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 Product Designer
Owns the design system of a B2B software product. Wants components with variants, tokens with modes, prototypes that test a real flow, and library releases that are versioned and reviewable — a design system is a product, not a page of nicely arranged buttons.
Figma
Penpot
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Design, prototyping & design systems
Figma
Team-wide design libraries that publish resources across teams, shared styles for colour, text, grids and effects, and an agent that generates full component sets in multiple sizes, states and themes from your real tokens and variables — the core of a design system managed in the tool is documented. What I could not find is the governed layer: library releases versioned and reviewable, prototype transitions and conditional logic, token export in a documented format, and accessibility checks in the editor. Seven, because the system is real but its release discipline is not evidenced.
Penpot
Penpot documents the design system as a first-class product: components published as libraries shared and synced across teams, built-in design tokens covering colour, typography, spacing and themes, variants that manage states, styles and sizes, and prototypes with transitions, overlays, scroll simulation and branching flows. What the pages do not document is library changes published as versioned releases — the version history described is per-file autosave — nor token export in a documented format, component usage analytics, or contrast checking built into the editor rather than a community plugin.
Collaboration, review & developer handoff
Figma
Free viewers and developers get measurements, asset export, comments with mentions and prototype presentation without a paid seat, and Dev Mode carries a real inspection and code story — CSS, Swift and XML panels plus an MCP Server on Professional. The documented code covers visual properties and spacing only, and I found no public information on version history with restore, branching, or a documented API. Strong handoff surface, weaker review mechanics.
Penpot
Real-time co-editing, comments in the inspect tab, sharing part or all of work by link with user roles and permissions, unlimited viewers, and a code inspect tab that expresses design as HTML, CSS and SVG and is explicitly free for developers — that is most of what a team and its engineers need. The gaps against a full handoff contract: version history is stated without restore, no branching or review of changes before main is described, and no named integrations with issue trackers or code tools appear — the API, plugins and the open MCP server are documented, named tool integrations are not.
Brand assets & governance
Figma
A logo-to-brand-kit generator producing colour palettes, typography pairings and brand assets directly on the canvas, plus team and community templates, gives non-designers something to start from. I found no public information on locked templates, rights and expiry metadata on licensed assets, approval workflows, or access by team and market — and the captured brand pages mostly govern Figma's own marks rather than the customer's. The kit generation is genuine; the governance half is not evidenced.
Penpot
Shared libraries carry colours, typographies and components for brand-specific designs, templates and libraries can be created, shared and downloaded, third-party fonts can be uploaded, and community kits demonstrate publishing a palette file as a synced library. But we found no public information on locked templates non-designers can fill, brand guidelines published in the tool, or rights and expiry metadata on assets; the governance shown is community reporting and submission review, not brand control.
Files, formats & portability
Figma
The terms state the customer retains all right, title and interest in their content, with a 30-day electronic retrieval window after termination, and export to SVG, PNG and CSS is documented per asset. I found no public information on a documented file format, whole-file download to a local copy, bulk export, or import from other named tools. Ownership is written into the terms; the mechanics of leaving are thin on these pages.
Penpot
The strongest portability story on this sheet: the core is open source under Mozilla Public License 2.0 with source code access at no cost, self-hosting is documented across Docker, Kubernetes with a Helm chart, OpenShift, Rancher, TrueNAS and even air-gapped deployment, files are based on SVG, CSS and HTML plus an open.penpot format with import from.penpot,.zip,.svg and.json and a Figma exporter, and sole ownership of uploaded content is written into the terms. Lossless round-trip export is not documented, and instead of a stated retention timeline the terms place data reconstruction and backups on the customer, with cancelled accounts possibly losing access to stored data.
AI features & rights to the work
Figma
The AI terms put training behind a Content Training toggle in administrative settings and state that input and output are customer content in which the customer retains all rights, while disclaiming any warranty on output. I found no public information on model providers, processing locations, content credentials, stock licences or indemnity. That is the control set I want in writing, without the transparency layer above it.
Penpot
The AI story is bring-your-own: any agent, any LLM and any AI tooling integrated into Penpot's core via the open MCP server, with the only generation capability I found being a community plugin that turns a text description into Penpot shapes on a fine-tuned OpenAI model. The terms state Kaleidos analyses only metadata and will not analyze the text and contents themselves, and users remain sole owners of uploaded content, but we found no public information on training exclusion or opt-out, admin controls over AI features, commercial-use rights for generated output, or indemnity.
European sovereignty
Figma
The terms are with Figma, Inc. under California law, and the privacy policy states all personal information is transferred to, processed and stored in the United States; I found no information on an EU hosting option. A published data processing addendum with Standard Contractual Clauses and a German imprint entity in Berlin are European elements, but the hosting chain itself is stated as US-only.
Penpot
The controller is Kaleidos Subsidiary S.L. in Madrid under Spanish governing law and the courts of Madrid, a data processing agreement is offered with Standard Contractual Clauses for transfers, the enterprise plan lists a choice of hosting region (EU, US, etc), and private cloud, on-premise or air-gapped self-hosting puts design data entirely on customer infrastructure. It stops short of end to end: the pages name no EU hosting infrastructure, publish no subprocessor list with locations and purposes (Google Analytics and PostHog appear only as website analytics mentions), and state nothing about where AI features process.
Pricing transparency
Figma
Every seat type — Full, Collab, Dev — carries a euro price across Professional, Organization and Enterprise with included monthly AI credits stated per seat, free viewers on paid plans, mid-term seats explained through daily proration or quarterly invoicing, and cancellation paths named. The credit mechanics — subscription and pay-as-you-go, monthly expiry, budget controls, thirty-day price-change notice — are documented in unusual detail. What keeps it from the top is the missing pay-as-you-go unit price and any storage pricing on these pages.
Penpot
Every plan carries a public USD price — Professional $0 user/month, Unlimited $7 editor/month with a cap on $175 per month no matter the team size, Enterprise $25 member/month and Private Server $50k year — plus per-plan storage limits, unlimited viewers on Professional, SSO and IP whitelisting named on Enterprise, a 14-day trial, and immediate cancellation written into the terms. VAT treatment, how and when added seats are billed or trued up, and contract conditions around the private server figure are not stated, which keeps a buyer from computing the full annual cost from the pages alone.
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.