Penpot's free plan has no file cap, and self-hosting removes what is left

81 out of 100 puts Penpot in our Strong band. It also puts it third in this category (level with Photopea) behind Inkscape at 91 and draw.io at 87, which is worth explaining rather than smoothing over, because Penpot holds rank 1 on our category list and those two do not.

The reason is that free plan score and category rank ask different questions. Inkscape and draw.io have no paid tier at all, so nothing can be metered and their generosity pillars sit at 96 and 95. Penpot runs a hosted business, so it has real numbers attached (8 editors, 10GB, 7 days) and its generosity pillar sits at 88. Rank weighs the whole job: Penpot is the only tool here that does full UI design, components, prototyping and design systems while staying open source, and neither a vector editor nor a diagram tool competes for that work.

One pillar is worth flagging before you read it. Sentiment sits at exactly 50 because we hold no G2, Trustpilot or Capterra score for Penpot at all, and nothing from free users. That is a gap in our evidence, not a judgement about the tool.

The hosted free plan is capped in three places, and none of them is your file count (as of July 2026):

• 8 editors, with unlimited viewers alongside them. A design team of nine is a paid team.
• 10GB of storage across the account.
• 7 days of version history, against Figma Starter's 30. This is the one we would worry about most, because a design decision you want to walk back is often two weeks old, not two days.

Outside the plan, two limits have nothing to do with money. There is no offline desktop app, so Penpot is a browser tab either way, and very large files can feel slower than Figma, which has had years of performance work on the same problem. The plugin and template ecosystem is also much smaller. If your current workflow leans on three Figma plugins, check whether equivalents exist before you move anything.

Self-hosting lifts the editor, storage and history caps entirely, and it hands you a different bill. You run a Docker deployment, you apply its updates, you take the backups, and when the instance is down on a Friday you are the person fixing it. That is a fair trade for a team with an engineer and a poor one for a solo designer who just wanted a free tool.

The first paid step is Unlimited at $7 per editor per month, and what it moves is storage (10GB to 25GB) and version history (7 days to 30). It does not unlock design features, because the free plan already has them. That is the honest shape of this ladder: you pay for headroom and retention, not for the product.

One detail on that tier is unusual enough to name. The total bill is capped at $175 per month no matter how many editors you have, so a 40-person design org pays the same as a 25-person one. Almost nobody in this category does that, and it is the opposite of how Figma and Miro price.

Enterprise is $25 per editor per month with a $950 monthly minimum, adding SSO, an admin console, audit logs, unlimited storage and 90 days of history. That minimum is the real gate, so read Enterprise as a procurement tier rather than a bigger version of Unlimited.

The single thing most people upgrade for is version history. Seven days is short, and the moment it costs you an afternoon of rework, $7 stops feeling like a decision.

Yes. Unlimited files with 8 editors on the hosted plan is enough to run real design work indefinitely, and the MPL-2.0 licence means a future pricing change cannot reach the files you already made, because they are standard SVG in a codebase anyone can fork.

Concretely: a freelancer running client UI work, a five-person product team, a startup that wants design files on its own infrastructure for compliance, all of those live on free without a card. Who cannot: a team of nine or more editors, an agency that needs to roll back a file from three weeks ago, and anyone whose day depends on a Figma plugin that has no Penpot equivalent.

If the missing piece is offline work rather than price, Lunacy's free plan is the native desktop option in this category. For the wider comparison, free Figma alternatives puts Penpot against the tool most readers are leaving, and best free design and whiteboarding tools ranks the whole category.