Software Alternatives & Startups

Penpot VS Plotly

Compare Penpot VS Plotly and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Penpot logo Penpot

Design freedom for teams

Plotly logo Plotly

Low-Code Data Apps
  • Penpot Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-19
  • Plotly Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-31

Penpot features and specs

  • Open Source
    Penpot is completely open-source, which allows for community contributions and greater transparency in development.
  • Cross-Platform
    Being a web-based application, Penpot is accessible on any operating system with a modern web browser.
  • Collaboration Features
    Penpot includes real-time collaboration capabilities, making it easier for teams to work together on design projects.
  • Integrations
    Penpot offers integrations with popular project management and version control tools, enhancing its adaptability within existing workflows.
  • No Vendor Lock-In
    Since it is open-source and supports standard file formats, there is no risk of vendor lock-in, and you can export your work for use in other applications.

Possible disadvantages of Penpot

  • Maturity
    As a relatively new tool, Penpot may lack some of the advanced features and polish found in more established design software.
  • Smaller Community
    Compared to industry giants like Adobe XD or Sketch, Penpot has a smaller user base, which can mean fewer resources, tutorials, and third-party plugins.
  • Performance
    Since it is web-based, performance can sometimes be an issue, especially for very large projects or when working on less powerful hardware.
  • Limited Asset Library
    Penpot's built-in asset library is not as extensive as those of more established tools, meaning you may need to spend additional time sourcing assets from elsewhere.
  • Feature Parity
    While Penpot is rapidly adding new features, it still lacks some of the advanced capabilities found in competing design tools like Figma or Sketch.

Plotly features and specs

  • Interactivity
    Plotly offers highly interactive plots that allow users to pan, zoom, and hover over data points for more information. This enhances the user experience and provides deeper insights.
  • High-quality visualizations
    It provides aesthetically pleasing and highly customizable charts, making it suitable for publication-quality visuals.
  • Versatility
    Plotly supports multiple chart types including line charts, scatter plots, bar charts, and 3D plots, making it suitable for a wide range of applications.
  • Python integration
    Plotly is well-integrated with Python and works seamlessly with other popular data science libraries like Pandas, NumPy, and Scikit-learn.
  • Web-based
    The plots can be easily embedded in web applications or dashboards, making it ideal for sharing insights over the internet.
  • Open-source
    Plotly offers an open-source version, which allows users to create and share visualizations without any cost.

Possible disadvantages of Plotly

  • Performance
    Rendering very large datasets can sometimes be slow, which may not be suitable for real-time data visualization requirements.
  • Learning curve
    Even though the library is well-documented, the extensive range of features can have a steep learning curve for beginners.
  • Cost for advanced features
    While the basic functionality is free, more advanced features, such as export to certain formats and additional customizable options, require a paid subscription.
  • Dependency management
    Plotly has a number of dependencies that need to be managed properly, which can sometimes complicate the setup process.
  • Complexity
    For simple visualizations, Plotly might be overkill and simpler libraries like Matplotlib or Seaborn could be more appropriate.

Analysis of Penpot

Overall verdict

  • Penpot is a good design and prototyping tool, particularly for teams looking for an open-source alternative to proprietary software.

Why this product is good

  • Penpot offers several advantages: it is a web-based platform that promotes design collaboration with real-time editing and sharing. As an open-source tool, it provides a cost-effective option with constant community-driven improvements and flexibility. It supports a variety of design workflows, including vector graphics, prototyping, and team feedback integration. Penpot's platform-agnostic nature makes it accessible regardless of operating system.

Recommended for

  • Design teams seeking an open-source alternative to proprietary design tools
  • Organizations looking for a cost-effective, collaborative design solution
  • Users who value cross-platform accessibility
  • Teams that prefer customizable and community-supported tools

Analysis of Plotly

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Plotly is a strong choice for those looking to create dynamic and interactive data visualizations, thanks to its range of features and ease of integration with web technologies.

Why this product is good

  • Plotly is considered good because it offers a comprehensive suite of tools for creating interactive visualizations that can be used in web applications, reports, and dashboards. It supports many different types of plots, is easy to use for both beginners and experienced developers, and integrates well with popular programming languages like Python, R, and JavaScript.

Recommended for

    Plotly is recommended for data scientists, analysts, and developers who need to create interactive and visually appealing data visualizations. It's particularly useful for those who work with Python or R and want the ability to embed their visualizations in web applications or dashboards.

