I’m excited to say that after watching Penpot grow over the last few years, Penpot has reached a reasonable parity with Figma. You can see my scoring criteria for that here in my Figma V Penpot Spreadsheet. Now sure, Figma has all these fancy AI things they just launched, but lets be real, most of us aren’t using those tools as part of our normal workflow outside of the in-canvas quick tools.
While it would be hard to convince my team to move at this moment to Penpot as a team of designers with multiple products, for new designers or new teams, I can comfortably recommend it. As Penpot continues to grow, I’m sure staff designers like me will get to a place where we start making the arguments for converting.
So, the caveats: I have not had a chance to try to do a full design like I did with Henpot. My updated evaluation comes from just attempting to use the functionality in the sheet. That said, the tokens were helpful, just some what anti-intuitive coming from a Figma stand point. When I apply a token/style to, say a button, that replaces the hex value in the properties. I can still find that hex value with some click drilling, and it still shows in code, but having effectively two properties panels felt a bit clumsy. I’m sure Penpot has good reasons for this, maybe a nod towards developers, but it felt odd to me.
Lastly, it would be really really nice to be able to prototype out components so we can do easy state management on interactive components. This makes it so you don’t have to wire button states every time you use one. Not the end of the world, and maybe someone can tell me, “Hey Nathan, you can do this already.” but I have yet to see how that would work.
Great job Penpot, and thank you for creating a wonderful alternative to Figma. As always, I’m rooting for you. 
