Figma → Penpot
What it saves, what actually moves, what you rebuild — and the thing that catches people.
What it costs, and what it saves
Figma is about $16 per full editor per month on Professional. Penpot is free, self-hosted or on their cloud.
Moves cleanly
Files via Penpot's Figma import, with fidelity dropping on complex documents.
You rebuild
Your design system. Components, variants and tokens need rebuilding deliberately.
What Figma costs you today
Free for up to three collaborative files. Paid seats are split by role: full editors run roughly $16 per month billed annually on Professional and around $45 on Organization, while view-only collaborators are free. The number that catches teams out is the seat model — anyone who edits, even occasionally, needs a full seat, and the count creeps as non-designers start touching files. Figures checked 2026-08-07; confirm against Figma's pricing page before budgeting.
What actually holds you in
High, and it is the file format. `.fig` is proprietary and nothing else opens it natively; Penpot can import Figma files but the fidelity is imperfect on complex documents. Components, variants and design tokens are structured Figma's way, so a migration means rebuilding a design system rather than exporting one. Teams that keep tokens in a neutral format such as Style Dictionary keep the exit far cheaper.
What you are moving to
Penpot is a browser-based design and prototyping tool with real-time collaboration, components, auto-layout and prototyping, built on open web standards rather than a proprietary format. Files are SVG-based, which means what you draw is readable by other software instead of trapped. It self-hosts with Docker, so designs can live on your own infrastructure — the deciding factor for regulated work. MPL-2.0, around 58k GitHub stars. It imports Figma files, though fidelity drops on complex documents, so treat a migration as a project rather than a click.
Free and open source, self-hosted or on Penpot's free cloud. Paid plans for hosted teams.
Penpot strengths
- Only open tool with real feature parity ambitions against Figma
- SVG-based files — your work is not locked in a proprietary format
- Self-hosts with Docker; designs never leave your infrastructure
- MPL-2.0 with no enterprise directory carve-out
What you give up
- Real-time collaboration is smoother in Figma
- Plugin ecosystem is a fraction of Figma's
- Figma import loses fidelity on complex files
- Performance lags on very large documents
The migration, step by step
- 1Import one representative file first and judge fidelity honestly before committing
- 2Deploy Penpot with docker compose if self-hosting, or use their cloud
- 3Rebuild the design system by hand rather than importing it — this is the part worth doing properly
- 4Move new projects to Penpot first and leave existing ones in Figma
- 5Migrate old files only when someone actually needs to edit them
The gotcha
Figma import loses fidelity on nested components and advanced auto-layout, and those are exactly what a mature design system is made of. Teams import everything, find it broken, and conclude Penpot is not ready — when the right approach was to rebuild the system and import nothing.
When to stay on Figma
Real-time multiplayer is central to how your team designs, or you depend on the plugin ecosystem.
More Layer 5 migrations
Figures verified 2026-08-07 against vendor pricing pages. Prices change and migrations differ by estate — treat the cost delta as a starting model, not a quote. Rankings and recommendations here are merit-only; affiliate income never changes a verdict. See our methodology.