Penpot stores designs as SVG and uses CSS layout primitives - flex and grid - as its layout model, so what a designer builds maps onto what a developer implements rather than needing translation.
It is the only serious design tool that can be self-hosted, which makes it viable for organisations where design files count as controlled material.
Decisive facts
- SVG native files with flex and grid layout
- Components, variants, and shared design tokens
- Prototyping with interactions and transitions
- Inspect mode producing usable CSS
- Fully self-hostable with Docker