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 Skeptic
Has read "free for viewers", "commercially safe AI" and "export anytime" on every page in this category. Reads instead for the click that turns a reviewer into a billed editor, the plan the IP indemnity actually covers, and whether the export keeps a single component.
Figma
Penpot
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Design, prototyping & design systems
Figma
Team libraries that publish across teams, tokens and variables the AI generator binds to, component variants across sizes, states and themes, shared styles for colour, text, grids and effects, and an interactive prototype template are all documented — though largely via the AI agent and plan feature pages. We found no public information on library publishing with versions, token export in a documented format, per-component usage analytics or accessibility checks in the editor. The documented evidence sits between a shared-systems tool and a governed one.
Penpot
Components publish as libraries "shared and synced" across the team, built-in tokens cover colour, typography, spacing and themes, and variants plus prototypes with transitions, overlays and branching flows are all on the feature pages. We found no public information on versioned library releases, component usage analytics, token export in a documented format, or accessibility checks inside the editor — contrast checking is a community plugin the vendor explicitly does not guarantee. A managed design system, not yet a governed one.
Collaboration, review & developer handoff
Figma
The reviewer economics are clean: viewers join with no billing account and can comment with mentions, take measurements, copy CSS, iOS and Android code and export assets, and Dev Mode is documented down to a code panel in CSS, Swift and XML that carries visual properties only, with no logic exported. An integrations directory and an MCP Server at Professional are named. We found no public information on version history with restore, branching, or an access audit log.
Penpot
Handoff is the strong half: unlimited viewers on the free plan, a code inspect tab outputting HTML, CSS and SVG that is explicitly free for developers, an open API with access tokens, and a plugin system. Version history appears only as day counts with no restore described, and we found no public information on branching, comment mentions, an access audit log, or named integrations with issue trackers — the MCP server is the closest thing.
Brand assets & governance
Figma
The captured brand pages are Figma's own trademark rulebook and an AI generator that turns a customer's logo into colour palettes, typography pairings and brand assets as editable layers on the canvas — a brand kit as output, not a managed central library. Community templates run past 1,000 and shared libraries and fonts appear at Organization. We found no public information on locked templates, approval workflows, or rights, usage and expiry metadata on assets.
Penpot
Teams get shared libraries carrying colours and typographies, a browsable template and plugin catalogue, and free design-system templates — a shared kit rather than governance. We found no public information on locked templates for non-designers, published brand guidelines, approval workflows, or rights, usage and expiry metadata on assets; the terms only note that user-uploaded third-party fonts are stored on the vendor's servers.
Files, formats & portability
Figma
Layer-level escape is documented — copy as SVG, PNG or CSS and an export panel for everything marked exportable — and the terms are clear on ownership: the customer retains all right, title and interest in their content, with a 30-day electronic retrieval window after termination before deletion. We found no public information on whole-file download with structure, an open or publicly documented file format, or bulk export of a team's files.
Penpot
The terms carry the weight here: the customer "will remain the sole owner of the content", the open file format takes.penpot,.svg and.json imports, a Figma exporter sits in a public repository, and free self-hosting via Docker, Helm charts, OpenShift or air-gapped installs is documented to continue running even after a cloud cancellation. Two gaps a buyer should price in: the terms make reconstruction of lost data the customer's responsibility, and we found no public information on bulk export of a team's files or round-trip fidelity for components and prototypes.
AI features & rights to the work
Figma
The training question gets a real answer: customer content trains the models only when a Content Training toggle is on in administrative settings, and input and output are Customer Content in which the customer retains all right, title and interest — commercial rights settle through ownership. But we found no public information on model providers, processing locations, content credentials, stock licences or an indemnity for generated output, and the default state of the training toggle is not stated; the AI terms instead say Figma makes no warranty and will in no way be liable for use of Output.
Penpot
AI exists as bring-your-own agents and LLMs through an open MCP server, plus a community "Rapid Prototyping with AI" plugin running a fine-tuned OpenAI model from a third party the vendor declines to guarantee. We found no public information on training of customer files, admin controls to switch AI off, commercial-use terms for generated output, where models process, or any IP indemnity; the closest statement is a privacy line that metadata is analysed and text contents are not.
European sovereignty
Figma
The terms are entered into with Figma, Inc., and the privacy policy states all personal information is transferred to, processed and stored in the United States, where headquarters and main servers are, and no EU residency option is stated on the captured pages. A published DPA with Module 2 Standard Contractual Clauses and a Berlin imprint for Figma GmbH exist, but these are transfer safeguards wrapped around a proven US chain, not European hosting or a European contract.
Penpot
The chain that is documented is European: Kaleidos Subsidiary S.L. of Madrid is the named data controller under Spanish governing law and Madrid courts, an EU hosting region is selectable, a DPA is incorporated by reference, and transfers rely on Standard Contractual Clauses. The rest is unstated — we found no public information on named hosting infrastructure or a published subprocessor list beyond website analytics tools such as Google Analytics and PostHog.
Pricing transparency
Figma
Almost everything a buyer needs is public: euro prices for every plan and seat type — Full seat €16/mo at Professional, €55/mo at Organization, €90/mo at Enterprise, with Collab and Dev seats priced separately — free view-and-comment access, daily-prorated mid-term seats with quarterly invoicing on the annual plans, AI credits bundled per seat with Starter at 150 a day capped at 500 a month, taxes excluded, and Governance+ named as Enterprise-only. The holes: the per-credit price for pay-as-you-go and the price of the AI credits subscription do not appear in the captured figures, and the plan unlocking SSO is not named.
Penpot
All four plans carry public USD prices — Professional at $0 user/month, Unlimited at $7 editor/month capped at $175 per month, Enterprise at $25 member/month, Private Server at $50k year — with unlimited viewers, per-tier storage, version-history windows, and Enterprise named as where SSO and IP whitelisting live. The captured pricing pages give different figures for limits, calling the free plan "No limits, no missing tools" while listing an eight-member team cap and storage caps; we found no public information on VAT treatment, how added seats are billed, or 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.