But can’t help but feel like this is a bit of knee jerk reaction to the growth of the much smaller open source product Penpot, that’s received increasing interest and even some funding since the Figma sale was announced.
Penpot has bet on making all the controls match the html/css spec as well as save everything as svg, in short having a big focus on making devs first class stakeholders.
This feels like a late response following Penpot Fest that ran recently and announced many cool dev features.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgcCPfOv5v56-fghJo2dHNB...
Overall I don't see Penpot being a realistic competitor to Figma, and I can't see this as being something that was done as a knee jerk reaction to Penpot's social success.
First, why it isn't a realistic competitor. While building everything out leveraging SVG as its main rendering engine allows for parity with code as an advantage, the inherent disadvantage it has is handling large files. For larger design teams, files often have thousands of designs and pages. Sketch has an advantage here over Figma primarily because it has a higher upper bound on possible memory that it can allocate to each file. Penpot not only has the memory restrictions Figma does (since it operates in the browser), it's also tied to the browser rendering performance of SVG, which simply wasn't designed for the scale designers operate at. It tends to get extremely slow once you have 50 or so pages in a single artboard. This means realistically, Penpot is competing for the casual design market, rather than the larger enterprise-scale design market. Figma's approach for this market has always been to use it as a top-of-funnel expansion opportunity, which is why their free tier targets these users. In general it's very hard to compete with something that is both industry-standard, and free. Penpot theoretically offers more functionality than the Figma free tier, but since it can't support the scale that Sketch/Figma does for larger files, it greatly narrows the market they're targeting. The market for users who want to build extremely advanced designs, but who also want to create extremely small files, is a narrow group.
Second, with regards to this being a knee-jerk reaction to Penpot's dev tooling, the dates just don't line up. Penpot really exploded in reaction to the Adobe acquisition announcement in late 2022, but Figma acquired a YC company known as Visly in 2021. Visly was apparently working on some design->code elements, which was really the first inkling that Figma was exploring this. It seems like this was being worked on / thought about long before Penpot took off. Given the submitter of this story appears to be Emil Sjölander, one of the Visly founders, I suspect that it's a fair assumption that Visly turned into Figma's Dev Mode feature: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/visly
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!
With that mindset, I know my designs can be used by anyone, and share them with coworkers without limits.
Really, I cannot stress this enough. Relying on open standards IS the only path to make technology work for us, and not against us.