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Broadly this is great to see and I’m sure the team has worked hard on this. But can’t help but feel like this is a bit of knee jerk reaction to the growth of t

Broadly this is great to see and I’m sure the team has worked hard on this. But can’t help but feel like this is a bit of knee jerk reaction to the growth of the much smaller open source product Penpot, that’s received increasing interest and even some funding since the Figma sale was announced. Penpot has bet on making all the controls match the html/css spec as well as save everything as svg, in short having a big focus on making devs first class stakeholders. This feels like a late response following Penpot Fest that ran recently and announced many cool dev features. https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgcCPfOv5v56-fghJo2dHNBqL9zlDTslh https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgcCPfOv5v56-fghJo2dHNB...

alberth 3y ago
Aren't there network effects to using Figma, that a self-hosted version of Penpot will never benefit from? Just like Github vs open source Gitea alternative.
- guideamigo 3y ago
  GitHub is too cheaply priced to disrupt. IMHO, Figma is expensive and Dev mode is poor.
- delfinom 3y ago
  Figma isn't a collaborative platform beyond your own project, it isn't a GitHub, it's for propertiary design of your products. The only thing Penpot has to do is "disrupt" the pricing equation and some businesses will pick it up to save some bucks, heck to even retain independent control.
- willsmith72 3y ago
  I think the main blockers are the pain of re-learning the software, and migrating things over. Lots of designers have down this already in the last few years from sketch. It's like software frameworks where young designers want to learn the most popular, coolest tool to help find a job, and companies want to use the most popular, coolest tool to help with hiring. I don't think it being self-hosted changes this for better or worse, but they still have a tough task ahead to get a critical-mass switching.
  - chupchap 3y ago
    UI is very similar so the learning curve is not steep
dnissley 3y ago
Wouldn't that be a good thing? Armchair regulators have been booing the Adobe acquisition on the grounds of "something something competition" -- this seems to prove that yes, indeed, great design tools can still be created in a post Adobe Figma world, and those upstarts can spur Figma to continue to compete.
raincole 3y ago
> a bit of knee jerk reaction to the growth of the much smaller open source product Penpot A thousand times better than not reacting at all and leave Figma to die?
yewenjie 3y ago
Has anybody here successfully migrated from Figma to Penpot?
- kuon 3y ago
  We tried, but we hit a blocking issue where undo would wipe the entire canvas.
karaterobot 3y ago
That's not been my impression as a designer. Outside of HN, I've not seen anybody talk about switching to Penpot. My team even looked at it and concluded it was several evolutionary steps from being an option. It's not a viable replacement for Figma yet. To be clear, I'd love it if it were, because I want competition in a space Adobe is trying to monopolize, I just don't feel like Penpot is providing that pressure at this point.
- pcurve 3y ago
  I haven't seen anyone switch to Penpot either, but it's clear Figma has been borrowing things from Penpot, which is actually great.
- mortenjorck 3y ago
  I see Penpot primarily taking Figma's market share around the edges. For established design teams with robust workflow needs, there's no competition right now despite some of Penpot's novel design features like grid layout. For independents, enthusiasts, and teams running on a shoestring, however (read: Figma's free-tier customers), it becomes considerably more compelling as a potential alternative. To paraphrase Reed Hastings' classic line: Penpot needs to become Figma before Figma can become Penpot.
dbbk 3y ago
I very much doubt they are worried about an obscure open source project.
ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
this feels like an advertisement for a "competitor", barely and thinly veiled as a comment on the topic
throwaway3821 3y ago
Posting anonymously as I have made some investments in the design tooling space. Overall I don't see Penpot being a realistic competitor to Figma, and I can't see this as being something that was done as a knee jerk reaction to Penpot's social success. First, why it isn't a realistic competitor. While building everything out leveraging SVG as its main rendering engine allows for parity with code as an advantage, the inherent disadvantage it has is handling large files. For larger design teams, files often have thousands of designs and pages. Sketch has an advantage here over Figma primarily because it has a higher upper bound on possible memory that it can allocate to each file. Penpot not only has the memory restrictions Figma does (since it operates in the browser), it's also tied to the browser rendering performance of SVG, which simply wasn't designed for the scale designers operate at. It tends to get extremely slow once you have 50 or so pages in a single artboard. This means realistically, Penpot is competing for the casual design market, rather than the larger enterprise-scale design market. Figma's approach for this market has always been to use it as a top-of-funnel expansion opportunity, which is why their free tier targets these users. In general it's very hard to compete with something that is both industry-standard, and free. Penpot theoretically offers more functionality than the Figma free tier, but since it can't support the scale that Sketch/Figma does for larger files, it greatly narrows the market they're targeting. The market for users who want to build extremely advanced designs, but who also want to create extremely small files, is a narrow group. Second, with regards to this being a knee-jerk reaction to Penpot's dev tooling, the dates just don't line up. Penpot really exploded in reaction to the Adobe acquisition announcement in late 2022, but Figma acquired a YC company known as Visly in 2021. Visly was apparently working on some design->code elements, which was really the first inkling that Figma was exploring this. It seems like this was being worked on / thought about long before Penpot took off. Given the submitter of this story appears to be Emil Sjölander, one of the Visly founders, I suspect that it's a fair assumption that Visly turned into Figma's Dev Mode feature: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/visly https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/visly
- tobr 3y ago
  > it's also tied to the browser rendering performance of SVG, which simply wasn't designed for the scale designers operate at. It tends to get extremely slow once you have 50 or so pages in a single artboard Haven’t tried Penpot so this is in the hypothetical, but surely not all of that needs to be kept around as full live SVG trees? You could draw the SVG to a canvas and keep it static until it changes.

