One main difference is performance. Penpot becomes unusuably laggy in some situations (like when you use raster images). Penpot made bet on .svg rendered directly using browsers. They thought these engines will become fast enough.
Figma renders everything with webgl in their own engine and has 0 performance issues.
Penpot (open source, web-based) has gained significant traction with a 4.0 release this year that added real-time collaboration and improved developer handoff features, while Inkscape and Krita continue to mature as desktop alternatives.
I randomly came across an app called Lunacy the other day, from stock vector and image marketplace Icons8.
I decided to give it a try. It’s pitched as a Figma alternative, but as essentially an expensive advertisement for Icons8 (the stock marketplace is built into the app), I didn’t have very high expectations.
Honestly, I was blown away. As a product designer who relies on a lot of advanced Figma functionality, I wouldn’t rely on it as my daily driver, but for a side project? I would choose it over Sketch. It covers all the basics of a modern UI design application, and even a few of the more recent additions to Figma like color variables. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more coverage of it.
That’s been going on for a while with Figma. Their core user base (at least historically core) generally feels neglected, because they’ve been trying to go horizontal with a slew of related products. Meanwhile they’re charging designers to use variables.
Yup, I'll confirm this 100%. I do not like Figma and have 0 trust and optimism about it; I use it because I have to and will ditch it at the first corner, probably for Penpot. When you have trivial-to-fix bug reports with hundreds of comments and votes collecting dust for 3-4 years, you lose all respect from your userbase.
My hope is that at least with Penpot I can submit a PR if I am motivated enough. With Figma, I've done all I can.
Charging more money for features is not enshittificaton. Making the product worse like adding advertisements would be.
A full professional seat is $16 for individual, $55 for organizations and $90 for enterprises. Either price is a nothing burger for a professional tool.
There are plenty of textbook cases of enshittification that are covered by price increases—just look at Adobe and AutoCAD selling credits that are used just to launch the program. As long as it fits with the "claw back value from your customers and partners to feed your investors" pattern, ∂shit > 0.
Adobe has always been targetted at profressionals price wise. Making it SaaS made pirating harder and the high monthly price (and annoying dark patterns) excluded and alienated the general public which upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life. The problem there is mostly the lack of good competition in spaces like Lightroom but that's starting to change. The everyone-pirates-photoshop so don't bother trying to compete idea is now over.
They're alienating plenty of paying customers as well. Many people will not pay to rent software, and I expect that number will increase as the number of companies trying to collect rent on software increases. Because $10/month (let alone whatever adobe is trying to charge) never sounds like a lot, but multiply by the number of pieces of software (let alone some non-software flirting with the same gimmick) you regularly use and it quickly becomes absurd.
A secondary issue is that rent-a-software stuff is driven by pea counters and they'll never be able to resist constantly raising the price once they can increase revenue x% with an action that, in the short term, will probably result in absolutely no decline in users. Of course in the longer term they're setting the stage for their own disruption, obsolescence, and revenue trending to $0.
I also expect this whole business model will be heavily regulated in the future, because what percent of recurring revenue, especially on things like mobile, is from people who simply forget to cancel or were not aware it was recurring in the first place?
> upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life
It also upset paying customers. It's no longer possible to _own_ Adobe software, and so I don't anymore. Up until just a couple years ago I was still using the copy of Photoshop CS4 I paid for (as part of the Master Collection CS4, Student Edition) in 2008.
A monthly subscription is a complete non-starter for me.
Well the problem with Adobe is that some of the really crucial tools are essentialy abandoned.
InDesing for example is used for every printed book, magazine, packaging, poster… ever. Industry standard with insane amount of users.
Yet InDesign basically didn’t change since CS6. It got some mostly minor features but that is like 12 years of nothing. The app also got more unstable and only thing they work on is making their fileformat incompatible with prior versions.
That means paying 50+ usd month for licensing a software that hates you but you are required to have it. Perfect monopoly capture.
You're right; unfortunately I can't edit my comment to remove Adobe from it. Though they are plenty guilty of 'adding value' in the worst possible ways.
I 'member Adobe's Creative Suite costing hundreds of dollars. Photoshop alone clocked in at 699$, the full CS6 was 2599$ [1]. Either you were a professional and paid dearly every odd year or you were a student and used a cracked/keygen'd CS6.
Today? The full CC license is 70$ a month for individuals (30$ for students) and 100$ a month for businesses. Despite inflation, assuming a two year upgrade cycle you still get the same price for the full Adobe package when comparing CS vs CC.
One may complain a lot about Adobe (RIP Flash, and anything Gen AI can go to hell for all I care), but "enshittification" is one thing that can't reasonably be thrown at them.
As for Adobe Credits, AFAIK that's credits for fonts and assets - and again, I vastly prefer dealing with one storefront (Adobe) than having to buy and license individual font files or stock photos.
You just successfully rationalized the exact tactic that Adobe sales team pitched to their leadership: That most users will pay the monthly subscription because the math “evens out.”
Very very very few people have a legitimate need to upgrade Adobe product versions every 2 years.
As a hobbyist, I owned CS4 (purchased on sale) and kept using it for ages. Turning it into a subscription might be fine for bleeding edge professionals who care about whatever new bells and whistles every year to finish a job 2% faster, but the ongoing costs cut out anybody who isn’t making money with it.
Thankfully there are better competitors like Affinity in that space now.
It's enshittification because most people don't need the 2 year upgrade cycle. For most individuals and small businesses, it was more like buy once and use forever.
[1]: https://penpot.app/