diacritica
diacritica on Hacker News
Exactly, we took it from CSS and we have said it multiple times. The audacity of Penpot was to actually do it and accept the consequences.
Thanks for you comment! I might reach out to you for some AI chat, sure! Can I ask you a question? What's the size of your team, the team uses Shadcn UI and Claude Code?
See, when you said "I don't need Figma anymore" I thought "that's why I don't really like the open-source Figma label" because we're building a different UI design tool, more like a platform, that's so close to code (also, open source, self-hostable, etc, etc) that you might want to use Penpot for the same reasons you didn't want to use Figma.
Anyway, thanks for the nice words!
I'm afraid it depends on whom you ask. Some devs really like it, some others don't. As we move towards a more multilingual stack, everyone will be happy and the product will shine even brighter. I don't code in ClojureScript (or Clojure) so I can't answer directly. Here's a nice blog post though (on why Penpot chose Clojure)
https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-chose-clojure-as-its-l...The new rendering engine is wasm + rust + skia, in case you're curious.
Hi, Pablo from Penpot here.
- New rendering engine should fix the performance issues. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciG0U5jJtHY (older reference https://community.penpot.app/t/its-time-for-penpot-to-almost...) Open beta coming in the next few weeks, finally!
- Our business model is Open Nitrate (see https://community.penpot.app/t/penpots-upcoming-business-mod...). For the impatient, think of it as a reverse open-core. The current pricing model for SaaS is quite straightforward. The "unlimited storage" for Enterprise on SaaS is fine, believe me.
- This is a European startup that was founded in 2011 and pivoted to a product-centric actvity in 2021. We're 45 people. We believe open source is the right social contract. All employees use Linux as their operating system. Yes.
- In terms of our vision of AI, I published this whitepaper in August https://penpot.app/blog/penpot-ai-whitepaper/ If you want to understand how we think about Penpot, design and platforms, read it.
- 3 months later, we can demo our MCP server capabilities here https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-mcp-server-showcase-as... but see also our internal folder with 1min clips here https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1CCuBqHEevWsp15bY... (my favourite is the flat design to design tokens and back to design). "design as a graph" is our ML-based applied research. We hope to have something cool ready at some point next year.
- The whole point of building Penpot was to unite designers and developers. New tools and platforms can play a role. We focused on declarative and semantic design paradigms departing from imperative design paradigms.
- We have 1.2M users, 25k Penpot new deployments every month, 30k new SaaS signups every month and a growing community of contributors and partners. Ironically, the early adopters are Fortune 500 companies knowing that a cycle is over and that they need to own their design assets. UI design is now as valuable as code, if not more.
- I don't like the "Open-Source Figma" label as we're building a superior tool but I understand it's a nice shorcut for now :)
- DM me on Linkedin if you have a couple of millions to spare :P
Those "modes" are extremely frustrating and represent a silo-based conception of how teams work. If the tools creates disconnects... the team gets disconnected, that's not progress at all.
Penpot's CEO here. In terms of the knee jerk reaction, it's hard to say but we have the impression that there is some of it in terms of priorities, particularly long-awaited flex-layout-ish capabilities, for instance. Let's not forget that Penpot is an open source project that has been sharing its code and roadmap way before the Adobe/Figma deal.
Regarding the "isn't a realistic competitor" point. You bet we are! The only realistic competitor in a while, actually, because we come from a deep understanding of how cross-functional teams address design & code instead of doubling down on silos or "modes". To be successful you need to do things VERY differently.
- We're open source and we're enjoying an extremely active community of contributors.
- We rely on open standards so designers (and organisations) can own their future while developers can treat design files as first class citizens in a git repo if they want to.
- You can use SaaS or self-host, we don't care about your deployment strategy.
- We bring code vocabulary and abstractions to the design process (see Flex Layout or upcoming Grid Layout https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx0ufKErqVk) so we get rid of the lost in translation issues that plague teams.
- We partner with people like Design Tokens (which are also open source) to build the future of Design Decisions so we can transcend the current status quo of design systems.
