As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates Figma 2.5/5 and Penpot 3.5/5 in Design. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 0 of the 6 judges pick Figma and 6 pick Penpot. Figma scores higher on 2 of 7 criteria (AI features & rights to the work and Pricing transparency). Penpot scores higher on 5 of 7 criteria (Files, formats & portability, European sovereignty, Design, prototyping & design systems, plus 2 more). Provenance — Figma: Rest of world; Penpot: EU-Made. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
Figma and Penpot split the six-judge bench by criterion. Penpot's widest leads are file ownership and portability, 9.2 to 4.5, and sovereignty, 5.7 to 1.3, both with six leans to Penpot and none back; design and prototyping runs 7.8 to 7.0 with five leans and a tie, and collaboration and handoff 7.0 to 6.5 with three leans and three ties. Figma leads pricing transparency 8.0 to 7.3 with four leans and two ties behind published seat prices — €16/mo at Professional, €55/mo at Organization, €90/mo at Enterprise — and AI and content rights 5.0 to 3.3 with six leans. Brand asset governance is close, 4.2 to 4.0, with two Penpot leans, one Figma lean and three ties. The five weighted totals shown put Penpot ahead — the product-designer bench 7.1 to 6, the skeptic 6.1 to 5 — yet the criterion split, not a single winner, is the result.
Choose Figma if
You need published seat prices before procurement signs — the verdict records €16/mo for a Full seat at Professional, €55/mo at Organization and €90/mo at Enterprise, and pricing transparency leans Figma four judges to none at 8.0 to 7.3
Your budget must show AI costs per plan up front — the verdict records AI credits stated per plan, under the pricing transparency lead with four Figma leans and two ties
Your stakeholders need to inspect files without paid seats — free viewers join paid plans under Figma's published pricing, a documented point in the pricing transparency criterion
Your legal review asks what an AI feature does with your content — AI and content rights leans Figma six judges to none, 5.0 to 3.3, while Penpot's verdict reports a community plugin on a fine-tuned OpenAI model the vendor does not guarantee, and we found no public information on training, admin controls, output rights or indemnity
Choose Penpot if
You need your files to remain yours and exportable — file ownership and portability leans Penpot six judges to none at 9.2 to 4.5; the terms name the customer sole owner of uploaded content, files rest on SVG, CSS and HTML with an open.penpot format, and a Figma exporter is documented
Your compliance mandate is EU control of data — sovereignty leans Penpot six judges to none, 5.7 to 1.3; Penpot's attributes record a Spanish legal-entity jurisdiction, EU venture-capital ownership and EU data residency as an option, while Figma's record United States default data residency and United States Cloud Act subprocessor exposure
Your team must keep working if the cloud service ends — the verdict documents self-hosting from Docker to air-gapped installs that continue running after a cloud cancellation, under the file ownership and portability criterion where six judges lean Penpot
Your design system runs on tokens and shared libraries — design and prototyping leans Penpot with five judges and one tie, 7.8 to 7.0, on built-in design tokens for colour, typography, spacing and themes and components published as shared, synced libraries
You sign off as a data protection officer — the data protection officer's weighted total runs Penpot 6 to Figma's 4.3
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Agency Owner
Runs a design agency of fifteen and hands every project over to the client at the end. Wants files that export with layers and components intact, guests who are not billed as editors, and terms that say the client owns the work — and what happens to it after a cancellation.
Figma
Penpot
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Design, prototyping & design systems
Figma
Team-wide design libraries, resources published across teams, and shared colour, text, grid and effect styles are documented, and the AI generator builds component sets with real tokens, variables and variants in different sizes, states and themes — a design system managed in the tool, not just a canvas. We found no public information on library changes published with versions, prototypes with conditional logic, token export in a documented format for development, or accessibility checks in the editor, which is what separates a managed system from a governed one.
Penpot
This is a genuine design-systems tool: components publish as libraries shared and synced across the team, built-in design tokens cover colour, typography, spacing and themes with no plugin needed, variants manage states and sizes, and prototypes get transitions, overlays, scroll simulation and branching flows. Accessibility checking such as contrast arrives through a community plugin rather than the editor itself, and we found no public information on versioned, reviewable library releases or per-component usage analytics.
Collaboration, review & developer handoff
Figma
Free viewers need no billing account and can comment with mentions, inspect measurements, copy CSS, iOS and Android code and export assets — the free client access I insist on before signing anything — and Dev Mode with a code panel in CSS, Swift and XML gives engineering real code rather than screenshots. Version history with restore, branching, a documented API and plugins, and named issue-tracker integrations are not described on the captured pages, and the code panel carries visual properties and spacing only, with no logic exported.
Penpot
Real-time co-editing, comments alongside the code output, public sharing of part or all of the work, and an inspect mode that hands developers real HTML, CSS and SVG — free for developers, which is exactly how I loop in clients' engineers without buying seats. Unlimited viewers, role and permission management, an open API with access tokens, a plugin system and an MCP server are all documented. We found no public information on version restore, branching or review of changes before they reach the main file, or named integrations with issue trackers and code tools.
