source tool grow (I didn't know it, for starters).
azemetre 4y ago
Interesting choice in tech they are using, I wanted to contribute but I don't know any clojure or clojurescript.
marcodiego 4y ago
Right in time to become a good option now that Adobe is trying to acquire Figma.
margarina72 4y ago
Well a good move on penpot would be to see how to get this figma file import [1] feature some resources, maybe even open a fundraising for this feature. I am pretty sure the general dismay would help gaining some momentum for any kind of funding. 1: https://tree.taiga.io/project/penpot/us/1469 https://tree.taiga.io/project/penpot/us/1469
neoberg 4y ago
They seem to be working as a company. Does anyone know what their business model is? I'm interested in contributing but I want to know this before I do.
- TuringTest 4y ago
  As I understand it, they're a startup with an astonishing ability to convince investors to fund open source tools, and they're able to set up an economically sustainable environment around those.
  - malermeister 4y ago
    How do they make it economically sustainable? Where does the money come from after the initial investment?
njsubedi 4y ago
Another great open source product from the company. Their open source project management software, Taiga (taiga.io), is a fantastic tool that I have used for several years. Feature-wise it’s the most matured software out there, and runs blazing fast.
- bhu1st 4y ago
  Checked Taiga, looks decent. On a side note glad to see your username pop up here. Where are you these days? Let's catch up.
  - njsubedi 4y ago
    Uh oh, good to see you here, bro! I’m in Pokhara.. I’ll ping you when I get to Ktm.
    - nqq 4y ago
      out of context but it was pleasant finding Nepali people here
      - njsubedi 4y ago
        There’re many, but I suppose most of them don’t participate in the conversation. I think we should change that.
      - bhu1st 4y ago
        Exactly. We have been here for decade or more so.
- darushimo 4y ago
  Wow i hadn't heard of this and looks like the right solution for a particular need I have. Thanks a bunch for mentioning!
andrewstuart2 4y ago
I love that FOSS exists and helps fight centralization and stagnation, but I worry that it will be seen as an example of competition. I have to wonder if this is one of the driving forces behind the epidemic of relicensing to be able to compete. If you can't seriously compete in a marketplace because the competition is overpowered, then taking some of the most popular FOSS solutions private and paid ends up being one of the only real ways to compete, and one of the only ways for those contributors to feel adequately compensated for their efforts. I have to wonder if stricter antitrust could help push back against some of the erosion of FOSS licenses (IMO) that we've seen in recent years. The whole "build something to compete with X and get your exit by being acquired by X" strategy can't be long-term sustainable, can it?
dsmmcken 4y ago
Looks like you can self host with a docker container. That's very cool. Can I import from figma?
- simulo 4y ago
  No - there was some discussion on such a feature, but im/Export from/to such complex formats is very difficult and often impossible to get perfectly right.
  - mdaniel 4y ago
    I've always heard that "perfect is the enemy of good" and in my experience as long as the tool communicates "I did what I could, and didn't know what to do with the following elements" then clear communication can go a long way toward allowing users to make informed decisions
  - dsmmcken 4y ago
    That's unfortunate. I have one large file that contains everything for a particular project. I migrated from Sketch to Figma a couple years ago and did so using their import. It was not perfect, but was better than nothing. It took a few days to clean it up again, but was a good starting point for migration. As the file has years of work in it, starting over would be a significant amount of work.
Kukumber 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32844338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32844338 :)
danielvaughn 4y ago
I'm excited to see alternatives to Figma, because using it is like an emotional rollercoaster for me. There are times when I'll open a massive project file with hundreds of frames, each with thousands of graphical nodes. And even then, I can zoom in and out with no friction at all, it's just buttery smooth. I've been a developer for over a decade, and I have no idea at all how they're able to pull that off. It's a technical marvel. On the other hand, it's far from what I would want for a modern design tool. Managing tokens, or anything from the "design system" world, is an absolute headache. Compared to the efficiency of the dev tools I use, it feels like Figma (and every other design tool) is just light years behind. Even when I use a tool that's built specifically for that purpose, like Supernova, I still feel pretty underwhelmed. I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking for, but I know that the current landscape doesn't cut it for me.
