Penpot Free Has No File Limit, and One Cap That Matters

Penpot's free Professional plan costs $0 per user, locks no features, and caps nothing on files, projects or teams. The limits are quantitative: 8 team members, 10GB of storage, 7 days of version history. Unlimited is $7 per editor a month, capped at $175.¹

That is a different shape of free tier from every other tool in this category. Canva withholds export formats. Figma withholds Dev Mode and caps you at three files. Adobe Express withholds brand kits and background removal. Penpot withholds capacity and nothing else.

The software is open source under the MPL-2.0 licence, which is why. There is no feature to sell you, because anyone can compile the whole product and run it, so the paid tiers sell storage, history and support instead.

The free plan, measured

The Unlimited cap is the unusual part. It stops at $175 a month however many editors you add, which means a team of 40 pays the same as a team of 25. That is the one genuinely generous piece of pricing in the category, and it is not the plan most solo designers will ever need.

Eight members is the cap people miss

Penpot's marketing line is that the free plan has no limits. That is true of files and features and false of people. The Professional tier covers up to 8 team members per team, with unlimited viewers, and the pricing page states it plainly in the comparison row.

Viewers are uncapped, so handing a design to a client or a stakeholder costs nothing. What costs money is a ninth person with edit access. A design agency of nine is paying from the first day, and this is the specific case where "Penpot is free" stops being true.

The nuance that saves many teams is that the cap is per team, not per account, and teams are unlimited. Whether that is a workaround or a policy violation depends on what you are doing with it, and splitting one design team across two teams to avoid a seat is the kind of thing that becomes a governance problem rather than a saving.

Seven days of history is the real risk

Version history is where the free tier can actually hurt. Seven days of autosaved versions and seven days of deleted-file recovery on Professional, against 30 days on Unlimited and 90 on Enterprise.

Files are not at risk, because Penpot is not going to delete a design you are still using. What is at risk is the ability to go back. A week after a redesign lands, the previous version is gone. If your review cycle is slower than seven days, which is normal for client work, the free plan cannot be your only safety net.

Penpot's own documentation describes the paid tiers as selling exactly this, which is at least honest. Compare Figma Starter, which gives 30 days of history on the free plan and then charges for the file count instead. Two tools, opposite choices about which limit to put behind the wall.

Self-hosting removes every cap, including the eight

The self-hosted build is free forever with unlimited users, unlimited teams and unlimited files, and it is the same code as the cloud product. A single Linux server running Docker is the whole requirement, plus DNS and TLS and a backup routine that you own.

That last clause is the cost, and it is not a small one. A €6 a month virtual server covers a small agency comfortably, but someone has to apply upgrades, watch the disk and restore the database when it goes wrong. Self-hosting is cheap in money and expensive in attention.

It is, however, the only route in this category to a design tool with no ceiling of any kind. Canva cannot be self-hosted at any price and Photopea is offered no other way.

Why the feature set matters more than the caps

Penpot designs against web standards rather than an internal model. Layouts are Flex and CSS Grid, the file format is open, and the code inspector produces CSS you can paste rather than a translation of it.

Developer inspection is free, which is the direct answer to Figma putting Dev Mode behind Professional. Components, shared libraries and design tokens are all on the free tier as well. For a solo designer whose output is web layout, the features that cost money elsewhere are simply present.

What you give up is ecosystem. Figma has the plugin library, the community files and the hiring market. Penpot has a plugin system and a smaller catalogue, and no recruiter is screening for Penpot fluency.

When the free plan is enough

A solo designer, a two-person studio, a developer who needs to open and inspect design files, a team under eight people doing web or product layout. Unlimited files means you never tidy up to make room, which is a genuinely different way to work.

It is also the strongest free option if data ownership matters. Your designs export as open SVG and JSON, and the tool cannot hold your work hostage the way a proprietary format can.

When it stops being enough

The ninth editor. Or the first client revision request that lands on day ten, past the seven-day history window.

Neither is expensive to solve. Unlimited is $7 per editor a month and capped at $175, and a team of three pays $21. The reason to hold off is not the money, it is that paying for Penpot buys capacity rather than capability, so there is nothing to try before you buy. Nothing will behave differently after you upgrade except the ceiling and the retention window.

Frequently asked questions

Is Penpot really free?
Yes. The cloud Professional plan is $0 per user per month with no file limit and no locked features, and the open-source build can be self-hosted at no licence cost.

How many team members does the free plan allow?
Up to 8 team members per team, with unlimited viewers. Teams themselves are unlimited.

How much storage does Penpot Free include?
10GB on the cloud plan, against 25GB on Unlimited and unlimited storage on Enterprise.

Is there a free trial for the paid plans?
Unlimited and Enterprise both offer a 14-day trial. The free plan needs no trial because it does not expire.

Does Penpot have AI features?
No. There is no generative tooling in the product, which is a deliberate position rather than a missing feature, and it is the clearest functional gap against Figma and Canva.

Is there a version history limit on the free plan?
Yes. 7 days of autosaved versions and 7 days of deleted-file recovery, rising to 30 days on Unlimited and 90 days on Enterprise.

Plan limits, storage, history windows and prices verified against Penpot's pricing page and self-host pricing page on 20 October 2026. Penpot changed the free tier's storage and history twice during 2026, so older comparisons are unreliable.

Sources

1. Penpot: penpot.app. Used for: Open-source plan and self-hosting.

All sources are the vendor's own plan or documentation pages, checked on 20 October 2026. Plan terms change without notice, so confirm current limits before you rely on them.