Comment by diacritica

21 hours ago

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

8 comments

diacritica

Reply
tonyoconnell  14 hours ago

Hello. I was delighted to see Penpot get a lot of traction when Adobe were going to buy Figma. I'm not a fan of Adobe because they killed so many of my favourite products. I switched from Macromedia (acquired by Adobe) Fireworks to Sketch to Figma and probably would have moved from Figma to Penpot already but I simply don't need Figma anymore. I use Shadcn UI and Claude Code to do my design these days without every having to touch Figma. All I need is a lightweight image editor that can crop and optimise some vectors and bitmaps now and again. I'd like if I had a lightweight design system that syncs designs with my code and the code with my design but I don't really need it. It looks like you are building something like this. Your MCP should be more usable with the new Claude Opus model and their new advanced tool use https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use but it would be useful to package that functionality into a tool that can call servers without needing MCP. Then I would give it to my Claude Code design subagent without worrying about it polluting my context window. I took the time to write this because I really like what you are trying to do and your new Open Nitrate business model is wonderful. I wish you lots of luck. If you ever want to chat about AI feel free to get in touch at tony@one.ie

  • diacritica  10 hours ago

    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!

pentagrama  18 hours ago

Hi, any plans to release an installable offline desktop version with no account requirement, similar to Inkscape? That would be great.

dustingetz  21 hours ago

are you happy with ClojureScript?

  • diacritica  21 hours ago

    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.