- ojkelly 4y ago
  In 2015 one of the founders wrote a really interesting post about how they did it [0]. > Pulling this off was really hard; we’ve basically ended up building a browser inside a browser. [0] https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web/ https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-...
  - natatana 4y ago
    Which can make sense on the short term, but on the long term I'm sure browsers' SVG renderer will catch-up and use GPU rendering in the spirit of pathfinder, piet-gpu, etc. This is why I think it is wise for Penpot to use the native browser SVG renderer. They can spend their limited ressources on making a cool app while the browsers will inevitably improve their vector renderer on their own
    - danielvaughn 4y ago
      Agreed, I really wish browsers spent more time developing SVG.
- protomolecule 4y ago
alberth 4y ago
It doesn't have the network effect. Folks seem to fail to realize that open source project fail when it comes to collaboration products, not because the tech is worse (many times the open source tech might be better), they fail because of the lack of network effects they have achieved. This is why Slack/FB/Github flourish, while open source alternatives don't.
- noSyncCloud 4y ago
  GitHub fails as a collab tool and has no network effect? Interesting perspective, I guess.
  - alberth 4y ago
    I'm saying the opposite. I'm saying that Github has flourished because of it's network effect vs alternatives.
overlisted 4y ago
For people looking at this post in the future, here's why it's so funny: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32850178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32850178
dabeeeenster 4y ago
Shameless plug but I interviewed Pablo for my podcast https://flagsmith.com/podcast/pablo-muzquiz-penpot/ https://flagsmith.com/podcast/pablo-muzquiz-penpot/ He's a mega interesting guy; it was a super fascinating 50 minutes of my life!
snapetom 4y ago
Maybe I’m using it wrong and it was never intended for this, but when I tried Penpot about a year ago, I had no way to export the diagram as one file like PDF or JPG. I could only export a layer. Did I miss something or am I not understanding what Penpot is for?
- simulo 4y ago
  You can export each artboard. Usually, there would be one design/variant/mockup on one artboard. This is the same model of export as figma does it.
  - wildrhythms 4y ago
    Not true. Figma lets you select an element ("layer") and export just that element (and its children as it appears on the canvas) to all of its available formats SVG, PNG, JPG, etc. and even offers 1x-4x scaling at export time.
    - MrTrvp 4y ago
      Additionally you can add a number higher than 4x.
- westhom 4y ago
  You were probably drawing onto the bare XY space without creating an art board first.
  - snapetom 4y ago
    TIL about boards. That was exactly the issue. Thank you!
syrusakbary 4y ago
I'm super excited about Penpot. It has a unique opportunity ahead to unite design and development workflows that I think very few people realize. Looking forward to what's coming next!
sirjaz 4y ago
The biggest issue I see with this is that it is web-based. It should be decentralized and have a native desktop client. 70% of the world has crappy internet, and if your connection goes down you are sol.
- spartanatreyu 4y ago
  Figma is web-based, how is this worse?
  - sirjaz 4y ago
    It has a desktop app that you can use offline. My problem with any webapp SaaS app is that you loose control of the data. That is one thing I don't like about figma
evolve2k 4y ago
Interested in if anyone tried to self-host Penpot locally. How was the speed/experience compared with using figma online?
uxdesignguy 4y ago
The fact they claim it’s the first open-source design tool demonstrates the ignorance they have for the craft. GIMP has been available as an open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop for a while, supports more and popular programming languages, and yet, hasn’t supplanted Photoshop just because it is open source. Penpot lacks the sophistication required from a design tool that’s difficult to notice if you’re not a designer working in these tools daily to do your job. The open-source spirit for design isn’t unique to Penpot and won’t be enough to galvanize the design community into adopting it for everyday use. At best, it will be used by developers and product managers working on simple workflows for apps, but can’t withstand the demands required for designing sophisticated tools.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nfodor 4y ago
I am an avid Penpot convert, but from Sketch App, that I have been using since so many years now. I set up a system so we can install Penpot in no time self-hosted in house, including dns setup and ssl certificates. There are still some rough edges on Safari, such as text not displaying in place, so I may switch to Chrome or Brave for it. I just wrote a blog post on how to install it here: https://blog.setip.io/foss-subscription-savings/ https://blog.setip.io/foss-subscription-savings/

