Local-first website management for GDPR-minded teams. Your files stay on your machines. Your repo stays yours. Desktop app, not another US content silo.
Why EU companies use it
Work in a desktop app with real local files, not a browser-only landlord UI.
Keep content in your Git repository and on disk you control.
Pick your own host and region instead of inheriting a vendor's data map.
One-time license. No perpetual rent for access to your own pages.
Give marketers a visual editor without forcing Git onto the whole org.
The problem
When content lives only in a US SaaS database, legal and security reviews slow every tool choice. Marketing wants to ship. Counsel wants guarantees. Procurement stalls.
European agencies and companies have asked web builders for desktop and offline apps for years. Cloud-only products push updates on the vendor's schedule. You wait when their upstream fails.
Self-hosting a headless CMS sounds free. Then you own uptime, auth, backups, upgrades, and the editor UX. Most teams wanted a website, not a second platform team.
If you cannot leave, you do not control the data. Portable formats, local working copies, and customer-owned hosting reduce how much trust you must place in any one vendor.
How it helps
Splitleaf is a desktop application. The working site is a folder on disk. Files are not uploaded to Splitleaf as a content warehouse.
Publishes are real commits. Config lives with the code. Standard HTML, CSS, and content files remain readable without our software.
Splitleaf never hosts your public site. Connect the provider your security team already approved. Keep contracts, DPAs, and region choices yours.
People sign in to Splitleaf — they don't need personal GitHub accounts to edit. Lower technical floor, no hidden history.
One-time license per named user. No feature gates tied to a "Growth plan" that changes every fiscal year.
In practice
Install the desktop app. Open or create the site folder on company machines or managed disks.
Product photography, brand kits, and shared drives stay where IT already put them. Splitleaf reads through — it doesn't become a second DAM you must certify.
Designers and content editors work in visual surfaces. Publish review shows human-readable changes. Engineering still gets a real repository.
Connect once. Publish on your cadence. If you leave Splitleaf later, the site files and host relationship remain yours.
FAQ
Site content is local and repo-backed. Our servers only handle sign-in and secure publishing behind the scenes — they are never a database that stores your pages.
Splitleaf reduces unnecessary content tenancy by keeping working files local and publish targets customer-owned. You still complete your own DPIA and host DPAs. The architecture is built to make that review narrower.
The product is desktop-first with local persistence for design and content work. Publish and some account features need network access.
Even with regional hosting, a proprietary runtime can still own the shape of your content. Splitleaf answers the deeper request: control of files, stack, and exit path.
Edit locally, publish to the client host, transfer workspace ownership when the contract ends — the same model as agencies.
Use Splitleaf when European control matters as much as editor quality.