The best Design & prototyping
Every option ranked — open-source, self-hostable, and commercial — by our transparent Sovereignty Score, with honest trade-offs so you choose what fits you, not us.
Interface design, prototyping and diagramming. Priced per editor per month, which is how a design team of six becomes a four-figure annual line.
L5Applications — layer 5 of the AI stack- 1
Penpot
Top pickOpen sourceThe one open design tool that genuinely competes — and it self-hosts.
Free and open source, self-hosted or on Penpot's free cloud. Paid plans for hosted teams. · in our Figma comparison →
What is Penpot? →92sovereignty - 2
Inkscape
Open sourceProfessional vector editing, free for twenty years.
Free and open source. Desktop install, no accounts. · in our Figma comparison →
What is Inkscape? →96sovereignty - 3
Excalidraw
Open sourceDiagrams and whiteboarding, done better than Figma does them.
Free and open source. Excalidraw+ is an optional paid hosted tier. · in our Figma comparison →
What is Excalidraw? →95sovereignty - 4
Lunacy
CommercialFree desktop UI design that opens Sketch and Figma files.
Free. Paid Icons8 subscription only for premium asset libraries. · in our Figma comparison →
What is Lunacy? →48sovereignty - 5
Sketch
CommercialThe incumbent Figma displaced — still excellent, still Mac-only.
Around $12 per editor per month, or a one-time licence with a year of updates. · in our Figma comparison →
What is Sketch? →38sovereignty
Is it free?
The free tier, its real limits and where you start paying — read from each vendor's own pricing page and dated.
Run these yourself
What each one actually needs — real RAM, honest running cost, and the setup time nobody quotes.
- Self-hosting Penpot 4–8 GB for a small design team, with backend, frontend, exporter (a headless browser), PostgreSQL 15 and Valkey on one box. For the top end, the docs say 4 CPUs and 16 GB are enough for thousands of users.
- Self-hosting Excalidraw Negligible on the server: all the drawing happens in each visitor's browser
Replacing a specific tool?
Head-to-head comparisons for each popular design & prototyping product.
Straight head-to-heads
Two design & prototyping tools, side by side — verified facts and a plain verdict.