1145 points by wiradikusuma 4y ago

so, who has actually tried this and has anything to say about it? (besides the fact that is very funny to see it #2 with the sale of figma being #1)

simulo 4y ago
I tried it! Good: - It is a good copy of figmas UI. With much open source software, it often seems the UI comes last in priority and interest; Penpot’s UI is well working and looks good. - Basic features are all there - The team has build an open source online platform before, so they know what they do. Bad: - In design systems particularly at variants and states of components, it is not on figma’s level yet Interesting: - You can self-deploy (cause open) or use their free instance - Front- and backend are written in clojure/clojure script
hectormalot 4y ago
I’ve used it for some designs and found it quite easy to work with. UI is very good (vs typical open source) Challenging is the Figma ecosystem taking most mindshare. Eg trying to find someone on Fiverr to create PenPot designs is hard.

wanderingmind 4y ago

This is the beauty of FOSS. It might be rough at the edges but you can always have access to it and not have to worry about losing your daily driver (talking to you Figma). Every organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business continuity risk.

jbaczuk 4y ago
FOSS has risks too.
- type0 4y ago
  Yes, it can even cause you to drop out of college https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32799090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32799090
  - Existenceblinks 4y ago
    Yeah I feel sick every time people pride FOSS/OSS only from consumers' perspective. While there's just a few way to financially sustain projects.
    - Existenceblinks 4y ago
      Congratulation downvoters you've successfully used free software on the back of people for a long time and don't want changes.
  - jbaczuk 4y ago
    lol
- marcodiego 4y ago
  Specially the risk of becoming a much better alternative.
  - jbaczuk 4y ago
    until users get too dependent on it and the maintainers stop maintaining it... or the maintainer goes rogue... or there is a vulnerability/bug introduced by someone... and you can't easily switch to another platform
- NayamAmarshe 4y ago
  Yeah, risk for the proprietary competition.
bolt7469 4y ago
rough at the edges That part is the deal-breaker for many people who actually use these tools for work. It's difficult to daily drive an objectively worse software, when your pay depends on producing value with it.
- dmantis 4y ago
  If you are a company and not an individual, nobody prohibits you to pay bounties to maintainers to focus on your needs instead of paying some try-to-hook-you-up-with-subscriptions company. Moreover, lots of OSS contributors are from China, Russia, India, Ukraine, etc - so a company may spend even less paying them for particular commits than buying software from bay area company. It's more about management mindset rather than insolvable problem. upd: And everybody wins - more quality OSS code, help developers in poor countries, less money to shitty companies like Adobe.
  - lowercased 4y ago
    > nobody prohibits you to pay bounties to maintainers to focus on your needs company or individual, that's true. but there's still big opportunity costs and time factors. Pay someone $1000 now to perhaps get some polish/bugfixes in a release 2 months from now... and do what in the meantime? Deal with 15% more time spent in sub-par-for-my-needs software? You can, but it's not a slam dunk decision, and just because you paid that money, you may still not get things as you want (or when you want).
    - newsclues 4y ago
      Hire devs and use OSS as a base to create the tools you need!
      - moonchrome 4y ago
        Hire dairy farmers to get the milk for your coffee - absolute insight into how it's produced. Also they got to raise cows from calves so no milk in the office for a while. But once you get it you can be sure it's organic ! That's not even going into the dev market situation right now ... I mean seriously have you people ever been near a situation where these kind of decisions are made ?
bearmode 4y ago
>It might be rough at the edges Often it's not just "rough around the edges", but fully missing features that are necessary (or STRONGLY desired) for a regular professional's workflow
acomjean 4y ago
In biology almost nobody pays for software. A lot of it is really rough around the edges (I have to install and try to run some of it as part of my job). It’s kinda interesting, most development is by grants and such, they don’t offer much in the way of support funding. A lot of development is fooling around taking output from a and making it work for b.
that_guy_iain 4y ago
> Every organization needs to start thinking about this and invest in good FOSS tools for any recent technology to avoid business continuity risk. As far as a business is concerned, Figma is still available. There is no business continuity risk. I personally, would say open source provides a much larger business continuity risk. There are many open source projects that are basically dead. They're widely used and quite crucial but development and support has basically stopped the maintainer has moved on with their lifes and have other things they want to do. A good example would be the Gorilla libraries in Go, it is still being maintained but the fact the maintainer has been looking for such a long time for someone else to take over because they don't have the time really means the library is just kinda existing. There is a popular User library for the Symfony framework in PHP, it literally says in the docs that people are expected to move off of it because they won't maintain it and lists a bunch of reasons why. How many teams using that library would even know that? One of the biggest complaints I've seen open soure maintainers complain about is people asking if their project is dead or not. As far as the maintainer is concerned it's maintained, when they have time. But it looks to the world that it is dead. Just because you can get the source code and use it at any time because the license allows it doesn't mean you're able to depend on it. In fact, since you're often paying no one for it and most often not even said thanks to anyone (myself included). You're entitled to nothing, no support, no note that they won't be maintaining it, etc. It annoys me when people think that FOSS means it's something you can depend on, when it literally comes with a license that makes sure you understand there is no warranty. That's how much you can depend on it. The person giving it to you says use at your own risk.
- infamia 4y ago
  > I personally, would say open source provides a much larger business continuity risk. I feel the opposite, open source gives people and companies options and the ability to soldier on if someone loses interest in a technology. This site is littered with notices from companies that they intend to discontinue some paid product or service suddenly with very little notice. If a group of people or companies really care about an open source technology, it's easy enough for them to ensure the continued maintenance of something they're getting for free. Also, if you care deeply about a technology, chances are others do as well and those projects will continue well past what a commercial vendor would maintain.