Yes, of course we have performance challenges with SVG on browsers (not Figma 2MB WASM memory limits, though, since we can access DOM memory availability which is now 16GB!) but these are temporary engineering challenges and we're working super hard on cracking them.
I'm fine having these debates on whether Penpot is a viable competitor to Figma, it's healthy and I get it, it happens all the time when new tools pop up (sometimes signalling the end of a cycle, even if it's not sudden). But what really matters to us at Penpot is that this goes beyond "competing" with a particular tool, this is about a specific world vision on how designers and developers want to collaborate to scale up design and software building.
And a key ingredient to all this is "what are developers going to do?" That's the real battleground out there. Developers outnumber Designers 10 to 1. People that keep wondering why Adobe paid $20B for Figma tend to miss the point. It's the developers, obviously! Of course they are worth $20B when you're not exciting to them!
This is not a static picture, it never was and it never is. Every single day we keep working hard on building the best design & prototyping tool for designers and developers, every single day we're re-balancing the status quo. It's already paying off with 400K+ users worldwide, half of them on self-host.
To be honest, we can't be more excited about everything that's going on and what's making everything worth it's not just the growing community of users and contributors but the amazing quality of it, these are not casual users coming for the free stuff, these are forward thinkers really getting it!
No, that's not happening.
Taiga was lunched as alpha in 2014. TaigaNext codebase comes from mid 2021 and will again be used by many devs around the world as best-practices reference, for sure!
Hey! (Taiga CEO) Wonderful to see taiga getting some exposure on HN. We're working on a completely new Taiga codebase, codenamed TaigaNext (we'll eventually decide on a proper name). We'll open up repos and stuff very soon for those who want to mess around with code and experimental features. Of course, TaigaNext and Penpot will have a tight integration so that both the lean and design process become more fluid for teams. We are being a bit silent on the Taiga front simply because we have a ton happening on Penpot's front atm! But expect great things from Taiga in 2023!
We offer KANBAN and Scrum and Issue management plus WIKI and EPICs, yes. And it's MPL 2.0 and you can self-host it, yep! 6-7 years ago! wow! Yeah, we've come a LONG way. Taiga6 is amazing but TaigaNext (codename) is just a totally different story and it will connect to Penpot!
this funding agreement came months ago, the FigmaGate had nothing to do with it. I'm surprised how many people think deals like this can happen in just a week, LOL!
Penpot's CEO here. You're spot on! SVG is a design principle of sorts for us, as we absolutely bet everything on open standards. You say this "but it will also mean they're tied explicitly to the browser's ability to render the combined html+svgs" and we hope we weren't wrong on building Penpot on top of these massive pieces of software. History will tell us if we made the "impractical" choice but our vision around open standards and design+code seamless integration demands that we go all in for SVG. I hope we'll be able to satisfy your curiosity sooner rather than later, thanks for your comment!
And that's exactly what we saw with 99.999999998% of VCs and investors that approached us. This news is about securing the funding to build something that is remarkably challenging and make it happen fast. Our bet on SVG, like the Figma employee above says, is at the core of our ethos, but requires extra work, this is the type of commitment you should expect from Penpot.
I've made my professional career out of rejecting false dichotomies and I've made sure to be surrounded by like-minded people, they'd had to remove everyone I guess, including the community. I understand where you're coming from and all I can say at this point is that I also write comments like yours elsewhere.
Thanks! That was the work of Juan de la Cruz, one of the Penpot UI designers!
One thing I didn't share on my community post here
https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563 was how tough was to find the right VC for us. The conversations started back in Nov 2021 and we received a ton of calls from excited (yet misaligned) VCs. Being used to enjoy total freedom as an employee-owned consultancy company we would quickly turned down most of them because we did see this path that you're describing crisp clear in front of us.
I think what is key for us here is that we, as a company, don't actually own the whole thing. That our open source license and a strong community lead us to a very successful business without having to revert to traditional playbooks. TBH, my biggest concern right now is not trying to convince you that you have to trust us, that would insult your intelligence. No, my biggest concern is how to create an open source community with both designers AND developers (I touch upon this here https://community.penpot.app/t/not-all-communities-are-creat...). This is my personal dream and it has been since I sent $15 to the Free Blender Campaign in 2002 while still a Physics undergraduate. For all these years I thought someone else would create something like Penpot but it kept not happening and some us got a bit nervous, I guess. Thanks for your thoughtful post!
