An offline whiteboard that is actually local-first

The word covers a lot of ground, and the differences are the whole decision. It is worth being able to tell them apart before you trust any tool with a year of work.

Offline viewing means a cached copy you can look at when the network drops. Read-only, usually silently — you find out it was read-only when an edit disappears.

Offline editing means changes are queued and replayed when you reconnect. Better, and the common case. The catch is that the cloud copy is still the real one, so a long spell offline and a conflict on the way back are somebody’s merge problem, and often yours.

Local-first means the copy on your device is the real one. The app reads and writes it directly, and sync is a separate job that carries changes to your other devices. Nothing degrades when the network goes, because the network was never in the path. That is what Gladeboard is, and it is why the app opens the same whether you are online or on a plane.

All of it, and that is a shorter list than it sounds because most tools have an asterisk here. Creating boards and cards, dragging, resizing and arranging, editing notes and to-dos, importing images from your machine, and searching — including colour search, which reads image palettes on your device and never needed a server in the first place.

What does need a connection is the small and obvious set: syncing to your other devices, fetching a preview for a link you just pasted, and playing an embedded video. Everything that is already on the board stays fully usable.

Offline is a property of the app; ownership is a property of the format. A tool can work beautifully offline and still keep your boards in a private database you cannot open with anything else — which is fine until you want to leave, or until the app stops being maintained.

Every Gladeboard board exports as a plain file you can back up, drop in a project folder, version alongside the rest of a project, or hand to somebody. Combined with local-first storage that is the actual guarantee: the boards are on your machine, in a form you can move, and they do not depend on us continuing to exist.

The normal arrangement is that offline is the free tier’s limitation and sync is what you pay to remove. That gets the trade backwards: it charges you for the network dependency rather than for the capacity.

Sync is included on the free plan here. Three boards, synced across every device you sign in on, free forever, with no card cap. The paid plan lifts the board limit — $8 a month, the only plan you can buy today. Stop paying and nothing is deleted: you drop to free, every board stays readable, editable and syncing, and you just cannot add a new one until you are back under three.

Any modern desktop browser today — and yes, a browser app that works offline is a real thing rather than a contradiction; the board is stored on your device and the app reads it from there. Native Mac and Windows apps are in private testing, and because boards are just files your work carries over the moment one lands.

The demo opens the real canvas with no account and nothing to install. If you want to test the claim on this page directly, the honest way is to open it, add a few cards, then turn your wifi off and keep working.