rapnie 4y ago

If you want to ask questions, have feedback, Penpot recently started a community on this Discourse forum: https://community.penpot.app https://community.penpot.app

mdaniel 4y ago
holy bright pink, batman :-(

js4ever 4y ago

It's really a fantastic tool, we are using it since several months in replacement of figma and Adobe XD. The prototype feature is working great as well.

NaN1352 4y ago
Can you do auto layouts? And components like figma?
- TuringTest 4y ago
  It has some support for reusable components, just not interactive ones (that's on the roadmap).
- simulo 4y ago
  It can do components like figma, it does not have autolayout and component variants yet.
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  It seems like no :( I'm a big fan of the auto layout feature in Figma and Framer, in fact I've started getting the designers at my workplace to use it in lieu of fixed pixel values. Would love to switch to a FOSS solution, but that one missing feature is a blocker for me, for now.

jameschensmith 4y ago

While I find it awesome to see Penpot getting some recognition right now, it is not at the point of being a Figma replacement just yet. But I'm very hopeful that it will eventually be. Once they get a plugin system implemented, I'll be recommending it to all my colleagues.

devteambravo 4y ago

I'm dismayed at the Figma news. I do not like Adobe. Hi PenPot, will be switching to you. I wish your name wasn't so close sounding to polpot.

gardaani 4y ago

How they pay the hosting and storage fees? What is the business model?

kozhevnikov 4y ago
https://help.penpot.app/faqs/#how-is-penpot-sustainable https://help.penpot.app/faqs/#how-is-penpot-sustainable
simulo 4y ago
I guess they will offer premium accounts for a fee at some point, just like they do for their other project, Taiga.io There is an interview on the company’s sustainability and strategy with its founder at https://opensource.com/article/21/9/open-source-design https://opensource.com/article/21/9/open-source-design

joelrunyon 4y ago

Is there a FOSS version of webflow?

hiidrew 4y ago
curious about this as well. hopefully it's next. webflow is pretty nice to use for a non-developer but the subscription pricing is hefty.
matdehaast 4y ago
Oleg is creating https://webstudio.is/ https://webstudio.is/ which I think is that.

pjmlp 4y ago

As usual, when money talks, we get FOSS posts with a subset of the capabilities of the real thing. Naturally everyone will do donations to support the upstream development going forward.

