penpot

Penpot is an open-source design and prototyping application that runs in the browser and can also be self-hosted on your own server. It targets the same problem that commercial tools like Figma address: designers and developers working on user interfaces need a shared space where designers can create layouts, components, and interactive prototypes, and developers can then inspect those designs and extract usable code from them. The "handoff drama" Penpot's description mentions is the friction that occurs when a design lives in one tool and developers have to manually translate it into code — often resulting in mismatches and back-and-forth.

Penpot is built around open web standards: designs are stored as SVG (the same vector format used in web browsers), and the inspect panel gives developers ready-to-copy CSS, HTML, and SVG code directly from any design element. It supports real-time collaboration so multiple people can work in the same file simultaneously, similar to how Google Docs works. The platform also supports design tokens — a system for naming and centralizing design decisions like colors and spacing so that the same values are used consistently across a product — as well as reusable components and CSS Grid layout. A plugin system allows custom extensions and integrations with other tools.

You would use Penpot when your team wants a collaborative design tool but prefers to avoid vendor lock-in, needs to self-host for data privacy or compliance reasons, or simply wants a free alternative to paid design platforms. Designers, UX researchers, and front-end developers all interact with it. The backend is written in Clojure and ClojureScript (a variant of the Lisp language that compiles to JavaScript), and it is deployed via Docker or Kubernetes.