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.
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.
Hah. I'm a self employed freelancer, but a friend works for (MegaCorp Intl) and every time we go for beers he mentions that he has "Unlimited Paid Time Off". But whenever I ask if that means he could take a few months to hike the Andes with me, he says.... well, no, actually they'd fire him if he took too much time. How much is too much? I ask. Well basically anything that would make them notice his absence, apparently.
The issue is that if storage is too cheap, people will inevitably mine filecoin on it. Additionally, promising "unlimited storage" and not holding that promise might be a legal liability.
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"
People see 'unlimited' and will do everything in their power to 'fact-check' it, forcing the producer to place a 'hard cap' and making everyone's life worse.
It might have become socially acceptable to lie when everyone else is, but it is still a lie. Back in my days, you at least had to put an asterisk behind such outrageous claims.
Travel to high trust societies if you don't get what I mean.
Things would be so much easier if we could expect human decency and ethics, even if there is no law against it, because it goes against our values as humans.
It absolutely is a lie, but you might live in a society where constant lying has been normalized. Personally, I believe that society would be better off if companies were held to the letter of their words.
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.
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.
> It doesn’t help that almost every designer doesn’t care to split things into more than one document
That’s how these tools encourage you to use them. If the tool crumbles under its own usage modalities, that’s because it’s poorly designed, not the user’s fault.
> 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?
It's amazing how the design world in my experience loves to use closed-source software, Figma first. The chiasm with the dev world is huge. Penpot's cool in this perspective.
Why don’t they provide a desktop version, similar to software such as GIMP, Inkscape, and others?
Do they believe they cannot achieve the desired revenue through crowdfunding? Many projects—most notably Blender—have been highly successful using this approach. It seems unreasonable that an average designer should be required to learn server administration
I am referring to the convenience of being able to download it from the store and start using it immediately. If it were as effortless as I described, they would reach a much larger number of users
I am not sure what you are really asking here. They have almost 20k commits of frontend and server code [0] over half a decade of development. What would a desktop version of this look like outside of a bundled Tauri/Electron wrapper?
The closest analogy would be Sketch for macOS, which Figma simply copied at first, and then mostly replaced. I would love to see open source Sketch for open source systems.
Figma has set an expectation for designers that their projects support multi-user editing by default and are available to clients, teammates and stakeholders without having to install anything. Its hard to go against that kind of productivity in any org.
So, Java instead of wasm, but open source. While LogSeq is an open source copycat (not really) of Obsidian, I simply can’t stand it. I have tried Penpot a couple of years back, so cannot say anything about it, with the exception that I noticed it’s Clojure. Would love to learn more if someone can comment on that. I guess I’m biased against Java, but I’m not experienced with it, so I may be very wrong on that one. Of course having an open-source Figma around feels empowering, so much it is ingrained into the current dev process.
Penpot is also implemented in Clojure/ClojureScript. ClojureScript is a Clojure Dialect which compiles down to JavaScript. So there is no Java involved on the frontend :)
With the integration of AI, people are using Figma for more than just design.
A recent use-case that a friend was gushing about:
- Input notes, data into Figma and ask its AI to summarize it into presentation worthy slides with built-in games to keep meeting members engaged, and host them to a website.
You don't just have to self-host, they offer a hosted version that's far more reasonably priced than Figma[1].
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
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.
> unlimited storage
Surely it's not actually unlimited. I wish such claims wouldn't be as common in the industry.
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.
Hah. I'm a self employed freelancer, but a friend works for (MegaCorp Intl) and every time we go for beers he mentions that he has "Unlimited Paid Time Off". But whenever I ask if that means he could take a few months to hike the Andes with me, he says.... well, no, actually they'd fire him if he took too much time. How much is too much? I ask. Well basically anything that would make them notice his absence, apparently.
The issue is that if storage is too cheap, people will inevitably mine filecoin on it. Additionally, promising "unlimited storage" and not holding that promise might be a legal liability.
It likely is as it is not general purpose storage.
Even though your Linux iso's are called "images", they can not be added to a penpot design file - sorry to say.
Can penpot import images? Given enough time, anything that can store PNG will become an automated backup backend
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"
HN users want to know if you're allowed to host the whole Internet on it.
Creative people could start encoding terabytes of movies inside of Penpot documents.
This is why we can't have nice things.
People see 'unlimited' and will do everything in their power to 'fact-check' it, forcing the producer to place a 'hard cap' and making everyone's life worse.
Don’t use the unlimited lie then, I assume.
"starbucks says there is no limit on how many napkins I can use but they got mad when I took the whole container, liars"
It might have become socially acceptable to lie when everyone else is, but it is still a lie. Back in my days, you at least had to put an asterisk behind such outrageous claims.
It's not a lie if no one is abusing it.
Travel to high trust societies if you don't get what I mean.
Things would be so much easier if we could expect human decency and ethics, even if there is no law against it, because it goes against our values as humans.
> It's not a lie if no one is abusing it.
It absolutely is a lie, but you might live in a society where constant lying has been normalized. Personally, I believe that society would be better off if companies were held to the letter of their words.
Someone will abuse it though, so why bother with the bullshit
You don't build high trust societies with lies
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.
