Every product team has one board that everyone draws on, and for most of a decade that board has belonged to Figma. The pen tool, the components, the comment pins, the handoff to the developer, all of it lives inside a file you can open only while the seat is paid for.
Penpot is the same board, on a server you can own.
The best open source Figma alternative for most teams is Penpot: MPL-2.0 licensed, free with no feature limits on its hosted Professional plan, free to self-host, and $7 per editor a month on the Unlimited plan, capped at $175 a month however large the team gets (checked Nov 3, 2026). Excalidraw is the pick for whiteboards and diagrams, Quant-UX for prototypes you want to test on real users, and Graphite if what you miss is a vector editor rather than a UI tool.
What Penpot actually is
Penpot is a browser-based design and prototyping tool for interface work: boards, components, layouts, design tokens, prototypes and an inspect view for developers. The repo is MPL-2.0 with about 62,000 GitHub stars (repo). Version 2.19, “Is this it”, shipped on October 28, 2026 with design tokens shared from a library, customisable keyboard shortcuts, per-side strokes and a faster WebGL renderer. Version 2.18, on September 9, 2026, added stroke-to-path and an Enterprise plan.
Penpot's prices on Nov 3, 2026, in US dollars: Professional at $0, described as “Free and fully featured. No limits, no missing tools.”; Unlimited at $7 per editor a month, “Capped at $175 per month, no matter your team size.”; and Enterprise at $25 per member a month. Self-hosting is listed as “Free, forever” and “Requires: Linux server, Docker knowledge, self-managed deployment.”
Penpot's most expensive team plan costs $175 a month for any number of editors. Figma's cheapest team plan costs $16 a month per Full seat, so the two lines cross at the eleventh designer.
What Figma charges now
Figma prices by seat type and plan, and every seat now carries an AI credit allowance. On Nov 3, 2026 figma.com/pricing lists Starter as free; Professional at $16 a month for a Full seat, $12 for a Dev seat and $3 for a Collab seat (the card has a Monthly/Annual switch, and these are the prices it shows first); Organization, billed annually, at $55, $25 and $5; and Enterprise, billed annually, at $90, $35 and $5. A Full seat covers Figma Design, Figma Make, Dev Mode, FigJam and the rest of the suite, with 3,000 AI credits a month on Professional, 3,500 on Organization and 4,250 on Enterprise; every other seat type gets 500.
Adobe agreed to buy Figma for around twenty billion dollars and paid a one billion dollar termination fee when the deal was abandoned in December 2023, and Figma listed on the New York Stock Exchange on July 31, 2025 at a valuation near nineteen billion dollars.
The open source Figma alternatives
Of the 300 design tools in the AppClap catalog (Nov 3, 2026), 197 have a free tier and 33 are open source. Five of them are worth your time, each for a different job.
Penpot
Penpot is the full Figma replacement: UI design, components, prototypes and developer handoff in the browser. It is free on the hosted Professional plan, $7 per editor a month on Unlimited with the $175 cap, and free to self-host (checked Nov 3, 2026), under MPL-2.0 with about 62,000 stars. It is best for a product team that wants Figma's workflow without Figma's seat. The honest drawback: Figma's shelves of community files and plugins are longer.
Excalidraw
Excalidraw is a hand-drawn-style whiteboard for diagrams, flows and rough wireframes. The editor at excalidraw.com is free; Excalidraw+, the hosted team product, is $6 per user a month after a 14-day trial (checked Nov 3, 2026). It is MIT licensed with about 135,000 stars (repo). The drawback: it draws boxes and arrows, not component libraries, so it replaces FigJam, not Figma.
Quant-UX
Quant-UX is a prototyping tool with usability testing built in: build the prototype, send a link, watch where people get stuck. It is free to use on quant-ux.com and GPL-3.0, with about 2,750 stars and a last push on October 11, 2026 (repo). It is best for testing a flow before anyone builds it. The drawback: a small team behind it, and an interface that looks its age.
