Hi @Oaziris,
Thanks for sharing this, and glad to hear you’ve already got tokens migrating successfully via Token Forge!
Filing a GitHub ticket for the exporter error is exactly the right move, since that gives the team visibility into the specific failure you’re hitting.
While that’s being looked into, a few things you could try in the meantime:
Check if it’s a size/performance issue. Because the Exporter plugin runs directly on top of Figma, it’s subject to Figma’s own memory and performance limits — very large design system files can time out. If your Design System file is sizeable, it might be worth trying to split it into smaller modules (e.g., exporting by page or by component group rather than the whole file at once) to see if that gets around the error. The team is actively working on moving bulk data processing outside of Figma to help with exactly this kind of constraint, so this should get easier over time.
Try connecting Figma’s and Penpot’s MCP servers to the same agent. Since your components are stuck, it might be worth trying a two-server approach: Figma has its own MCP server that lets AI agents read structured design data — components, variables, layout, styles — directly out of your Figma files. If you connect that alongside Penpot’s MCP server in the same agentic tool (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, etc.), the agent can effectively act as a bridge — pulling context out of Figma on one side and using it to recreate or write components into Penpot on the other. This isn’t an official, packaged integration between the two products, so expect to do some prompting and iteration to get good results, but it’s a viable way to get unblocked without waiting on the exporter fix.
Manual migration as a fallback. If neither of those unblocks you, manual recreation of the components is unfortunately still the most reliable fallback for now — tedious, but it guarantees you get exactly what you need without waiting on the export pipeline.
If it’s helpful, we also put together The Enterprise Guide to Migrating Design Systems to Penpot, which covers some best practices for exactly this kind of migration — things like running a pre-migration readiness audit, validating with a pilot file before scaling, and handling large/complex design systems specifically. Might be worth a look given the scale of what you’re migrating.
Figma’s Penpot exporter plugin is under continuous, active development, so keep an eye on your GitHub ticket — there are improvements in the pipeline that should help with cases like this.
Hope this helps, and good luck with the migration!
Kendra
