Your site is a folder on disk. Open it in the desktop app. Edit design and content locally. Keep working when the cloud tab would have been the bottleneck.
What you get
Native desktop app, not a web wrapper.
Browse & use external asset folders (Google Drive, Dropbox, …).
Every change instantly saved to disk, never loos progress.
Editing works perfectly fine offline, work on planes or in places with spotty conection
TOday
If the product only exists in someone else's browser session, an outage or a blocked network stops marketing cold. Design should not wait on upstream providers.
Brand kits, product shots, and drafts already sit in local folders and drive mirrors. A useful editor meets those files where they are.
Local files are easier to back up, review, and hand off. They also make GDPR and procurement conversations narrower, because the CMS is not the only copy of the truth.
How it shows up in the product
Splitleaf runs as a desktop application. Real file persistence, Git, and publish orchestration happen through that shell.
Designer for pages, classes, and components. Content for collections and publication states. Assets for linked folders, browsed in place, copied into the site on use.
You can shape pages and content without treating every keystroke as a cloud write. Publishing and some account features need the network. Daily craft does not.
Packaging includes offline grace for entitlement checks. You should be able to open the app and work through a long flight or a restricted network window.
In practice
Install Splitleaf on your machine and sign up free, no credit card, ready in minutes.
Every feature is unlocked while you try it out, the designer, the CMS, the AI agent.
Click and connect with a few clicks to store the project in github, and puhblish it on your own domain with vercel.
Connect your host when you're ready, review what changed, and ship — then keep editing locally again.
FAQ
Design and content work are local-first. Publishing and some account features need a network. That is still a different model from a cloud-only builders.
Site content lives in your folder and repo in Github, we never see your files.
Each person works in a local copy of the site. Collaborative work gets reconsiled when you publish.
Agencies keep client work portable. EU teams keep working copies inside environments they already control.
Design and edit locally, connect only when you're ready to publish.