rvz 4y ago
> As usual, when money talks, we get FOSS posts with a subset of the capabilities of the real thing. This. They're right you know. The same thing happened with LibreOffice, GIMP and InkScape. Even if you have an installed version of them, they don't come any where near the features of 'the real thing' and users will complain why it is not Office® 365 or the real Photoshop®, or actually Figma®. On top of that, neither of these FOSS alternatives have done nothing to combat the move to online versions of Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Figma, etc. since there is no need for the user to install anything which will always be ahead of manually installing these apps. The only exception to this is Blender, but as always with specialist software it is used by a small amount of users compared to the applications that I have described. As for Penpot, it just tells me that the Figma users that are 'upset' over Adobe today are just going to keep using Figma anyway and are just reacting over the news of the acquisition, since Penpot still doesn't meet the requirements and vast capabilities of Figma.
- TuringTest 4y ago
  > On top of that, neither of these FOSS alternatives have done nothing to combat the move to online versions of Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Figma, etc. since there is no need for the user to install anything which will always be ahead of manually installing these apps. The point of FLOSS software is not to prevent proprietary tools from existing, it's to make sure that a Free&Open alternative exists if you don't want them.
- buovjaga 4y ago
  > On top of that, neither of these FOSS alternatives have done nothing to combat the move to online versions of Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Figma, etc. since there is no need for the user to install anything which will always be ahead of manually installing these apps. An online version of LibreOffice has been available since 2017 and now there is even a WebAssembly version in development.

shash7 4y ago

Thank the lord. After the acquisition, this is definitely something I'm looking into.

capableweb 4y ago

Sounds like they have a interesting history behind the creation of Penpot: > Penpot was (effectively) born in a Kaleidos personal innovation week (PIWEEK, aka recurring hackathon) in 2018. Back then we had been recently forced to break one of our sacred rules at the company “only open source tools and platforms are allowed to build technology” due to F1gm4’s overwhelmingly productivity boost for designers at the company. “We are second-class citizens in open source, it’s frustrating and it’s painful!” they cried, and they were right. https://kaleidos.net/ https://kaleidos.net/ seems like an interesting place to work as well. Gonna be exciting to see where Penpot moves from here. I'm a 100% Figma user who just signed up for Penpot and gonna see if it's possible to adopt for my own workflows. Particularly interesting for me as a Clojure/Script developer is that Penpot is written in Clojure and ClojureScript, but the average user won't care about that. But will also be interesting to see if they'll be able to keep iterating at the same speed as they currently are, and how the language will affect it.

ithrow 4y ago
I don't see how Clojurescript is a good thing here, it's probably the most inefficient and with the most overhead of all the compile to JS languages (with out talking too much about react with penpot uses), even highly optimized pure JS won't come anywhere near the performance of Figma's C++ engine. Yes, performance for this tools matters.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Time will tell. Currently Penpot is using SVG for rendering the canvas, while Figma is using HTML <canvas> element for rendering the canvas, with their own custom engine. I don't know anything about what Penpot is planning, but I'm still excited to see what a SVG canvas could possibly do in competition to Figmas own renderer. And then the rest of the UI is just basic HTML which any framework/compile-to-js language could handle. It's all about the canvas, and browsers are arguably pretty efficient at render SVGs so again, time will tell what happens.
  - javchz 4y ago

orliesaurus 4y ago

Adobe trying to pay $20B dollars to buy a designer tool meanwhile I am still pushing in prod code I wrote using vim

riddleronroof 4y ago
Haha this. And now someone put copilot in vim.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Copilot have existed in vim since the public launch, or am I missing something?
- polyamid23 4y ago
  https://github.com/github/copilot.vim https://github.com/github/copilot.vim
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Is it code for a designer tool that Adobe just paid $20B for?

timetraveller26 4y ago

I was just thinking that I should finally learn to use Figma, but now I think that I might as well learn PenPot, hopefully the recent news will make this open source tool grow (I didn't know it, for starters).

azemetre 4y ago

Interesting choice in tech they are using, I wanted to contribute but I don't know any clojure or clojurescript.

marcodiego 4y ago

Right in time to become a good option now that Adobe is trying to acquire Figma.

margarina72 4y ago

Well a good move on penpot would be to see how to get this figma file import [1] feature some resources, maybe even open a fundraising for this feature. I am pretty sure the general dismay would help gaining some momentum for any kind of funding. 1: https://tree.taiga.io/project/penpot/us/1469 https://tree.taiga.io/project/penpot/us/1469

neoberg 4y ago

They seem to be working as a company. Does anyone know what their business model is? I'm interested in contributing but I want to know this before I do.

