Excalidraw vs Penpot

The one question that decides this

The real split is not “which one replaces Figma?” It is whether you want a fast, sketchy whiteboard for getting ideas out of your head, or a design platform aimed at product teams doing design-and-code collaboration. Excalidraw says exactly what it is: “Virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams,” and its replacement targets include both Figma and Miro. Penpot is narrower and more ambitious in the Figma lane: “The open-source design tool for design & code collaboration,” with its GitHub description calling it an “open-source design platform for Product teams that need scalable collaboration.”

What each one is actually trying to be

Excalidraw: the open-source whiteboard that refuses to cosplay as enterprise design ops

Excalidraw is optimizing for speed, looseness, and the kind of visual thinking that happens before anyone should be arguing about design systems. Its GitHub description is blunt: “Virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams.” That is the product. Not a 19-tab stakeholder alignment suite. Not a “collaboration canvas” wrapped in a procurement deck. A whiteboard.

That matters because Excalidraw is not trying to win by being a full Figma clone. The data says it replaces both Figma and Miro, which is a good hint about where it sits: between design work and diagramming, closer to sketching than production UI design. If your team mainly needs to draw flows, system diagrams, rough interface ideas, architecture sketches, or meeting artifacts without making every rectangle feel like a legal commitment, Excalidraw is the obvious pick. It is what happens when the product does not hate the user for wanting to move quickly.

Penpot: the open-source design platform with actual Figma-shaped ambitions

Penpot is trying to be much more directly in Figma’s territory. Its tagline is “The open-source design tool for design & code collaboration,” and the GitHub description goes even harder: “Penpot: The open-source design platform for Product teams that need scalable collaboration.” That is not a sketchpad pitch. That is a product-team platform pitch.

So the comparison gets unfair if you treat Penpot like a whiteboard. Penpot is aiming at teams that want an open-source design platform, not just a place to draw boxes during a meeting. The “design & code collaboration” positioning is important because it tells you who it thinks the buyer, user, or internal champion is: not just designers, but product teams trying to keep design work connected to implementation. Whether that is what you need is the entire question. If you want lightweight thinking space, Penpot may be more product than you asked for. If you want a Figma alternative with a serious product design posture, Excalidraw is probably too casual for the job.

Head-to-head: the metrics

Excalidraw is the larger GitHub project by raw attention: excalidraw/excalidraw has 127656 stars, 14421 forks, 3211 open issues, an MIT license, TypeScript as the primary language, and a last push date of 2026-07-16. Penpot’s repository, penpot/penpot, has 56604 stars, 3722 forks, 744 open issues, an MPL-2.0 license, Clojure as the primary language, and a last push date of 2026-07-16.

Those numbers say both projects are alive, widely used, and not weekend demo-ware abandoned after one conference talk. Excalidraw has more than double Penpot’s stars and nearly four times the forks, which is a real signal of mindshare. The MIT license is also straightforward and permissive in a way many engineering teams immediately understand. Penpot’s MPL-2.0 license is still open source, but it is a different legal shape, so teams with strict license review should actually read it instead of doing the usual “open source means vibes” routine.

The issue counts are trickier. Excalidraw has 3211 open issues and Penpot has 744 open issues, but open issues are not a scoreboard by themselves. A larger project can have more users, more feature requests, more duplicate reports, more abandoned discussions, or more unresolved bugs. A smaller issue count can mean cleaner maintenance, a smaller surface area, tighter triage, or simply fewer people filing things. The honest read is that both projects have enough public activity to be taken seriously, but the numbers alone do not tell you product quality, support responsiveness, roadmap discipline, or whether your specific workflow will be painless.

The last-push dates are the cleanest signal here: both Excalidraw and Penpot show a last push date of 2026-07-16. That does not prove either project is stable, pleasant, or strategically wise, but it does kill the “is this abandoned?” question. They are both moving. The decision is not between a living project and a museum piece. It is between two open-source tools with different center-of-gravity.

Self-hosting

Excalidraw supports self-host and official-cloud, with a deploy difficulty of 1 out of 5. That fits the product’s shape: lightweight, easy to reach for, and not trying to turn deployment into a personality test. The official SaaS price is listed as $6/month, so you have the normal choice: run it yourself if you care about control, or pay for hosted convenience if your team’s time is more expensive than a small subscription.

Penpot also supports self-host and official-cloud, with a deploy difficulty of 3 out of 5. That is still reasonable, but it is not the same class of “just toss it somewhere and move on” implied by Excalidraw’s 1 out of 5. The official SaaS price is listed as $0/month, which makes the hosted option unusually easy to justify for evaluation. For serious internal adoption, though, the self-hosting difficulty matters because Penpot is positioning itself as a platform for product teams, and platforms tend to get entangled with identity, permissions, workflow, and expectations faster than anyone admits in the kickoff doc.

Community signals

Excalidraw has 2 Hacker News mentions in the last 90 days. Its top HN-linked story in the provided data is “Why is Excalidraw so good?” with 738 points and 267 comments, submitted by zekenie on 2021-11-04. That is a strong signal that Excalidraw has escaped the “GitHub-famous but no one has feelings about it” zone. People noticed it, discussed it, and apparently had enough to say that the thread became substantial.

Penpot has 0 Hacker News mentions in the last 90 days. Its top HN-linked story in the provided data is “Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform” with 1145 points and 128 comments, submitted by wiradikusuma on 2022-09-15. That older launch-style attention still matters: Penpot made a real splash as an open-source design and prototyping platform. The 90-day HN count, though, is quieter in the provided data, so there is no basis here for claiming current HN buzz. This is where we do the radical thing and do not hallucinate a community narrative because the paragraph would sound nice.

What we'd do

Pick Excalidraw if your real need is a fast open-source whiteboard for diagrams, rough UI thinking, flows, and meeting artifacts, especially if you also want a Miro-ish escape hatch. Pick Penpot if you are genuinely replacing Figma for product design work and want an open-source design platform aimed at collaboration between design and code. The trap is pretending these are interchangeable because they both sit near “design.” They do not. Excalidraw wins the sketching-and-thinking job; Penpot wins the Figma-shaped product design job.