alberth 3y ago

Aren't there network effects to using Figma, that a self-hosted version of Penpot will never benefit from? Just like Github vs open source Gitea alternative.

guideamigo 3y ago
GitHub is too cheaply priced to disrupt. IMHO, Figma is expensive and Dev mode is poor.
delfinom 3y ago
Figma isn't a collaborative platform beyond your own project, it isn't a GitHub, it's for propertiary design of your products. The only thing Penpot has to do is "disrupt" the pricing equation and some businesses will pick it up to save some bucks, heck to even retain independent control.
willsmith72 3y ago
I think the main blockers are the pain of re-learning the software, and migrating things over. Lots of designers have down this already in the last few years from sketch. It's like software frameworks where young designers want to learn the most popular, coolest tool to help find a job, and companies want to use the most popular, coolest tool to help with hiring. I don't think it being self-hosted changes this for better or worse, but they still have a tough task ahead to get a critical-mass switching.
- chupchap 3y ago
  UI is very similar so the learning curve is not steep

dnissley 3y ago

Wouldn't that be a good thing? Armchair regulators have been booing the Adobe acquisition on the grounds of "something something competition" -- this seems to prove that yes, indeed, great design tools can still be created in a post Adobe Figma world, and those upstarts can spur Figma to continue to compete.

raincole 3y ago

> a bit of knee jerk reaction to the growth of the much smaller open source product Penpot A thousand times better than not reacting at all and leave Figma to die?

yewenjie 3y ago

Has anybody here successfully migrated from Figma to Penpot?

kuon 3y ago
We tried, but we hit a blocking issue where undo would wipe the entire canvas.

karaterobot 3y ago

That's not been my impression as a designer. Outside of HN, I've not seen anybody talk about switching to Penpot. My team even looked at it and concluded it was several evolutionary steps from being an option. It's not a viable replacement for Figma yet. To be clear, I'd love it if it were, because I want competition in a space Adobe is trying to monopolize, I just don't feel like Penpot is providing that pressure at this point.

pcurve 3y ago
I haven't seen anyone switch to Penpot either, but it's clear Figma has been borrowing things from Penpot, which is actually great.
mortenjorck 3y ago
I see Penpot primarily taking Figma's market share around the edges. For established design teams with robust workflow needs, there's no competition right now despite some of Penpot's novel design features like grid layout. For independents, enthusiasts, and teams running on a shoestring, however (read: Figma's free-tier customers), it becomes considerably more compelling as a potential alternative. To paraphrase Reed Hastings' classic line: Penpot needs to become Figma before Figma can become Penpot.

dbbk 3y ago

I very much doubt they are worried about an obscure open source project.

ImPostingOnHN 3y ago

this feels like an advertisement for a "competitor", barely and thinly veiled as a comment on the topic

throwaway3821 3y ago

Posting anonymously as I have made some investments in the design tooling space. Overall I don't see Penpot being a realistic competitor to Figma, and I can't see this as being something that was done as a knee jerk reaction to Penpot's social success. First, why it isn't a realistic competitor. While building everything out leveraging SVG as its main rendering engine allows for parity with code as an advantage, the inherent disadvantage it has is handling large files. For larger design teams, files often have thousands of designs and pages. Sketch has an advantage here over Figma primarily because it has a higher upper bound on possible memory that it can allocate to each file. Penpot not only has the memory restrictions Figma does (since it operates in the browser), it's also tied to the browser rendering performance of SVG, which simply wasn't designed for the scale designers operate at. It tends to get extremely slow once you have 50 or so pages in a single artboard. This means realistically, Penpot is competing for the casual design market, rather than the larger enterprise-scale design market. Figma's approach for this market has always been to use it as a top-of-funnel expansion opportunity, which is why their free tier targets these users. In general it's very hard to compete with something that is both industry-standard, and free. Penpot theoretically offers more functionality than the Figma free tier, but since it can't support the scale that Sketch/Figma does for larger files, it greatly narrows the market they're targeting. The market for users who want to build extremely advanced designs, but who also want to create extremely small files, is a narrow group. Second, with regards to this being a knee-jerk reaction to Penpot's dev tooling, the dates just don't line up. Penpot really exploded in reaction to the Adobe acquisition announcement in late 2022, but Figma acquired a YC company known as Visly in 2021. Visly was apparently working on some design->code elements, which was really the first inkling that Figma was exploring this. It seems like this was being worked on / thought about long before Penpot took off. Given the submitter of this story appears to be Emil Sjölander, one of the Visly founders, I suspect that it's a fair assumption that Visly turned into Figma's Dev Mode feature: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/visly https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/visly

tobr 3y ago
> it's also tied to the browser rendering performance of SVG, which simply wasn't designed for the scale designers operate at. It tends to get extremely slow once you have 50 or so pages in a single artboard Haven’t tried Penpot so this is in the hypothetical, but surely not all of that needs to be kept around as full live SVG trees? You could draw the SVG to a canvas and keep it static until it changes.