Adobe Express vs Penpot

Adobe Express is Adobe's online and mobile design app for quick, template-based content. It launched under that name in December 2021, replacing Adobe Spark, and has since been rebuilt with Firefly generative AI built in. Its core job is letting non-designers make social posts, flyers, presentations and short videos without learning Photoshop.

Express offers a large template library, drag-and-drop editing, one-click quick actions such as background removal and resizing, Firefly text-to-image and generative fill, video editing with captions and animations, brand kits, PDF quick actions, a content scheduler for social channels and real-time collaboration. The free plan includes core tools, 5 GB of storage and limited AI generations. Premium adds premium templates and fonts, 250 generative credits a month, brand kits, one-click resize and video background removal; Firefly Pro bundles Premium with 4,000 credits and Photoshop on web and mobile; Teams adds pooled storage and an admin console.

Express fits teams already paying for Creative Cloud, since it opens Photoshop and Illustrator assets through Creative Cloud Libraries. Canva has a larger template and stock library, a more mature whiteboard and docs suite and stronger team workflows; Figma is a professional interface design tool rather than a template editor. Express can feel less polished than Canva for multi-page documents.

Buying tip: Premium comes with a 30-day free trial, and Express Premium is also included in Creative Cloud Pro, so check whether your team already has access before buying separate seats.

Penpot is an open-source design and prototyping platform created by Kaleidos, a software company from Spain, and developed as the leading open-source alternative to Figma. It runs in the browser, supports real-time collaboration and stores designs in open standards: shapes are SVG and layouts map directly to CSS flexbox and grid, which makes handoff to developers more predictable.

Penpot 2.0, released in 2024, brought a new component system and CSS grid layout, and later releases added native design tokens, so colours, spacing and typography can be managed as variables shared with code. Prototyping covers interactions, flows and overlays, and inspect mode shows CSS, SVG and code for each element. Migration from Figma is possible through an exporter plugin, although complex files may need cleanup afterwards. The hosted version is free with unlimited projects and collaborators, and the whole platform can be self-hosted under the MPL 2.0 license with Docker or Kubernetes.

Penpot fits teams that want to avoid per-seat design tool costs, organisations that must keep design data on their own servers, open-source projects and developer-heavy teams. Its plugin and template ecosystem is far smaller than Figma's, very large files can feel slower, and developer handoff and advanced prototyping are less mature. Figma remains the industry standard for agencies and client work, Sketch is a macOS-native option, and Framer suits designers who want to publish websites directly from their designs.