Figma vs Penpot, Run in Parallel on the Same Client Project for Five Weeks

Comparisons between these two usually turn on open source versus proprietary, and then list features in a table. I wanted a different question answered: if I actually delivered a real project in each, where would the time go? So over five weeks we built the same twenty-screen interface twice, same brief, same component structure, one of us in each tool, swapping halfway to control for familiarity.

Total hours: 31 in Figma, 44 in Penpot. That is a forty-two percent gap, which is large, and I want to be specific about where it came from because it is concentrated in two places rather than spread evenly.

The first is components with variants. Figma’s variant system lets you define one component with properties — state, size, icon on or off — and swap them from a panel. Penpot has components and it has recently gained a form of variants, but the workflow at the time of testing required more manual construction, and our button set alone accounted for roughly four of the thirteen extra hours. If your deliverable is component-heavy — a design system, a large app — this single difference will dominate everything else in the comparison.

The second is plugins, and specifically one plugin. We use an automated contrast checker across every screen before handoff. In Figma this is a plugin that runs in about ninety seconds. In Penpot we did it by hand, screen by screen, which took just under three hours across the twenty screens. That is not an inherent property of the tools so much as an ecosystem gap, and ecosystem gaps close, but it was real for us in this project.

Where Penpot won, and it genuinely did: file handling. Penpot’s files are open format and can be self-hosted, and twice during the five weeks I opened a file, edited it, and inspected the underlying data without needing the application to mediate. That mattered once in a way that saved us — a corrupted board that I could repair directly rather than filing a support ticket and waiting. Figma is a better tool and also a place your work lives at somebody else’s discretion, and those are separate axes, which is why I now check what an export actually contains before committing to any tool.

Performance on large files was closer than I expected, and closer than it was a year ago. Both slowed at around the fifteen-screen mark on the same laptop. Figma degraded more gracefully — panning stayed smooth while rendering lagged — where Penpot’s slowdown was more uniform and therefore more noticeable, but neither became unusable and I would not make a decision on this.

The handoff experience is the part I would tell a small studio to weigh most heavily, because it is the part your client touches. Figma’s shared link, with inspect mode and comments, is understood by developers who have never used the tool. Penpot’s equivalent works and is functionally similar; it is simply less familiar, and on two occasions I spent ten minutes on a call explaining where to click. Ten minutes twice is not much. It is not nothing when you are billing.

Cost, for our two seats, since per-seat pricing grows with headcount: Figma at the Professional tier was $360 a year. Penpot self-hosted was the cost of a small server, about $84 a year, plus roughly six hours of my time over the five weeks in setup and one upgrade. At my billing rate, once you start pricing your own time, those six hours are worth more than the $276 saved, which is the honest conclusion for a studio of two and the opposite conclusion for a team of twenty.

If I had to state it in one line: Figma is faster at the work, Penpot is safer with the artefact. We stayed on Figma, and we now keep a Penpot export of every completed project, which costs about twenty minutes a month and means the decision is reversible.