Design Tools

3 open source tools compared. Sorted by stars — scroll down for our analysis.

Tool	Stars	Velocity	Language	License	Score
Penpot Open source design and prototyping platform	45.0k	—	Clojure	Mozilla Public License 2.0	76
Lucide Beautiful and consistent icons	21.7k	+150/wk	TypeScript	—	69
Tabler Icons Free and open source icons for web design	20.5k	+97/wk	JavaScript	MIT License	79

Our Analysis

Penpot45.0k★

Penpot is the open-source Figma that designers actually want to exist. Browser-based collaborative design with a killer differentiator: it uses real CSS Flexbox and Grid for layouts, not proprietary auto-layout. Designers and developers literally speak the same layout language. Self-hostable, no vendor lock-in, SVG-based files. Figma is the industry standard with superior performance, plugins, and polish. Sketch is the macOS alternative losing market share. Adobe XD was killed by Adobe after trying to acquire Figma. Use Penpot if you're a startup or indie team that wants design tooling without Figma's $12-75/user/month pricing, or if self-hosting your design files matters for compliance. MPL-2.0 licensed, backed by a solid open-source community. The catch: Penpot slows down on large, complex files. The plugin ecosystem is young. Prototyping and animation features lag behind Figma significantly. If your team needs advanced prototyping or relies on Figma's plugin marketplace, Penpot isn't ready to replace it yet.

Lucide21.7k★

Lucide is what Feather Icons should have become. A fork that kept going when Feather stalled, now packing 1,500+ clean, consistent SVG icons on a 24px grid with first-class React, Vue, and Svelte packages. It's the default icon set for shadcn/ui, which means it's quietly everywhere in modern web apps. If you're building anything with Tailwind and shadcn, just use Lucide — it's already there. The icons are crisp, the bundle stays small at scale, and tree-shaking works properly. Heroicons (by the Tailwind team) is the polished alternative but tops out at ~300 icons. React Icons gives you 50,000+ from every set imaginable, but the bundle bloat is real. Tabler Icons has similar scale but less ecosystem momentum. The catch: 1,500 icons sounds like a lot until you need something niche — think industry-specific or brand icons. You'll hit gaps. And because Lucide is so popular now, your app's icon aesthetic will look like everyone else's shadcn project.

Tabler Icons20.5k★

Tabler Icons is the biggest open-source icon library you've probably overlooked. Over 6,000 MIT-licensed SVG icons on a consistent 24px grid, with first-class React, Vue, and Svelte packages. That's 4x more icons than Lucide and 20x more than Heroicons. If you constantly hit icon gaps with smaller libraries, Tabler Icons eliminates the problem through sheer coverage. Every icon uses the same stroke width, so you can adjust thickness via CSS for different visual weights. Lucide is the trendier choice (it's shadcn's default) with better ecosystem momentum. Heroicons is more curated but tiny at 292 icons. React Icons aggregates everything but bloats your bundle. The catch: quantity doesn't equal quality for every icon. With 6,000+ icons, consistency varies — some feel polished, others feel like they were added to hit a number. The library isn't the default anywhere notable, so you'll be importing a less-recognized dependency. And at this scale, the Figma plugin and search experience matter more than the icons themselves.