I’ve been using Figma previously beforehand, and I discovered about Penpot through r/FigmaDesign as alternatives. I wanted to try something different and as there is a likelihood of Figma restricting certain features and paywalling them like what happened with Dev Mode which I was kind of sad about.
That was until I discovered Penpot, and I find it pretty awesome, and it has the code inspect feature that Figma formerly had when it was on beta and I am glad to find such feature, and the fact that it is Open source and that it is free l I really like and as well as the Grid and Flex layouts and all of that that came with Penpot 2.0.
But I think the major downside with Penpot is definitely performance, loading and moving elements are just laggy for some reason and I feel it’s just not as performance optimized as it is in Figma.
Even having little elements feels laggy for some reason, whether it be down to the Wi-Fi or server-side, I feel it is a hassle to handle and laggy and I do not know if this applies to others as well
I have 16GB of RAM running Dual-Channel and an i5-8350u if that is relevant and I run Penpot on Edge which is a Chromium-based browser which many suggested when finding around for such topic like this, and I don’t know if self-hosting actually increases performance, I tried finding threads and haven’t found anything about it.
I feel if they sort the optimization and make just as fast as Figma’s which uses WASM compared to Penpot’s Clojure. Because right now as a standalone it really is just “manageable” but “hard” to use. It’s unfortunate you need to wait for things to load and it isn’t as smooth and feels jittery. That aside, Penpot is really good, I just wished it had better performance and not as laggy as it is now.
I really hope the Penpot team takes the performance aspect into consideration in future updates, maybe even make a desktop app that actually utilizes the computer’s GPU of that sort. Till then I will try keep using Penpot and learn using it as an alternative to Figma and learn its nooks and crannies and see how I can implement it alongside my design processes with both Figma and Penpot.
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It’s definitely not your computer. Penpot is actively working on performance at the moment to ease these concerns, but yeah there’s definitely some not so fun lags.
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Yes, please. Snappiness is super important for intuitively working with a tool. Performance is usually an ongoing effort in software development. Shout-out to the Penpot people working on that.
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unfortunately yes. Especially considering that It’s already an effort to get used to a new software’s interface. I am ok with giving up with advanced features, but it is too hard to deal with lags =(
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I haven’t used it enough to experience its performance. For me, the biggest thing that’s holding me back from moving to it is the component system, which even with v2 is lackluster, lacking states. I know that work is in the backlog, but I feel like it should be prioritized.
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If you look at their releases, they have basically a 3.0 on deck. They aren’t marketing it like 2.0 but it should be out by the end of the summer. But yeah, again, performance isn’t snappy.
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For me, I am not quite ready to replace XD with PenPot, but I don’t think I can ever go to Figma (due to not trusting them with buy-outs or price changes). The thing I dislike about PenPot that XD offers is a native desktop app. I have a lot of things going on in my browser/s. I don’t want a design tool in that chaos. I’d prefer a stand alone program on my computer… a program that will let me make the full use of my 3 computer screens when trying to design a desktop app UI, and let me click and drag my pallets to my left and right screen, leaving the center screen for the pure artboard.
That’s what is holding me back from using it mainstream, but otherwise, it has a lot that I like.
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If you’re on a Mac, you can turn any website into web app. You get the Dock icon, a dedicated window with a simplified status bar, etc. I just tried it for 1 minute, and seems to basically work. Might not get you all the way, but it’s something. More info here in Apple Support.
I tried that but I feel like it’s even more laggy 
I don’t self host. The project I’m working on is quite small and has only a few bitmaps. I switched back to Chrome and it seems to work a little bit better although still leaves a lot to wish for.
It’s the only thing keeping me from using Penpot for prototyping.
In the rare instances I absolutely need to prototype I go for Figma just because Penpot is unusable with the current lag.
I love prototyping and would do it much more often if Penpot were performant.
Heck, I’ve even used Penpot for slide decks and client social media materials and the experience in terms of features was A+. But the performance + horrible exports which have the same root cause (the rendering engine), kept me from making this my preferred workflow.
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We are very close to having a new rendering engine that the Penpot team has been working on for many months. The new rending engine is entering private beta this month, and hopefully will be available for us in a couple months. This update will make Penpot on par with Figma in terms of performance.
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That’s awesome to hear about it more than a year later! I do look forward to it! Penpot v3 incoming? 
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I agree with others. Brilliant to hear. This is by far the biggest pain point for me with the platform. I work exclusively in PenPot for UI design (and I love it!). As a result though I tend to push the current limits of performance with almost every mock up I create it seems (even though I’ve followed all the advice I can to speed things up).
I’m a graphic designer now working as a front end dev, so I’m coming from years of working in programs like Illustrator (albeit a desktop app) where I got to just keep duplicating artboards to create a series of mock ups in one go, so it’s been difficult to change my workflow. I don’t want to have to create multiple layers simply to farm boards that are part of a sequence out just because of performance issues.
With the added power of PenPots shared components, colours and type it’s great to keep it all integrated, but very quickly gets bogged down the further I go - leading to PenPot crashing and regular browser freezes just to make one small change like border radius or text on a parent component.
Fingers crossed this next update to the rendering engine improves the process. Otherwise I’ll be forced to come off it for larger mock ups and prototypes until performance drastically improves.
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Hi everyone! In an effort to bring even further clarity into this, you can hear all about the new rendering engine and our plans around it in this chat Elena Torro had last month!
It is coming, and yes, it will be big. I also highly suggest considering Penpot Fest for who knows, maybe a glimpse of things… 
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