Self-hosted Figma alternative: own your design files with Penpot

Your design files are the blueprint for everything your team ships -- every screen, every component, every decision about how a product looks and behaves. For years that blueprint has lived on someone else's server, behind a per-seat subscription that climbs each time you hire, with the vendor free to change the price or the terms whenever it likes. Figma got more expensive, briefly almost belonged to Adobe, and reminded a lot of people how little of it they actually control. Penpot is the design tool you own instead.

What Penpot is

Penpot is a full open-source design and prototyping platform that runs in the browser -- UI design, reusable components, real-time collaboration, and interactive prototypes -- all under a proper open licence. It is not a stripped-down clone or a weekend toy. Design teams use it as their day-to-day tool for building interfaces, maintaining design systems, and handing work off to developers.

What makes that ownership real is the file format. Penpot stores design as open web standards -- SVG, CSS, HTML, and JSON -- rather than a proprietary binary only its own app can read. Your work stays portable, your exports are code a front-end developer already understands, and there's no format lock-in waiting to strand you if you ever move somewhere else.

The difference from the hosted incumbents is where the ceiling sits. In the SaaS world, the number of editors, version history, developer inspect, and the collaboration features you actually want all sit behind escalating tiers, and the whole thing lives on infrastructure you can't see. Penpot has no paywalled tier and no editor cap. Every feature is in the box, and the box runs on your server.

The features that actually matter

• Real-time collaboration. Multiple people edit the same file at once, with live cursors and selections, plus comments pinned directly to the canvas. This is the multiplayer core the hosted tools are built around -- here it's just included.
• Components and shared libraries. Build reusable components, wire up variants, and publish shared libraries so a design system stays consistent across every file and project. No enterprise tier required to share a library.
• Interactive prototypes. Link boards together with clickable hotspots, transitions, and flows, then click through a real user journey. Prototyping is native, not a bolt-on.
• Flexbox and CSS Grid layout. Penpot's layout engine uses actual CSS Flexbox and Grid, so what a designer builds maps cleanly onto how the front end really renders. A genuine advantage over tools that invent their own auto-layout model.
• Design tokens. Manage colours, spacing, and typography as first-class design tokens inside the file, in a standards-based format you can export and feed straight into code -- the kind of system that's a plugin-and-enterprise affair elsewhere.
• Developer inspect. Any element exposes its CSS, SVG, and measurements for handoff, with no separate paid "dev mode" seat gating it.
• Plugins. A plugin API lets you extend Penpot with your own tools and community add-ons, so the platform grows with your workflow instead of waiting on a vendor roadmap.

Why self-host it instead of the hosted version

Your files never leave your server. Design work is product strategy made visible -- unreleased screens, brand direction, everything a competitor would love to see. Self-hosting means those files sit on infrastructure you control, not in a vendor's multi-tenant cloud with terms that change under you.

The cost stops scaling per seat. Hosted design tools charge per editor, so onboarding a designer, a PM, or a contractor is a recurring line item forever. Penpot on your own box costs the same whether five people use it or fifty. You pay for the server, not for the privilege of adding a teammate.

You control the version and the environment. No forced UI changes the week before a deadline, no feature you rely on getting moved to a higher tier. You choose when to update, you test the new version before it touches your team, you can keep it behind your own network, and the whole thing lives in your stack alongside everything else you run.

Who it's for

Product and startup teams who want a real design system and live collaboration without a subscription that grows with every hire.

Agencies and studios juggling client work who need editors on demand -- freelancers, contractors, a client stakeholder or two -- without per-seat billing turning collaboration into a cost decision.

Privacy-conscious and regulated organisations -- anyone in government, healthcare, or security-sensitive work who simply cannot put unreleased interface designs on someone else's cloud, and needs the tool inside their own perimeter with data residency they can actually point to on an audit.

The honest setup notes

Penpot is not a single container you flip on. It's a small stack: a frontend, a backend, an exporter service, a PostgreSQL database, and a Redis-compatible cache. The exporter renders your PNG and PDF exports with a headless browser, so it genuinely wants memory -- plan for a few gigabytes of RAM to start, and more once several people are editing at once, because the exporter is the piece that eats it first. Your real state lives in two places at once: the Postgres database and an assets directory holding uploaded images and fonts. Back up one without the other and a restore gives you half a design system. You'll want SMTP wired in for invitations and account emails, a reverse proxy in front for TLS, and updates that mean pulling new image versions and occasionally letting a migration run.

None of that is exotic, but it is real ops work that keeps showing up after launch. Or let us run it.

Deploy it in one click

You can absolutely stand this up yourself -- write the compose file, provision Postgres and the cache, size the exporter, configure storage and SMTP, and own the backups and upgrades from then on. It's a satisfying afternoon and a standing chore.

Or you deploy Penpot in one click on Caliber Node and skip straight to the part where your team is designing. We provision the whole stack -- database, cache, exporter, and storage -- on a server that's yours, keep it patched, and handle the backups. If the exporter runs out of memory or a disk starts filling, that's our pager and not yours. You still get real logs, SFTP access, and full export of your data whenever you want it. It's self-hosting without the babysitting.

First run

1. Open your Penpot URL and create the first account -- that's you, the owner.
2. Create a project, then add a new file inside it.
3. Draw a board at a device size (a phone or desktop frame) to give yourself a canvas.
4. Lay out a screen with a few shapes and text, and turn a repeated element into a component so you can reuse it.
5. Switch to the prototype view, link two boards with a click interaction, and hit play to click through your first working flow.

That's a real design and a clickable prototype, running on your own server, in a few minutes.

The bigger picture

Design tooling decides how your product gets made, and for a decade the industry quietly accepted that this critical layer should be rented, per person, from a company that could be acquired or repriced at any moment. Owning it back is not nostalgia -- it's keeping the blueprint of what you build on infrastructure you actually control, priced by the box instead of by the head. Penpot proves the open version is not a compromise; it's just design software that answers to you.

Deploy Penpot in a few minutes →

Or browse the full app catalog to see what else you can own.

One-click self-hosted apps, managed for you -- real logs, SFTP, and your data always exportable. Never a black box.