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 Data Protection Officer
Reviews every tool where unreleased products, customer screenshots and employee photos end up. Wants the contracting entity and hosting region named, the AI providers on the subprocessor list, and training on customer files excluded for the whole organisation in the terms — not behind a toggle each user has to find.
Figma
Penpot
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Design, prototyping & design systems
Figma
Team-wide design libraries published across teams, shared styles for colour, text, grids and effects, and an AI component generator that works with the customer's real tokens, variables and component variants point to a design system managed in the tool. We found no public information on versioned library releases or on prototypes with transitions and conditional logic, which keeps it below the top of this band.
Penpot
The design system is managed in the tool itself: components publish as libraries shared and synced across the team, built-in design tokens cover colour, typography, spacing and themes, and variants manage component states, styles and sizes. Prototyping is documented with transitions between screens, overlays, scroll simulation and branching flows. Contrast checking arrives only through a community plugin, and we found no public information on versioned library releases or per-component usage analytics, which keeps this short of the top level.
Collaboration, review & developer handoff
Figma
Dev Mode is well evidenced with measurements, copy as CSS, iOS and Android code, a code panel in CSS, Swift and XML, and asset export; free viewers can comment without a paid seat, and an MCP server and integrations directory are named. We found no public information on version history with restore, branching, or named issue-tracker integrations.
Penpot
Real-time co-editing, comments in the inspect view, share links and public sharing are documented, with unlimited free viewers and team roles, permissions and invitations. Developer handoff is code inspection showing HTML, CSS and SVG rather than screenshots, alongside an open API with access tokens and a plugin system. We found no public information on version restore, branching or review of changes before they reach the main file, nor named integrations with issue trackers.
Brand assets & governance
Figma
The logo-to-brand-kit generator produces colour palettes, typography pairings and brand assets on the canvas, and over a thousand community templates exist — brand kit generation rather than a governed central library. We found no public information on locked templates, rights or expiry metadata, or approval workflows; the brand guidance captured governs Figma's own marks, not customer assets.
Penpot
Share libraries make colours, typographies and components available to any team member for brand-specific designs, and templates and libraries can be created, shared and downloaded, with a community colour-palette kit importable as a template. We found no public information on brand guidelines published in the tool, approval workflows for assets, or rights and expiry metadata, so governance rests on shared libraries alone.
Files, formats & portability
Figma
Customer ownership of all Customer Content and a 30-day electronic retrieval window after termination are written into the terms, and export as CSS, SVG and PNG plus an asset export panel are documented. We found no public information on an open or documented file format, whole-file download, or bulk export of a team's files.
Penpot
Ownership is written into the terms — the customer remains sole owner of uploaded content — and the core is open source under MPL 2.0 with files in SVG, CSS, HTML and the.penpot format that Penpot itself imports, plus a Figma exporter published on GitHub and file download. Self-hosting is documented in depth: Docker, Helm charts, OpenShift, Rancher, TrueNAS, Elestio and air-gapped deployments, with self-hosted instances continuing to run under the open-source licence. The terms place backup responsibility on the customer, which the self-host and open-format route directly answers.
AI features & rights to the work
Figma
Training on Customer Content happens only when the Content Training toggle is on in administrative settings — a control to find and set, not an exclusion written into the terms, and its default state is not documented — while the AI terms do state the customer owns Input and Output. The captured pages name no AI model providers or processing locations, and Figma expressly disclaims warranty and liability for AI output rather than offering indemnity.
Penpot
AI arrives as an open MCP server and a promise to integrate any agent or LLM, plus a community plugin that turns text descriptions into shapes using a fine-tuned OpenAI model and carries an explicit no-guarantee disclaimer with plugin terms alongside it. The terms state the vendor analyses only metadata and not the contents themselves, which is a general data-handling statement. We found no public information excluding customer files from AI training, no organisation-wide admin switch for AI features, and nothing on commercial use of generated output, content credentials or indemnity.
European sovereignty
Figma
The terms are entered with Figma, Inc. under California law and San Francisco courts, and the privacy policy states all personal information is transferred to, processed and stored in the United States with no residency option offered; the published DPA with Module 2 Standard Contractual Clauses is the only European-facing safeguard captured. The subprocessor page is referenced but not captured, the named providers such as Zendesk, Statsig and Akismet are US services, and the Berlin Figma GmbH in the German imprint is not the contracting entity.
Penpot
The contracting picture is unusually clear: Kaleidos Subsidiary S.L. of Madrid with tax ID B24967721, Spanish governing law, Madrid courts, a published DPA incorporated by reference into the terms, and Standard Contractual Clauses for international transfers. A choice of EU or US hosting region is offered, and self-hosting — private cloud, on-premise, air-gapped — puts design data on infrastructure the customer names. What is missing: no published subprocessor list with locations (only Google Analytics and PostHog for analytics and payment gateways are named, with purposes), and we found no public information on the processing location of AI features.
Pricing transparency
Figma
Every plan and seat type is priced in euros with the billing period stated, free view-and-comment access on paid plans is explicit, mid-term seat additions are prorated and invoiced on a stated schedule, per-plan AI credit allotments are listed, taxes are stated as excluded, and Governance+ is named as Enterprise-only, with renewal, price-change termination and downgrade conditions in the terms. We found no numeric price for pay-as-you-go or subscription AI credits and no storage pricing, so a heavy AI user's total cost is not fully computable.
Penpot
All four tiers carry public USD prices — Professional at $0 per user per month, Unlimited at $7 per editor per month with a cap of $175 per month, Enterprise at $25 per member per month, Private Server at $50k a year — with per-plan features, storage, team-size limits, unlimited free viewers, a 14-day Unlimited trial and discounts for non-profits, education and open source. Single sign-on and central admin are tied to the Enterprise plan, though the self-host page says only "check pricing" for Enterprise while the pricing page states $25, so the captured pages give different figures there. We found no public information on VAT treatment or on how and when added seats are billed.
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.