What’s next for Penpot?
If you read our 2025 “not a roadmap”, you already know the deal: this is not a promise list. It is an open window into what we are working on now, what is coming up, and why.
A lot has happened since that post. We shipped native design tokens and variants. We worked through a long list of design deal-breakers (the small and medium fixes that make daily work less painful). Tokens sync with external tools is still in progress. The new render engine is no longer a distant headline: it is here, in beta, and getting real. And we built things we did not even picture back then, like the Penpot MCP server, because the world (and our community) moved faster than our older roadmap could.
We have kept a six-week release rhythm on purpose. Not because we love deadlines for their own sake, but because steady improvement is how Penpot stays usable week after week. If you like watching work land in public, our dev diaries are the backstage pass. We are quietly proud of that cadence.
The design industry is going through a seismic shift: AI, agents, bigger files, stricter enterprise expectations, more design-system maturity. We feel it too, sometimes with vertigo, but mostly as energy. We would rather ride the wave than pretend nothing changed.
Penpot 2.16: a turn of the cycle
This roadmap starts from 2.16 (Penpot 2.16 release: Alegria Geral), which we see as more than another version number:
- Design tokens in the Design sidebar: pick, check, and apply tokens next to the controls you already use, without bouncing back to a separate panel
- WebGL rendering (beta): an optional faster canvas for heavy files (off by default until you enable it in settings)
- A big pile of small wins: on the order of fifty enhancements and sixty bug fixes, so the day-to-day feel improves even when no single headline explains it
- Community at scale: not one or two patches at the edge, but a unprecedented wave of contributions (import tokens from linked libraries, find and replace, read-only version preview, and plenty more)
From here we ask the practical questions: What’s next? What’s the near future? What are we already building?
Where Penpot is heading
Penpot is an open-source, full-stack design platform on open web standards. We want cross-functional teams to think and build in one loop: design, dev, ops, and product working on the same intent in the same flow, so decisions do not rot on the way to production.
Two ideas keep showing up in every hard decision:
- Remove the gap between design and delivery: that single loop is the goal, not parallel worlds that drift apart.
- Digital sovereignty: self-host, integrate, and leave without lock-in.
This is how we are organizing the work ahead. Five tracks that are the areas where we want to push Penpot to the next level, with stronger foundations and higher quality:
- Reliability first: keep making render and stability even stronger, so complex files stay fast and trustworthy at scale.
- Design systems as infrastructure: make libraries, tokens, components, and their governance more scalable and easier to run across teams.
- AI that multiplies workflows: build on MCP and structured design data for automation that is useful in real work.
- Enterprise with leverage: deepen self-host and admin controls for larger and regulated orgs, without forking the soul of the product.
- Design-to-delivery: developers as first-class users. Better ways to consume design intent in real delivery work.
Plans will change as we learn, ship, and react to feedback. Our priorities will evolve too (and I’m sure that we all agree that lately the context has been especially wild).
The five tracks
Each track below has Planned work (what we are committed to pushing forward) and Candidates (strong directions we are actively considering, but not locked in yet).
At a glance
Track 1: Design Experience and Reliability
Goal: Make Penpot feel faster, more stable, and more trustworthy for daily work, especially on complex files.
Planned
-
New render engine (WASM/WebGL renderer) → In progress
A new rendering architecture to dramatically improve performance and stability at scale. Taiga epic: Taiga epic #8525 -
Stability and reliability improvements → In progress
A focused effort to reduce crashes and stability issues in real-world usage. -
Design deal-breakers → In progress
Design improvements we deliberately held back while the new renderer was still the big bet. With WebGL in beta, that backlog is unblocked and we can ship them (for example: Background blur, Stroke per side, PDFs export improvement, Numbered lists, Image crop, Video player). -
Component overrides and refactor
Strengthen core component behaviour so design system workflows are more predictable. Taiga: Taiga US-11311 · Taiga US-11028 · Taiga US-12124 · Taiga US-10508
Candidates
-
Variable fonts
Add support for variable font axes and controls.
Taiga: Taiga #3686 -
File sharing without team access
Share files across boundaries without forcing team membership flows.
Taiga: Taiga #11503 -
Prototyping: Scrollable boards
Taiga: Taiga #4519 -
Prototyping: Component interactions
Taiga: Taiga #12067 -
Prototyping: Smart animate
Taiga epic: Taiga epic #12304 -
Visibility in history versions (content, authorship)
Better accountability and visibility when reviewing past versions. Taiga: Taiga US-14267 -
Size units (cm, pt, in, rem, em, etc.)