TuringTest 4y ago
As I understand it, they're a startup with an astonishing ability to convince investors to fund open source tools, and they're able to set up an economically sustainable environment around those.
- malermeister 4y ago
  How do they make it economically sustainable? Where does the money come from after the initial investment?

njsubedi 4y ago

Another great open source product from the company. Their open source project management software, Taiga (taiga.io), is a fantastic tool that I have used for several years. Feature-wise it’s the most matured software out there, and runs blazing fast.

bhu1st 4y ago
Checked Taiga, looks decent. On a side note glad to see your username pop up here. Where are you these days? Let's catch up.
- njsubedi 4y ago
  Uh oh, good to see you here, bro! I’m in Pokhara.. I’ll ping you when I get to Ktm.
  - nqq 4y ago
    out of context but it was pleasant finding Nepali people here
    - njsubedi 4y ago
      There’re many, but I suppose most of them don’t participate in the conversation. I think we should change that.
    - bhu1st 4y ago
      Exactly. We have been here for decade or more so.
darushimo 4y ago
Wow i hadn't heard of this and looks like the right solution for a particular need I have. Thanks a bunch for mentioning!

andrewstuart2 4y ago

I love that FOSS exists and helps fight centralization and stagnation, but I worry that it will be seen as an example of competition. I have to wonder if this is one of the driving forces behind the epidemic of relicensing to be able to compete. If you can't seriously compete in a marketplace because the competition is overpowered, then taking some of the most popular FOSS solutions private and paid ends up being one of the only real ways to compete, and one of the only ways for those contributors to feel adequately compensated for their efforts. I have to wonder if stricter antitrust could help push back against some of the erosion of FOSS licenses (IMO) that we've seen in recent years. The whole "build something to compete with X and get your exit by being acquired by X" strategy can't be long-term sustainable, can it?

dsmmcken 4y ago

Looks like you can self host with a docker container. That's very cool. Can I import from figma?

simulo 4y ago
No - there was some discussion on such a feature, but im/Export from/to such complex formats is very difficult and often impossible to get perfectly right.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  I've always heard that "perfect is the enemy of good" and in my experience as long as the tool communicates "I did what I could, and didn't know what to do with the following elements" then clear communication can go a long way toward allowing users to make informed decisions
- dsmmcken 4y ago
  That's unfortunate. I have one large file that contains everything for a particular project. I migrated from Sketch to Figma a couple years ago and did so using their import. It was not perfect, but was better than nothing. It took a few days to clean it up again, but was a good starting point for migration. As the file has years of work in it, starting over would be a significant amount of work.

Kukumber 4y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32844338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32844338 :)

danielvaughn 4y ago

I'm excited to see alternatives to Figma, because using it is like an emotional rollercoaster for me. There are times when I'll open a massive project file with hundreds of frames, each with thousands of graphical nodes. And even then, I can zoom in and out with no friction at all, it's just buttery smooth. I've been a developer for over a decade, and I have no idea at all how they're able to pull that off. It's a technical marvel. On the other hand, it's far from what I would want for a modern design tool. Managing tokens, or anything from the "design system" world, is an absolute headache. Compared to the efficiency of the dev tools I use, it feels like Figma (and every other design tool) is just light years behind. Even when I use a tool that's built specifically for that purpose, like Supernova, I still feel pretty underwhelmed. I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking for, but I know that the current landscape doesn't cut it for me.

