After the demo this morning I figured it was time to update my Figma V Penpot parity document. Good news is, Penpot went up about a whole 10% in parity! Meh news is, it’s not quite past the 80% threshold but I think we’re really getting close! Enjoying the speed updates and over all quality of life updates. Spoke with a developer on my team and they had this feedback to share:
Well, they would first need to support:
- variables (including color mode and multi-themes → this is where Figma does not scale)
- text-styles
- gradient-styles
Until they have all of those features, they can’t make an API because all the Figma (and any API) is literally just the internal API used to build the product they just expose and let other people use.
Based on what they were able to see in the API documentation, those features were missing. I think Penpot is on the way here anyway as I know text-styles and gradient styles are available but since introducing primitives and semantics, Figma gained a leg up in the DS community. Making sure those are available via the API will help immensely. Other feedback included:
Companies who also need to whitelabel their DS into different brands/themes would also really benefit from being able to both declare a “brand theme” and benefit from a dark mode/light mode option.
Finally, loved seeing the plugin support and really looking forward to the community contributing to the product. I feel very close to being able to make the case to designers and development teams to change over to Penpot. Very Exciting!
File I used to test these features included below.
App Test Henpot Nov Update.penpot (13.3 MB)
