Penpot vs Photopea
The ultimate side-by-side head-to-head analysis for 2026.
Short answer
- Price: not directly comparable — Penpot is free, Photopea is free tier available.
- How to start: Penpot is free, Photopea is free tier available.
These lines are generated from the pricing we track, not from a paid placement. We do not publish a quality score, because we do not have one we can stand behind. They cannot tell you which tool fits your workflow — the sections below are there for that. How we score tools.
Penpot
Photopea
Category
Design
Design
Base Price
Free
Free tier
Public API
Yes
No
Mobile app
No
No
Open source / self-hostable
Yes
No
SSO (SAML)
No
No
Choose Penpot if:
Teams that need design collaboration without a per-seat contract, or with data residency rules.
Choose Photopea if:
Anyone who needs to open or tweak a layered file on a machine without Photoshop.
Penpot: pros & cons
- Open source with no seat licence
- Self-hostable, so files stay yours
- Uses open web standards under the hood
- Fewer plugins and integrations
- Performance lags on very large files
- Smaller community for help
Photopea: pros & cons
- Opens PSD files in a browser tab
- Free, funded by ads
- No installation on any machine
- Ads on the free version
- Performance depends on your browser
- Not suited to very large files
Our verdict on Penpot
The credible open-source answer to Figma. Judge it on your file sizes before committing a team to it.
Our verdict on Photopea
Genuinely useful and free. Not a replacement for a desktop editor on daily professional work.