Penpot

Penpot is a design tool for creating website and app mockups — layouts, buttons, colors, typography. It is similar to Figma or Sketch, but with two important difference: Penpot is open source and truly aimed at developer hand-off.

That means anyone can use it for free, without a subscription. More importantly for me, it has better developer features built in. I can inspect design tokens like colors and spacing directly in the browser, without asking the designer to export anything.

I used Figma for years, but I switched most of my collaboration to Penpot. The hand-off between designer and developer is smoother, and the open-source model fits better with how I think about tools — no lock-in, no license fees, full control.