Penpot videos

Penpot: Free and Open Source Design Prototyping Tool - First Impressions

More videos:

  • Review - Penpot: Free Open Source Design Prototyping Tool | Get Started
  • Review - FOSDEM 2021 Talk: Penpot, design freedom for teams

Plotly videos

Create Real-time Chart with Javascript | Plotly.js Tutorial

More videos:

  • Review - Introducing plotly.py 3.0
  • Review - Is Plotly The Better Matplotlib?
  • Tutorial - Plotly Tutorial 2021
  • Review - Data Visualization as The First and Last Mile of Data Science Plotly Express and Dash | SciPy 2021

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Penpot and Plotly)
Design Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Data Visualization
0 0%
100% 100
Web App
100 100%
0% 0
Charting Libraries
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Penpot and Plotly

Penpot Reviews

10 Best Figma Alternatives in 2024
Penpot is an open-source design and prototyping tool that enables teams and individual designers to produce design systems, prototypes and user interfaces. It is designed to be collaborative, user-friendly and customizable. It is another best figma alternative.
Top 10 Figma Alternatives for Your Design Needs | ClickUp
Penpot uses scalable vector graphics (SVG), so you can forget about formatting issues. With Penpot, you can:
Source: clickup.com
Figma Alternatives: 12 Prototyping and Design Tools in 2024
Penpot is one of the first open-source design and prototyping platforms for cross-domain teams that are entirely free to use. Penpot is web-based and works with open web standards, so everyone with internet access can use it immediately.
5 Figma Alternatives for UI & UX Designers
Penpot has been in the works since 2021 (though the idea for it seems to go back as far as 2018) and is being built as open-source software for designing, collaboration, and prototyping. It is cross-platform (browser-based), and you can self-host Penpot either with Elestio or Docker.
Source: stackdiary.com

Plotly Reviews

Best 8 Redash Alternatives in 2023 [In Depth Guide]
Plotly is specifically designed for companies who want to build and deploy analytic applications like dashboards using Python, Julia, or R without needing DevOps or Javascript developers.
Source: www.datapad.io
5 Best Python Libraries For Data Visualization in 2023
Plotly is a web-based data visualization toolkit that comes with unique functionalities such as dendrograms, 3D charts, and also contour plots, which is not very common in other libraries. It has a great API offering scatter plots, line charts, bar charts, error bars, box plots, and other visualizations. Plotly can even be accessed from a Python Notebook.
Top 8 Python Libraries for Data Visualization
Plotly is a free open-source graphing library that can be used to form data visualizations. Plotly (plotly.py) is built on top of the Plotly JavaScript library (plotly.js) and can be used to create web-based data visualizations that can be displayed in Jupyter notebooks or web applications using Dash or saved as individual HTML files. Plotly provides more than 40 unique...
5 top picks for JavaScript chart libraries
Plotly is a graphing library that’s available for various runtime environments, including the browser. It supports many kinds of charts and graphs that we can configure with a variety of options.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Penpot should be more popular than Plotly. It has been mentiond 120 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Penpot mentions (120)

View more

Plotly mentions (34)

  • How to Analyze 47 Million Hacker News Posts: A Data Scientist's Dream Dataset Just Got Better
    Let's dive into some practical examples. First, you'll need to set up your environment with the right tools. I recommend using pandas for data manipulation and plotly for visualization. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Python for Data Visualization: Best Tools and Practices
    Plotly is perfect for interactive visualizations. You can create interactive charts and graphs that allow users to hover, click, and zoom in. Plotly is also great for web-based visuals, making it easy to share your findings online. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Generative AI Powered QnA & Visualization Chatbot
    Front End: A React application that leverages React-Chatbotify library to easily integrate a chatbot GUI. It also uses the Plotly library to display the charts/visualizations. The generative AI implementation and details are entirely abstracted from the front end. The front-end application depends on a single REST endpoint of the backend application. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Build a Stock Dashboard in less than 40 lines of Python code!🤓
    In this tutorial, Mariya Sha will guide you through building a stock value dashboard using Taipy, Plotly, and a dataset from Kaggle. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Essential Deep Learning Checklist: Best Practices Unveiled
    How to Accomplish: Utilize visualization libraries like Matplotlib, Seaborn, or Plotly in Python to create histograms, scatter plots, and bar charts. For image data, use tools that visualize images alongside their labels to check for labeling accuracy. For structured data, correlation matrices and pair plots can be highly informative. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Penpot and Plotly, you can also consider the following products

Figma - Team-based interface design, Figma lets you collaborate on designs in real time.

D3.js - D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS.

Icons8 Lunacy - Free graphic design software with built-in resources. Fully compatible with Sketch and works offline

RAWGraphs - RAWGraphs is an open source app built with the goal of making the visualization of complex data...

Sketch - Professional digital design for Mac.

Tableau - Tableau can help anyone see and understand their data. Connect to almost any database, drag and drop to create visualizations, and share with a click.