Taiga: Taiga #2328
Track 2: Design System Operations
Goal: Make design systems even more scalable and maintainable across teams, files, and environments.
Planned
-
Auto-link used libraries on file import → In progress
Keep libraries connected when importing across environments.
Taiga: Taiga #13976 -
Share a library across teams → In progress
Allow cross-team library sharing with access levels and proper governance.
Taiga: Taiga #12473 -
Design tokens: Internal libraries and files sync → In progress
Tokens become a real shared source of truth through libraries.
Taiga: Taiga #12015
Candidates
-
Design branching (before merging library changes)
Safer workflows for library maintainers to batch changes and publish confidently.
Taiga: Taiga #13981 -
Design system governance
Pull/push editing flows and permission patterns for shared systems. Taiga: Taiga US-14268 -
Component slots
Container components with swap-friendly slots that preserve consistency.
Taiga: Taiga #12456 -
Design tokens GitHub sync
Connect tokens to repo-based sources and providers.
Taiga: Taiga #9968 -
Variants: Standard states
Taiga: Taiga #10562 -
Variants: Nested component copy properties
Taiga: Taiga #11987
Track 3: Agentic and AI-Native Workflows
Goal: Unlock safe automation and agent workflows on top of real design infrastructure, without sacrificing trust and control.
Planned
-
Design as a graph (SDG) → In progress
A structured graph representation of design files to enable advanced workflows and AI/ML experimentation. -
Agentic dev environment → In progress
Technical foundations for agent-driven workflows in development environments.
Doc: GitHub doc -
MCP server improvements
Hardening architecture, documentation, and operability of MCP.
Docs: Penpot docs · Taiga epic #12407
Candidates
-
MCP apps
Embedded UIs inside MCP clients (ChatGPT/Claude/VS Code/etc.) to speed up selection, review, and confirmation.
Requirements: Affine · Taiga: Taiga US-14269 -
SDG integrations: GitHub, Storybook
Connect structured design data to delivery workflows.
Track 4: Enterprise and Self-Host Platform
Goal: Provide governance, control, and self-host confidence for large and regulated organizations.
Planned
-
Admin Console: Organizations → In progress
Multiple organizations: set boundaries for separate workspaces without losing central governance. -
Admin Console: People section → In progress
Visibility and governance across the org: remove somebody from all teams at once. -
Admin Console: Advanced permissions → In progress
Control who creates teams, brings people in, or moves teams. -
Admin Console: SSO Config → In progress
Familiar sign-in flows and access control for enterprise deployments.
Candidates
-
Admin Console: Plugins allowlist
Control which plugins are allowed in an org. Concrete and easy to explain in enterprise conversations. -
Admin Console: MCP Management
Manage which MCP integrations are allowed in an organization. -
Admin Console: Audit log
Compliance traceability without depending on unfinished infrastructure. -
Admin Console: Org-admin role
Delegation for mid-size and larger companies. -
Admin Console: User directory sync
The natural next step after SSO: keep org membership automatically in sync with the corporate directory. -
Admin Console: Attributes and groups
Transversal sets of people for governance at scale. -
Admin Console: Teams overview
Give the org owner visibility into all teams without needing to be a team member. -
PassKeys and 2FA
Taiga: Taiga #5692 -
Self-host sizing and operational guidance
Clear requirements and guidance for self-host environments. Taiga: Taiga US-14270
Track 5: Design-to-Delivery
Goal: Give developers and delivery teams even clearer, more actionable design intent and tooling.
Planned
No planned items to announce yet. This track is currently represented by active candidates below.
Candidates
-
Inspect tab improvements
Make Inspect easier and more useful, especially for viewer-only use cases.
Taiga: Taiga #8851 -
HTML rendering / viewer
More implementation-aligned ways to consume designs. Taiga: Taiga US-14271 -
Responsive breakpoints (CSS-based)
CSS-aligned breakpoint modelling for responsive design. Taiga: Taiga US-14272 -
Mirror app / devices preview (View Mode responsive and mobile-first)
Better preview and interaction testing across devices and breakpoints.
Taiga: Taiga #12432
Feedback
We want this roadmap to stay useful and real. Tell us what you would add, what you would drop, and what would make the biggest difference for your day-to-day work in Penpot. We are all ears.