OpenPencil
OpenPencil describes itself as an “open-source AI-native vector design tool” built around “Design-as-Code”, where prompts turn into editable UI on a live canvas. It is free and MIT licensed, with about 7,000 stars (repo). It is best for developers who want to generate interface designs from prompts and keep the files next to their code. The drawback: it is young and moving fast.
Graphite
Graphite calls itself “a free, open source vector graphics editor and animation engine, available now in alpha”. It is dual licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, free, with about 27,800 stars (repo). It is best for illustration and vector work rather than screens. The drawback is in its own description: alpha.
tldraw, with about 51,200 stars, comes up in every search, but its SDK is source-available under tldraw's own licence, with a free hobby licence, a 100-day trial and “value-based pricing” for production use (checked Nov 3, 2026). It is not open source, so it sits outside the table.
| Tool | Licence | Price (Nov 3, 2026) | Best for | Stars |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Penpot | MPL-2.0 | $0, or $7 an editor capped at $175 | UI design and handoff | ~62,000 |
| Excalidraw | MIT | $0, Plus $6 a user | Whiteboards, diagrams | ~135,000 |
| Quant-UX | GPL-3.0 | $0 | Prototypes with user testing | ~2,750 |
| OpenPencil | MIT | $0 | Prompt-to-UI, design as code | ~7,000 |
| Graphite | MIT or Apache-2.0 | $0 | Vector art, alpha | ~27,800 |
| Figma | Proprietary | $16 to $90 a Full seat | The incumbent | n/a |
Penpot vs Figma: which is better in 2026?
Figma is the better tool if your team already pays for it and leans on its plugins, Figma Make and Dev Mode, and Penpot is the better tool if you want the file on your server, a bill that stops at $175 a month, and an open MCP server. Figma's Full seat costs $16 a month on Professional, $55 on Organization and $90 on Enterprise. Penpot's editor costs $0 or $7. The practical difference for a small team is not features. It is whether the twelfth person costs $16 or $0.
Is Figma free?
Yes, for a very small team, and no for anything larger. Figma's Starter plan is $0 with “Unlimited drafts”, “150 AI credits/day, up to 500 AI credits/mo”, and, per Figma's help centre, “A single team with one folder and 3 files” and 30 days of version history (checked Nov 3, 2026). A fourth shared file means a Professional Full seat at $16 a month. Penpot's Professional plan is free with no file limit.
Is there an open source Figma alternative with an MCP server?
Yes. Penpot's MCP server is “free and open”, runs remote or local; the code lives in the mcp directory of the Penpot repo (checked Nov 3, 2026). Figma lists “Advanced Dev Mode inspection and MCP Server” among the features of its paid Professional plan, so on Figma the MCP server comes with a paid seat.
What you actually take on
Figma's price buys the ecosystem. Plugins, community files, Figma Make, the fact that every contractor and client already has an account, and someone else's uptime are all part of the $16. Self-hosting Penpot is a Linux server and Docker you maintain, backups you have tested, and upgrades you schedule, and Penpot's own page says so without softening it: “Requires: Linux server, Docker knowledge, self-managed deployment.”
- 1Do you pay for more than ten Figma Full seats today?
- 2Does your team rely on specific Figma plugins or community files every week?
- 3Is keeping design files on infrastructure you control a real requirement, or a preference?
- 4Are you willing to run Docker on a Linux server, or would you use Penpot's free cloud instead?
This series keeps walking down a hallway of paid-app doors: dictation, the deploy platform, the CRM, the login, the mailbox, the visitor book, the back office, the shop window, the appointment book, the workbench, the server room, the team notebook. Today's door is the drawing board, the one every product starts on, and the twin behind it is a canvas with no seat count. We keep writing these at AppClap because a search for software should put the tool you can own next to the famous one, with the price on the page. Our Figma alternatives page lists everything we track, and if you would rather describe the job, start from an open source design tool I can self-host. Spend thirty seconds on it: do you want to rent the board, or own it?
