Figma Professional — Full seat, 6 seats → Penpot, self-hosted
Marginal. At $50 an hour, Penpot saves you $326 over 3 years.
Worth doing only if your hour is worth less than
$56.79/hrBelow that rate, moving to Penpot pays for itself inside 3 years. Above it, your time is worth more than the saving, and you should stay on Figma Professional — Full seat.
Every figure on this page updates as you move these. Most comparisons of this kind quietly assume your time is free and your team never changes size.
What you pay now
| Figma Professional — Full seat $16.00/month × 6 seats, billed annual | $96.00 |
| Every month | $96.00 |
What the escape costs
| Vultr vc2-2c-4gb 2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM · 80 GB disk · 3 TB transfer · $300 of credit for your first 30 days via our referral link | $20.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 40 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.28 |
| Your time 1 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $50.00 |
| Every month | $70.28 |
| Migration, once 12 hours of your time, our estimate | $600.00 |
The same box elsewhere, if you already have an account. The arithmetic above uses the cheapest.
- Vultr $20.00 vc2-2c-4gb · used above · $300 of credit for your first 30 days
- Linode $24.00 Linode 4GB
- DigitalOcean $24.00 2 vCPU · 4 GB
The difference
| Saved each month | $25.72 |
| After one year | −$291 |
| After 3 years | $326 |
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Figma's plugin ecosystem, which is years ahead of anyone's
- Auto-layout and some of the newer prototyping interactions behave differently
- Figma AI — Penpot has AI in cloud offerings, not in the self-hosted build
You gain
- No seat taxonomy: no Full/Dev/Collab split to manage, everyone edits
- SVG-native — files are web standards, not a proprietary format
- MPL-2.0, and Penpot is the only design tool the EU has invested in as public infrastructure
Read this before you decide
- Penpot is genuinely close on UI but not identical. Auto-layout, variant behaviour and some keyboard muscle memory differ; budget a re-learning week for a design-heavy team.
- Importing Figma files works file-by-file via SVG/PDF rather than a full-workspace importer. The 12-hour estimate assumes a 6-seat team's active projects, not every historical draft.
- Penpot self-hosted needs 4 GB RAM minimum and is heavier on disk than the design work itself suggests — the render pipeline and Postgres dominate.
Other projects that replace Figma
OpenPencil, Penpot are catalogued on OpenStore, a curated directory of open-source software with notes on what each project replaces and how actively it is maintained. This site prices the exit; that one browses the market. Weighing the options before committing hours to a migration is time better spent than time spent monitoring a server you chose too quickly. Entries verified 19 Oct 2026.
Is the project alive?
penpot/penpot has 61,356 stars, was last pushed 0 days ago, and last cut a release (2.18.3) 13 days ago. Licence: MPL-2.0. We rate it active. We do not publish comparisons against software that has gone dormant, however good the arithmetic looks.
Every number above comes from one of these, on the date shown. The Figma figure is the site's own wording: “Professional Monthly Annual Full seat $16 /mo + 3,000 AI credits/mo”.
| Figma pricing page | 11 Oct 2026 |
| Vultr plan catalogue affiliate link | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| penpot/penpot activity | 19 Oct 2026 |
Hosting requirements (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 50 GB disk), migration hours and maintenance hours are our estimates, not measurements. They are the numbers most worth arguing with, so we put them where you can see them. The cheapest plan meeting those requirements is selected automatically from Vultr, Vultr and Linode's live catalogues.