I’ve been using Penpot for about a month now. I’m coming from Figma. I’m not doing a self hosted version. So my biggest issue with Penpot is really that it seems buggy and clunky. I get strange unexpected behaviors all the time. My biggest problems so far are:
Undos don’t seem to go in order or record steps well. I’ll make an adjustment on something, change my mind or copy text and it comes in odd and hit undo and I’ll see things I worked on 10 minutes ago undoing, but not what I’m currently working. Then trying to re-do steps to put stuff back is 50/50 so I’ve ended up having to manually remake parts of my designs that have already been completed waisting a lot of time.
Strange things happen sometimes when I use a color asset to change a font color. Often I do this and the font changes too. I have no idea why. For instance I’ll change something to my primary brand color and the font will go form normal to bold. Again I hit undo to backtrack and then end up in issue #1.
The rendering is okay, but it struggles a lot too. Maybe self hosting and throwing a bunch of resources at it fixes that.
What’s great about it is the learning curve was almost nothing. A few different key commands for stuff and I’m off and running. Also it seems to export into PDFs better than Figma. There’s a lot going for it.
I think if these issues can get worked out I’ll stick around and even try to self host, but otherwise I can’t spend all this extra time. Even the free version of Figma just works I don’t have to fight it. I do love the idea of Penpot. I was so excited when I came across it.
I have. It created a lot of other issues for me so I shut it off. I had Penpot completely quit a few times or not load my canvases with it turned on. It seems to get constantly overloaded. That was about 2 weeks ago, maybe it’s gotten better and worth another try. I’m also using Google Chrome, maybe a diffent browser would be better?
Okay just to followup on WebGL. What’s going on for me is that whenever I resize a box, sections of my canvas go gray. If I make too many adjustments too fast my whole canvas goes gray. it comes back after a second or two, but its hard to work with that happening over and over while I go.
Here’s my canvas for 6 seconds after tweaking this. Sometime after it does load I get a popup in the upper right that says something is wrong also.
Thanks for the feedback on the rendering. There are two different things that will improve in the next release:
Box resizing: We’ve improved that part. The WebGL render uses a system that divides the screen to fasten operations, we’ve improved the drawing of these division so the “cut” changes don’t happen. This “whole canvas going gray” situation is a bit weird, if you could attach a file where you can reproduce this in a deterministic way, we could take a deeper look in that specific issue.
About blurriness: On “fast” operations, we render shapes some times with lower quality to boost performance. It should go back to normal once the interaction is finished. We’ve improved this on text to make this change smoother.
Sometimes, a bug might happen on a specific corner case, so any example to reproduce the error in a deterministic way help us a lot.