If that ever happened, the way you describe it, you'd also find my dead body the next morning. The autopsy would read like this "The cause of the death was forcefully ingestion of a full set of CDs with some strange 'Debian 1.3' markings, the poor fellow bled from within and suffered greatly in long agony". 25 years of open source hacktivism can't end like that, I wouldn't be able to process it. I'm Penpot's CEO BTW.
Yeah, we're now an interesting hybrid between python and clojure :)
Oh, I forgot. Still, we're working on what we call TaigaNext and some of these requests will be addressed, but we don't have them now.
I'm part of the Taiga team and I agree with you. Our workaround is using n8n or zapier to automate that but we don't have it built-in. Now, at the same time, targetting Jira users has proven to be extremely difficult. It's not only the vedor lock-in, it's also the mindset. Even if we had complex dependency connections and visualizations we know Jira teams (and decision makers) would play the moving post here. It's frustrating but Jira users (or at least the ones in command) are able to withstand much more pain than we anticipated.
Yes! I mean, Blender is such a beacon for us... we feel tiny in comparison but it's nice to read "The Blender of UI design" as much as "the open source Figma killer" :)
True, "it seems to be" but it's not. We have taken established standards found on other tools (Figma is one of them) because we wanted to make sure the learning curve was superflat. At the same time we're building a "code meets design" approach that is very different. SVG as native format already tells you that we favour open standards instead of conceding to our private representation/storage abstraction. I wonder, whenever Figma finally adopts RTL support, will people say "oh, the copied Penpot there"? grin. The same way Taiga has its own personality, Penpot will steadily design (pun intended) its own path and diverge more and more from established design tools. The fact that the design tool market is so tiny doesn't help either, TBH, but this is one the issues we're trying to fix with Penpot.
Hi Steve! That's fine, the motivations we had to build Penpot won't probably overlap with a lot of people's own interests. We do believe that the design process is very quickly taking over a critical part of innovation and design+code conversations and it terrifies us that open source doesn't have a say there. We think we can bring a better community ethos to design tools, how they're built and what level of vendor lock-in they pursue. Recent changes in Figma pricing has skyrocketed monthly bills for the vast majority of companies and teams (big and small). Not only that, they have been neglected RTL support for years (top5 request ever) because they have other priorities (Penpot added RTL support a month later its Alpha launch). My background is in Physics and Computer Science and I'm your typical nerdy dev now turned into CEO but I have come to appreciate how important is that design tools are free and open for everyone. I'm also a believer in designops and bringing designers closer to the development process, I think Penpot can achieve that better than others thanks to the open source tech community.
Kaleidos CEO here (Taiga+Penpot). It's not free at all but we want to make sure we have an honest and sustainable business model. We made stupid mistakes with Taiga a few years ago (a bad mix between an open source product and a proprietary SaaS style pricing. We have enough resources to make sure we can build great tools first without being obsessed about charging but Taiga would be straightforward. Penpot is different, though, because it is the first design&prototype tool that's open source and we are not sure what business model would make sense. Open Core focusing on great self-hosted and SaaS options plus Tax-the-rich for premium features doesn't sound too bad but, yet still, we are not entirely sure. For the time being this is not a pressing matter but the team and resources that Taiga and Penpot require are not trivial. I mean, look at the challenges that Penpot is addressing... no wonder there are only a handful of tools like this, they are extremely challenging to build. Furthermore, we want to make sure Penpot is the designers' tool of choice also for devs once they get to respect the design process.
A pity that website looks very outdated.
We developed Taiga (taiga.io) with that in mind. It's meant for cross-domain teams but a lot of people use it for their own personal projects. At the moment, 50% of new Taiga users come from Trello or Jira (in that order). Check it out
https://resources.taiga.io/getting-started/