Penpot is the first open - source design and prototyping platform for cross - domain teams, developed by the company Kaleidos. It is built on Web technology, independent of specific operating systems, and uses open Web standards (SVG). It breaks the limitations of traditional design tools, enabling seamless collaboration between design and development teams and greatly improving work efficiency.
Core Functions
- Design Toolset: It has built - in vector drawing tools that support operations on shapes, text, and images, as well as custom colors and styles, meeting all the needs of designers. For example, designers can easily draw various graphics and adjust their colors, sizes, and positions.
- Prototyping: Users can create interactive prototypes, set page jumps, preview, and share them with teams or customers to better test and validate design ideas. For instance, product managers can show the interaction process and functions of a product to the team through prototypes.
- Asset Library: It manages reusable elements such as icons, photos, and graphics, maintaining design consistency and improving team collaboration efficiency. Designers can store commonly used icons and other elements in the asset library for easy use in different projects.
- Version Control: It tracks every change in the project and allows users to easily roll back to previous states, ensuring the stability and traceability of design projects. In case of design problems, it is possible to quickly restore to a previous version.
- Permission Management: It provides fine - grained permission control, allowing administrators to set the roles and access levels of team members to protect sensitive information. For example, for some important design files, access can be restricted to specific personnel.
- Multi - user Collaboration: Each member can view and edit projects in real - time, check historical changes, comment, and provide feedback. Team members can jointly complete design projects on the same platform, improving communication efficiency.
Advantages
- Open - source and Free: It is completely free and open - source, allowing community contributions and customization. Users can also choose to deploy it on their own servers to ensure data security and autonomous control.
- Cross - platform Compatibility: Thanks to Web technology, it can run smoothly on any modern browser. Whether users are using Windows, macOS, or Linux, they can enjoy a consistent and high - quality design experience without worrying about limitations caused by operating system differences.
- Support for Open Standards: It uses SVG as the core file format, which not only ensures high - quality output and editability of design works but also promotes compatibility with other vector editing tools. This facilitates the reuse and sharing of design resources, lowers the technical threshold, and enhances the flexibility of team collaboration.
- Easy Integration: It provides a GraphQL API that can be integrated with other tools and services, facilitating combination with existing development toolchains.
- Stable Performance: It uses modern technology stacks such as React, Puppeteer, Node.js, and MongoDB and follows the microservice architecture principle. This allows each component to be developed and expanded independently, ensuring the maintainability and scalability of the system, as well as the performance and stability of the platform.
Application Scenarios
Penpot is widely used in product design, UI/UX design, website development, and other fields. For example, product design teams can use Penpot for product design, prototyping, and test verification; UI/UX design teams can use it for interface design, interaction design, and user experience optimization; website development teams can use it for website planning, page design, and functional prototyping.