The folks behind Penpot also make a kanban management tool, kind of like Trello, called Taiga: <a href="http://taiga.io/" rel="nofollow">http://taiga.io/</a> It's also OSS (Django/Angular), self-hostable, and very pleasant to use.<p>I'm rooting for both of these, and now that they have some funding I hope they'll dedicate effort on polishing the rough edges (and do something about the gratuitous amount of white space that permeates all of their web presence, and maybe reconsider their color palette to be less muted and more saturated, heavier, and decisive). They seem to be actively working on Figma imports, auto layouts, multi-user edits and more at this moment so they're on the right track.<p>For both of them, <i>even</i> if the VCs pull the rug from underneath to race for an exit, it being OSS is good insurance. A fork would mean that we don't have to spend time learning yet another tool. The good will fostered by it being OSS is what encourages some of us to look into their offerings, and in this way what we see is something that seems like a sustainable model for OSS projects.
Disclaimer - I work for Figma but had no part in the acquisition. My comments are my own and I don't represent Figma.<p>Technically I'm very curious to see how Penpot evolves with this investment, especially in regards to their choice to base everything on SVGs. IMO this will be their greatest superpower and also greatest weakness. Keeping things tied explicitly to code means exporting the final product is going to be near-perfect translation wise, but it will also mean they're tied explicitly to the browser's ability to render the combined html+svgs.<p>Currently Penpot's performance starts dropping rapidly once you approach around 1000 layers. Most robust design systems I see run around 10-40k layers (with the record I've seen being 250k). I'm very curious if they'll be able to optimize their approach to support those sizes of libraries.
> Before September 15, Penpot’s CEO and co-founder Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz said that sign-ups were growing at around 40% per month: after Adobe’s news, that figure ballooned to 5,600%, and has stayed consistent since then. On-premise deployments have also grown 400%.<p>5600%! Good for them. I'm sure a lot of it was folks exploring options but I wonder how many of those new users will stick around -- anyone try it out and decide to make the commitment to use Penpot as a full replacement? Anything it still needs / hesitations?
Taking any app and adding Google Docs style "collaboration" to it is a recipe for success, in the same way that taking a piece of art and making it an NFT did, for a period time, make its value 10-1,000,000x greater.<p>From an engineering POV, maybe someone should sell a CRDT service that proxies multiple users into one and pretends to be general, but really authors domain-specific stuff since CRDTs and OT "general" is not very valuable.
Here comes the same VC scam again.<p>Like what happened to Keybase, also what happened to Bitwarden and is now happening to Penpot.<p>With all of this, it will just end up just like Keybase as investors will race for an exit.
> Before September 15, Penpot’s CEO and co-founder Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz said that sign-ups were growing at around 40% per month: after Adobe’s news, that figure ballooned to 5,600%, and has stayed consistent since then. On-premise deployments have also grown 400%.<p>wow. check out their growth <a href="https://star-history.com/#penpot/penpot&Date" rel="nofollow">https://star-history.com/#penpot/penpot&Date</a>
Scott Tolinski (Syntax podcast, LevelUp tuts) did a video about Penpot on the day that the Figma acquisition was announced. Check it out to see how it compares to Figma.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj7D0tSNmEg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj7D0tSNmEg</a>
Open source alternatives do really well when a lot of people are complaining about the pricing of the closed source leaders (e.g. Snowflake). I don't hear many people complaining about Figma's pricing, but maybe that will start once Adobe starts meddling.
I saw earlier this year that the Figma team had (finally) got around to thinking about the accessibility of their UI. Out of curiosity I went hunting to see if Penpot has UI accessibility built-in. It's not one of the founding principles, but good to see they say it's one of their 'values' going forward - <a href="https://github.com/penpot/penpot/issues/2195" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/penpot/penpot/issues/2195</a>
Because you can't read it because of their broken "consent" intersitial <a href="https://archive.ph/0ekuT" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/0ekuT</a>
Tried it - pretty straight up Figma clone - doesn't feel as polished but it's not bad. Nice addition to open source design tools.<p>Would be great to be able to import .fig files
This is great news, congrats to Penpot!<p>As a full-time Figma user and one-time evangelist for it, I looked eagerly for alternatives after the recent news. Penpot is not ready for my team to switch over yet, but I hope that if, in the future, Figma suffers the same fate as Adobe's other software design tools, Penpot will by then have grown into a viable OSS alternative.
Congratulations to the team behind it (Kaleidos, Peter & Pablo)
I trust them to make really great things and still fully OSS, this is where they are coming from. I can't believe for a second they will betray their own vision.
20 billion is just a lot of money though right? I never thought Figma was that great to use anyway. Maybe there’s more than meets the eye on the way it is set up in the back end and adobe is looking to leverage that knowledge.
How do open source companies make money? The only thing I figure here, is that VCs are betting another company like Microsoft will want to acquire the number 2 player, and exit that way.