Penpot is out of beta and brings many new features to compete with Figma

Penpot, the free and open source Figma rival, has announced it's out of beta and officially launching their tool “to the world”, almost two years after the first alpha release.

Penpot is a design and prototyping tool that allows to design the UX (user experience) and UI (user interface) for websites, software and mobile applications (among others). The platform is open source and powered by a community whose contributions are numerous (complementary modules and plugins, additional features, bug fixes, translations…).

Like Figma, this tool is web-based and accessible via all major browsers. It offers many similar functionalities and features like components, fonts management, interactive prototyping, real-time collaboration, measurements between objects, etc., but due to its youth (Figma was launched in 2015), it was always a bit behind in terms of features.

But, after many alpha and beta releases, more than 20 thousands stars on GitHub, and a growing popularity and community (especially after Figma's acquisition by Adobe), Penpot announced yesterday their first stable release in an official announcement and “unboxing” video. This new version introduces some long-awaited features, like Flex Layout, that lets you create designs that grow to fill or shrink to fit, and reflow as their contents change, but also Code Inspect (a browser-like inspect mode), Webhooks (to communicate between different applications) and accessibility improvements.

Of course, Figma is not the only player in this field, and there are many other rivals like Sketch, Adobe XD (for now), Lunacy, etc., but as we can see in this “2022 Design Tools Survey”, Figma is way ahead of its competitors in terms of users. Penpot has been growing and gaining popularity pretty quickly these last few months, and it has some big advantages: it's completely free and open source, and it can run on any machine (unlike Sketch, for example).

So, what do you think? Will 2023 be the year we see Penpot become a major actor in the design tools field?