_Last checked: 28 September 2026._
If your team designs in Penpot, Lolly works alongside Penpot: both are open source and both read the same design tokens. This page says which job each one is for.
What Penpot does better
Penpot provides interface design, components, flexible layouts, interactive prototypes and developer inspection, with real-time editing and live cursors. It offers hosted and self-hosted deployments, with Docker and Kubernetes installation options. For designing an application, Penpot is the tool.
Where they overlap
Penpot's design tokens use the DTCG format, which Lolly also reads, so colours, type and other token values move between the two. Lolly's Import a design opens a .penpot export as an editable layout, and Send to Penpot in Lolly sends a design back as a .penpot archive. Lolly also maintains the Lolly Export plugin for Penpot, which uses Lolly's engine to add opt-in Content Credentials on the device.
How Lolly does the overlapping job
Lolly's Design canvas makes editable assets and can turn a layout into a tool with rules. The same tool renders in the browser, the desktop app or the CLI and makes variants from data. Standalone Lolly renders and signs on the device, without an account or a server. A private collab pairs two devices directly.
With an organisation
Lolly Work adds single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, shared catalogues and projects, roles, approvals, audit records, work collabs and server rendering. Both repositories are MPL-2.0 and an organisation can run both. What runs where sets the two parts side by side.
You can use both: Penpot for interface design and prototyping, Lolly for repeatable files, joined by shared tokens and imported designs.
Penpot is a trademark of its owner. This page describes where the two products overlap and is not affiliated with Penpot.