Brand assets & governance
Figma
An AI generator turns a logo into colour palettes, typography pairings and brand assets on the canvas, with reusable skills to package a brand-kit workflow for sub-brands and client projects — useful, but it is generation, not governance. We found no public information on locked templates that keep non-designers inside the brand, guidelines published in the tool, or rights and expiry metadata on licensed assets.
Penpot
Shared libraries carrying colours, typographies and components, a publishable colour-palette kit, community templates and libraries to create, share or download, plus custom font upload — enough for a studio to keep a brand roughly consistent. We found no public information on brand guidelines published in the tool, locked templates non-designers can fill, approval workflows, or rights, usage and expiry metadata on assets, which is what governance means when I hand a brand library over to a client.
Files, formats & portability
Figma
The terms state the customer retains all right, title and interest in their content, and give a 30-day electronic retrieval window after termination before Figma may delete — ownership and post-cancellation behaviour in writing, the first thing I check before handing a client over. Export is thinner: copy as CSS, SVG or PNG and an export panel for marked assets are documented, but we found no public information on a documented whole-file format, PDF export, bulk export of a team's files, or transfer of a removed user's files to the organisation.
Penpot
Handover is the whole game for me and it is in writing: the customer remains sole owner of uploaded content, files rest on open standards (SVG, CSS, HTML, JSON) with the.penpot format for import and export plus a Figma exporter, and the core is open-source under Mozilla Public License 2.0 with source code at no additional cost. Self-hosted deployments — Docker, Kubernetes, even air-gapped — continue running on the client's own infrastructure, so a cancelled contract does not strand the work. The one gap is that the captured pages state no retention timeline for cloud files after cancellation, and reconstructing lost data is placed on the customer as their responsibility.
AI features & rights to the work
Figma
Training on customer content happens only when the Content Training toggle is on in the administrative settings, and the AI terms make input and output customer content with the customer retaining all rights — the two clauses my clients ask about. Model providers and processing locations, labelling or content credentials, stock licences per asset type, and any indemnity are not described on the captured pages; the terms in fact give no warranty on AI output and put review and clearances on the customer.
Penpot
AI shows up as plumbing — any agent or LLM integrates through the open MCP server across code-to-design and design-to-code workflows, and a community prototyping plugin running a fine-tuned OpenAI model turns a text description into shapes — while the terms state that only metadata is analyzed, not the text and contents themselves. We found no public information on whether customer files train any model or how to opt out, on admin controls to switch AI features off, on commercial-use terms for generated output, or on indemnity.
European sovereignty
Figma
The privacy policy states that all personal information is transferred to, processed and stored in the United States, where the headquarters and main servers are, with no EU residency option offered, and the contract runs with Figma, Inc. under California law and San Francisco venue. The European elements I can point to are a published data processing addendum carrying Standard Contractual Clauses and a Figma GmbH registered in Berlin in the imprint — safeguards and an affiliate, not EU storage or an EU contracting party.
Penpot
The contracting entity is named as a Spanish company in Madrid, tax ID and address published, under Spanish law and the Madrid courts, with a data processing agreement incorporated into the terms and standard contractual clauses offered for transfers. Files can sit in a chosen EU hosting region — or entirely on our own infrastructure, since private-cloud, on-premise and air-gapped self-hosting are documented. We found no published subprocessor list with locations and purposes (only Google Analytics and PostHog named for website analytics) and no statement of where AI features are processed, which holds it below the top level.
Pricing transparency
Figma
Every plan and seat type carries a public euro price — Starter free; Professional full seat at €16/mo with collab at €3/mo and dev at €12/mo; Organization full seat at €55/mo billed annually; Enterprise full seat at €90/mo — and the pages state outright that viewers and commenters need no extra seat on paid plans. We found no public information on the per-credit pay-as-you-go price or storage pricing, so I can price a team almost — but not entirely — from public pages alone.
Penpot
A buyer can price a fifteen-person studio from the public pages: Professional at $0 user/month with up to 8 team members and unlimited viewers, Unlimited at $7 editor/month with a cap on $175 per month no matter the team size, Enterprise at $25 member/month, Private Server at $50k year, all stated in USD, with storage, autosave versions and file recovery listed per tier, a 14-day trial, non-profit, education and open-source discounts, and cancellation at any time taking effect immediately. Single sign-on and IP whitelisting sit with the Enterprise tier, and developer inspect is free. We found no public information on VAT treatment, on how and when added seats are billed mid-cycle, or on any AI credit pricing.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Figma
Penpot
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Ownership
Not determined
Not determined
Data residency
Not determined
Not determined
Subprocessors
US CLOUD Act reach
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
As of 28 Oct 2026, the panel rates Penpot higher: 3.5/5 against 2.5/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 0 of the 6 judges pick Figma and 6 pick Penpot. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is Figma or Penpot European?
Figma is not European by provenance (Rest of world). Penpot is European (EU-Made). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Do Figma and Penpot have a free plan?
As of 28 Oct 2026, both vendors’ own pages state a free plan. Each product page links the pricing page it was read from.