Hi everyone,
I wanted to share some honest feedback after a significant investment on our end.
We spent roughly 72 hours of human work migrating all of our company’s designs from Figma and Adobe XD into Penpot — around 56 files in total. We were genuinely optimistic about this move, especially given the promises around the new rendering engine. We expected it to be the safe, reliable choice going forward for our team.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of the migrated files turned out to be essentially unusable due to serious performance problems. Ironically, the new rendering engine performs worse than the old Canvas-based solution in our real-world use case.
Specifically, working with boards/artboards across roughly 9 screens in a single file grinds Penpot to a halt — panning, zooming, and selecting objects become extremely laggy to the point of being unworkable for actual production work. I’m attaching a video that demonstrates this directly.
We really wanted this migration to succeed — the tool has a lot going for it philosophically (open source, self-hostable, no vendor lock-in), but performance at this level is a dealbreaker for teams with non-trivial file complexity.
At this point, I have to be blunt: I strongly discourage anyone from relying on Penpot for real production work. It’s a nice demo and a cool experiment, but honestly, I wouldn’t waste any more time on it. After 72 hours of migration work across 56 files, ending up with something slower than our old Canvas-based setup is not a good look, and it’s hard to trust the roadmap after this.
Video: Private Seafile