ojkelly 4y ago
In 2015 one of the founders wrote a really interesting post about how they did it [0]. > Pulling this off was really hard; we’ve basically ended up building a browser inside a browser. [0] https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-tool-on-the-web/ https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-design-...
- natatana 4y ago
  Which can make sense on the short term, but on the long term I'm sure browsers' SVG renderer will catch-up and use GPU rendering in the spirit of pathfinder, piet-gpu, etc. This is why I think it is wise for Penpot to use the native browser SVG renderer. They can spend their limited ressources on making a cool app while the browsers will inevitably improve their vector renderer on their own
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    Agreed, I really wish browsers spent more time developing SVG.
protomolecule 4y ago

alberth 4y ago

It doesn't have the network effect. Folks seem to fail to realize that open source project fail when it comes to collaboration products, not because the tech is worse (many times the open source tech might be better), they fail because of the lack of network effects they have achieved. This is why Slack/FB/Github flourish, while open source alternatives don't.

noSyncCloud 4y ago
GitHub fails as a collab tool and has no network effect? Interesting perspective, I guess.
- alberth 4y ago
  I'm saying the opposite. I'm saying that Github has flourished because of it's network effect vs alternatives.

overlisted 4y ago

For people looking at this post in the future, here's why it's so funny: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32850178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32850178

dabeeeenster 4y ago

Shameless plug but I interviewed Pablo for my podcast https://flagsmith.com/podcast/pablo-muzquiz-penpot/ https://flagsmith.com/podcast/pablo-muzquiz-penpot/ He's a mega interesting guy; it was a super fascinating 50 minutes of my life!

snapetom 4y ago

Maybe I’m using it wrong and it was never intended for this, but when I tried Penpot about a year ago, I had no way to export the diagram as one file like PDF or JPG. I could only export a layer. Did I miss something or am I not understanding what Penpot is for?

simulo 4y ago
You can export each artboard. Usually, there would be one design/variant/mockup on one artboard. This is the same model of export as figma does it.
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  Not true. Figma lets you select an element ("layer") and export just that element (and its children as it appears on the canvas) to all of its available formats SVG, PNG, JPG, etc. and even offers 1x-4x scaling at export time.
  - MrTrvp 4y ago
    Additionally you can add a number higher than 4x.
westhom 4y ago
You were probably drawing onto the bare XY space without creating an art board first.
- snapetom 4y ago
  TIL about boards. That was exactly the issue. Thank you!

syrusakbary 4y ago

I'm super excited about Penpot. It has a unique opportunity ahead to unite design and development workflows that I think very few people realize. Looking forward to what's coming next!

sirjaz 4y ago

The biggest issue I see with this is that it is web-based. It should be decentralized and have a native desktop client. 70% of the world has crappy internet, and if your connection goes down you are sol.

spartanatreyu 4y ago
Figma is web-based, how is this worse?
- sirjaz 4y ago
  It has a desktop app that you can use offline. My problem with any webapp SaaS app is that you loose control of the data. That is one thing I don't like about figma

evolve2k 4y ago

Interested in if anyone tried to self-host Penpot locally. How was the speed/experience compared with using figma online?

uxdesignguy 4y ago

The fact they claim it’s the first open-source design tool demonstrates the ignorance they have for the craft. GIMP has been available as an open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop for a while, supports more and popular programming languages, and yet, hasn’t supplanted Photoshop just because it is open source. Penpot lacks the sophistication required from a design tool that’s difficult to notice if you’re not a designer working in these tools daily to do your job. The open-source spirit for design isn’t unique to Penpot and won’t be enough to galvanize the design community into adopting it for everyday use. At best, it will be used by developers and product managers working on simple workflows for apps, but can’t withstand the demands required for designing sophisticated tools.

deleted 4y ago

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nfodor 4y ago

I am an avid Penpot convert, but from Sketch App, that I have been using since so many years now. I set up a system so we can install Penpot in no time self-hosted in house, including dns setup and ssl certificates. There are still some rough edges on Safari, such as text not displaying in place, so I may switch to Chrome or Brave for it. I just wrote a blog post on how to install it here: https://blog.setip.io/foss-subscription-savings/ https://blog.setip.io/foss-subscription-savings/