Unstable, very crash prone with just a few users designing 10 plus pages. And a huge memory hog too.
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.
> very crash prone
> And a huge memory hog
On the server side or the frontend side?
Figma is a huge memory hog, too...
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.
> It doesn’t help that almost every designer doesn’t care to split things into more than one document
That’s how these tools encourage you to use them. If the tool crumbles under its own usage modalities, that’s because it’s poorly designed, not the user’s fault.
I'm sure if the original developer bothered to show up again he could fix it in a weekend.
For folks who want a stand-alone desktop release:
https://github.com/author-more/penpot-desktop/releases
That's a pity:
> 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?
It’s indeed a reasonably usable tool. Gets very slow with large canvases though, so don’t put everything into a single canvas.
It's amazing how the design world in my experience loves to use closed-source software, Figma first. The chiasm with the dev world is huge. Penpot's cool in this perspective.
In many industries, you want to use a mix of (a) the best tools available for the job, and (b) what everybody else in the same industry uses.
Open vs. closed source is a secondary consideration outside tech circles, and often within.
Why don’t they provide a desktop version, similar to software such as GIMP, Inkscape, and others? Do they believe they cannot achieve the desired revenue through crowdfunding? Many projects—most notably Blender—have been highly successful using this approach. It seems unreasonable that an average designer should be required to learn server administration
There is in fact an effort to make a desktop application!
Source (& releases): https://github.com/author-more/penpot-desktop
Topic on penpot forum: https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-desktop-road-to-1-0/72...
I am referring to the convenience of being able to download it from the store and start using it immediately. If it were as effortless as I described, they would reach a much larger number of users
https://penpot.app/ you don't have to download it at all :)
Thanks for the information, but I was talking about the advantage of local usability.
I am not sure what you are really asking here. They have almost 20k commits of frontend and server code [0] over half a decade of development. What would a desktop version of this look like outside of a bundled Tauri/Electron wrapper?
[0]: https://github.com/penpot/penpot
I am not a software developer. There are many people who think like me...
The closest analogy would be Sketch for macOS, which Figma simply copied at first, and then mostly replaced. I would love to see open source Sketch for open source systems.
You mean which Figma replaced in the market, because they were not limited to a native app?
This is imo a cautionary tale that being a native app primarily is a bad idea in this year.
Figma has set an expectation for designers that their projects support multi-user editing by default and are available to clients, teammates and stakeholders without having to install anything. Its hard to go against that kind of productivity in any org.
Penpot provides the same.
I think Figma stole the grid layout idea from penpot, but it’s common in software to do that
I tried to self host penpot a few months ago but the app would crash after a few minutes and not properly show the canvases. So a no for me
They seem to update very frequently; I don't know if it still crashes now — I'm planning to try it myself.
What i tested happned 5 months ago. if the issue exist 1 month ago too it is the same problem.
The problem lies with the whole thing is XML and SVG unlike Figma's Canvas/WebASM . The whole thing is unable to scale.
They are actually working on a new canvas-based rendering engine in order to get away from using the DOM so that should help performance quite a bit.
https://community.penpot.app/t/its-time-for-penpot-to-almost...
First discussed here 3 years ago:
Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32851262
1145 points, 128 comments
Have been self-hosting this on Docker/Portainer for several weeks for a few people. Works fine so far.
Lunacy is amazing for me. Very fast and intuitive.
Tried Penpot, it was laggy and non usable.
https://icons8.com/lunacy
Not open source however
Thank you both, had no idea about existence of lunacy (the app).
Penpot has been invaluable! A very nice system and team. 'On prem' Figma has a lot of unique possibilities.
So, Java instead of wasm, but open source. While LogSeq is an open source copycat (not really) of Obsidian, I simply can’t stand it. I have tried Penpot a couple of years back, so cannot say anything about it, with the exception that I noticed it’s Clojure. Would love to learn more if someone can comment on that. I guess I’m biased against Java, but I’m not experienced with it, so I may be very wrong on that one. Of course having an open-source Figma around feels empowering, so much it is ingrained into the current dev process.
Penpot is also implemented in Clojure/ClojureScript. ClojureScript is a Clojure Dialect which compiles down to JavaScript. So there is no Java involved on the frontend :)
Clojure huh???? never see that outside financial system
https://pitch.com/ is also a huge Clojure visual app. They build UIX [0] which is a really nice interface to React.
[0]: https://github.com/pitch-io/uix
Do you support MCP? I really want to be able to do conversation-based UI design!
I was immediately drawn to the emoji in the commit message titles.
I love this team. It's so endearing.
While I agree, I'm not sure it's a team, it looks like mostly one dude :)
Thats Clojure...one person can look like a whole team ;)
couldn't help being cheeky...actually there are quite a few contributors.
Yeah, finally some lisp!
Penpot is a startup that raised $12M a few years back:
https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/02/penpot-the-open-source-pla...
I'm seeing several contributors: https://github.com/penpot/penpot/graphs/contributors
Figma is also one dude.
1.65k employees according to Wikipedia.
With the integration of AI, people are using Figma for more than just design.
A recent use-case that a friend was gushing about:
- Input notes, data into Figma and ask its AI to summarize it into presentation worthy slides with built-in games to keep meeting members engaged, and host them to a website.