We’re constantly working to improve Penpot and make it the best tool for your design needs, and we want your input! We’ve put together a list of the top 10 issues and feature requests that have come up frequently, but we’d love to hear from you too:
Top 10 issues we’ve heard from the community:
Comments & notifications: Improving feedback workflows with better notifications.
Zoom control: Managing excessive zoom in/out in the design process.
Precision in rendering: Especially in microinteractions and small details.
Text to path: A more intuitive way to work with text paths.
Smart layout creation: Keeping elements in their pre-layout order when using layout tools.
CSS style copy/paste: Directly copying and pasting styles as CSS.
Batch editing elements: Allowing multiple element edits, even when attributes differ (e.g., different line thicknesses).
Path editing at close zoom levels: Needing to zoom in too much for detailed path edits is a pain point.
System state information: Improving traceability of element states and changes applied.
Color picker and libraries: Enhancing the color picker, especially for colors from libraries (strong opinions here! ).
While we’re already working on Variants, Design Tokens, and Performance Improvements, we know there’s much more we could improve.
What do you think? Which of these issues should we focus on next? Are there others that should be higher on the list? We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Share your feedback below and let’s make Penpot even better, together!
Hi! I’d like to see scrolling interactions implemented to elevate Penpot as a viable, robust product design alternative to Figma and even Sketch (especially when prototyping).
Here’s what I’d like to see:
Basic vertical and horizontal scrolling within a board
Scroll-to interactions upon clicking an element
Sticky behaviors on elements that are triggered when scrolled past
(Bonus) Scrolling effects to trigger changes in opacity, position or scale based on scroll of the current viewport or board.
Please consider improving font handling and support for OpenType features. As a would-be user, the lack of OpenType feature support is absolutely a dealbreaker and is the reason I can’t switch any of my current workflows to Penpot.
As a type designer, Penpot’s implementation of font shaping/rendering is frustrating. It doesn’t appear to follow industry standards, but its issues aren’t sufficiently documented to produce workarounds for.
Until Penpot has no nested components and variants, DS people will not consider joining in. This with combination of Tokens implementation by Tokens Studio will skyrocket the interest. Sometimes it is good to attack a specialized niche in the market instead of being a general tool. Capturing the specialized professionals will give you a lot of insides which will help you to differentiate your selves from Figma. Good luck.
I think the people not mentioning performance have never tried to build an entire landing page in Penpot. Or use an icon library. These are basic thing that are impossible to go through with in the current environment because of ongoing lag.
I’ve been keeping an eye on Penpot for a while as I’d very much like to move off of XD. However, I really can’t use Penpot at all until basic things like scrolling within boards is possible. More complicated scroll states would be awesome (i.e. things like list headers being sticky) but at this point, a basic vertical/horizonal scroll is what I really need.
In addition to performance issues (I know the Penpot team is already working on it), being able to work offline (alone at least) would be a huuuge advantage for a lot of people, with auto sync when you’re connected again.
Maybe including a toggle between online (with auto-save) / offline (with manual save) could also help to reduce performance issues in offline mode, in the sense that all synchronization tasks would not have to be active.
When I talk about Penpot with some friends, these were the two issues that came up the most. I can imagine how complex this could be, but it would be so cool!
Hello @timotheegoguely that is an idea that we have talk many times. One of the principal issues that we see is if while you are on offline mode a team member would edit the same file/part that you work on it and how we would handle this situation. How would you see that this issue could be solved?
What if, when activated, the offline mode could block all editing functionality (and maybe even the ability to open the file) for all collaborators except the one who has activated this mode, until the option is unchecked?
This would mean activating the offline mode in advance (while connected), for example, before a train journey, so that the information that this file is in offline mode can be sent to the application and somehow displayed in the interface.
A bit like some cloud services that make a file available offline by downloading it locally: the initial action is taken online, and then the desired file can be accessed offline.
Performance is already in the works as we announced here. The list above is highlighting other features or enhancements that are not included in the prioritisation pipeline yet and we hope to get some feedback from you.
Second this: we really want to use Penpot but keep switching back to XD: component states (and the performance that you are already working on). Without component states we can’t switch.
Being able to share libraries between teams would be a top priority for me apart from performance issues.
Working in a larger organisation that need an on premise solution due to security issues, it makes it nearly impossible to manage some kind of design system within only one team.
I’d love to see a better dealing of images. Their current behavior behaves like CSS like
background-size: 100%;
or
background-size: cover;
which “okayish” but I miss the positioning. Example, I have an image of a person which is positioned on the right third. When putting this image to mobile/square aspect ratio, the person would vanish or at least get cut of. In CSS I would then normally adjust the background positioning. So having some settings in the image popup would be great. (proposal attached as Link and PNG).
).
and let’s make Penpot even better, together! 
