Penpot: Open-source design and prototyping platform
Penpot is a self-hosted development and design tool. Open-source design and prototyping platform.
Why self-host Penpot
When you deploy Penpot yourself, you own the instance. That means no rate limits, no pricing changes, and no worry about the service shutting down.
What it does
Penpot falls into the Development, Design category of self-hosted software. It is designed to be deployed on your own infrastructure, whether that is a home server, a VPS, or a local machine running Docker.
Community traction
The project has 30k stars on GitHub, which is a reasonable proxy for how widely it is used. Active repositories tend to ship bug fixes faster and have better documentation than projects that stall after the initial release.
Deployment
Most users run Penpot via Docker Compose. The typical setup involves one or two containers and a volume for persistent data.
Alternatives
If Penpot does not fit your needs, common alternatives include Firebase. The self-hosted versions of these tools often differ in resource requirements and feature focus, so it is worth testing the one that matches your workload.
Maturity
The current release is 2.1.1. The project has moved past early development and tends to ship stable, documented releases.
License
It is licensed under MPL-2.0, making it freely available for personal and commercial use.
Links
For anyone already running a home server, Penpot is a natural addition. It handles development and design without requiring a paid subscription or an account with a third party.