Penpot France insights
In May, we had a great Penpot meetup in Paris where we talked about the new upcoming features and rendering engine in Penpot, the new MCP server, and also about a talk about Plugins vs Agentic!
Things we learned
- The new release is full of great contributions from the community, emphasizing the strength that opensource softwares.
- The opensource community is pretty strong in France, with active associations and initiatives, including the French government which is developing its own opensource digital suite, called La Suite Numérique (operated by the DINUM).
- The new rendering engine is one of the most expected updates from the community. It has been a very long and hard work from the dev team and will make a big difference.
- Pablo (@diacritica) showed us a little benchmark he did using several AI models to see how they behaved with Penpot MCP servers. The results are excellent, mostly because Penpot uses open standards and directly speaks the language of LLMs, which helps building robust and scalable design systems.
- The AI Topic itself brought some worries and legitimate questions to the table too: are LLMs gonna replace designers, how risky is that to plug a LLM to our projects in terms of privacy, how to deal with thos new tools in a smart way: many topics that are worth sharing and discussing.
- Aurélien (@a-ng-d) shared his experience as a plugin developer and made us think about this important question: when is it better to develop a plugin to solve a given problem, rather than keeping on asking a LLM ? It all comes to balancing cost and usage/time to take the right decision.
Areas to improve
- The event occurred at the beginning of a long week-end, which was a bit risky but fortunately we had many attendees!
- Although the talks were great and everyone enjoyed them, it could be a great idea to encourage more exchange and interaction with the community, maybe through a little workshop or team tasks next time.
- Remember that some of the audience is very new to Penpot (some folks have heard about it, sometimes for a long time, but haven’t taken the time to try it yet), so it’s important to keep that in mind to ensure nobody feels lost in translation
Notes for future viewers
- Regarding new features, you can directly check out Penpot’s Github here: Releases · penpot/penpot · GitHub
- Regarding the MCP server, check out the official page with videos and explanations on how to get started: Penpot MCP server
- You can watch Aurélien’s presentation on his LinkedIn post (careful, it’s in French!): Plugin vs Agentique | Aurélien Grimaud
Photos, videos, links
Vous pouvez consulter le résumé de cette soirée en français dans la section Penpot en Fançais de la communauté: Penpot Meetup France - Mai 2026
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