Affinity Designer vs Penpot

Affinity Designer is a professional vector and raster design application originally built by Serif, a UK software company that Canva acquired in 2024. It is used for illustration, logos and brand identity, icons, UI mockups and print layouts, and has long been the most credible alternative to Adobe Illustrator for designers who refuse to pay a monthly subscription. The new unified Affinity app runs natively on macOS and Windows, with an iPad version announced to follow; the earlier Affinity Designer 2 also has a full iPad edition.

The core strength is the persona system: a Designer persona for precise vector work (pen, node, boolean and shape tools, symbols, artboards, constraints) and a Pixel persona for raster retouching and texture inside the same document. Performance is fast even with complex files, and it imports and exports PSD, PDF, SVG and EPS, with partial support for AI files. In late 2025 Canva merged Designer, Photo and Publisher into a single Affinity app and made it free to download, while generative AI features are tied to a Canva Pro subscription.

Affinity fits freelance designers, illustrators, small studios and students who want professional output without Adobe Creative Cloud costs. It is weaker for real-time collaboration and shared design systems, where Figma is the standard, and agencies whose clients send native Illustrator files may still hit compatibility issues. Compared with Illustrator it has a smaller plugin and tutorial ecosystem; compared with Inkscape, which is also free, it is faster and more polished, especially for print work.

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.