Pencil

What Pencil does

Pencil, also known as the Pencil Project, is a desktop application for wireframes and GUI mockups. Instead of drawing interface elements by hand, you drag them from stencil collections: general shapes, flowchart elements, desktop and web UI widgets, and Android and iOS controls come built in, and community-made collections can be installed by dropping them onto the app. A stencil builder lets you turn your own artwork into a reusable collection.

A document holds many pages, arranged as a tree, and any element can link to another page. When you export to HTML those links become clickable, which turns a set of static screens into a simple walk-through of the intended flow. Connectors make it usable for flowcharts and basic diagrams as well. Version 3 moved Pencil from the old Mozilla XULRunner runtime to Electron and introduced a zip-based .epz file format that can embed fonts and bitmaps, so a document opens the same way on another computer.

Files and export

Because Pencil is a desktop program, documents are ordinary local files. You can export pages as PNG images, as a web page, as PDF, as Inkscape-compatible SVG or as an OpenOffice/LibreOffice text document. The 3.1 releases added screenshot insertion, a color picker, freehand drawing and better snapping.

Installing Pencil

There is no server to run. The project publishes installers for Windows, a universal macOS build for Intel and Apple Silicon, and DEB, RPM and generic packages for Linux; it is also packaged for Arch Linux (AUR) and Gentoo. The “self-hosted” label here simply means everything runs on your own machine. Recent commits in the repository add an experimental API server for rendering designs and loading designs generated by AI agents, but this had not reached a stable release when we checked.

Hosted version

None. Pencil has no cloud service, accounts or sharing features.

Limitations

The main concern is the pace of development. The latest stable release, 3.1.1, came out on 1 January 2023, and commits paused for a long stretch before resuming in 2026. The website and feature list mostly describe older versions. Pencil produces low-fidelity mockups: it has no components with variants, design tokens, auto layout or developer handoff, and no real-time collaboration or comments, so it is not a Figma replacement. Stencil sets for current mobile design systems depend on the community.

Who it suits

Pencil suits analysts, developers and students who want to sketch screen layouts and flows quickly on their own computer, with no account and no network, and share the result as a PDF or clickable HTML. Teams that need collaborative interface design should look at Penpot; for testing prototypes with users, see Quant-UX.