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.
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.
Give marketers a visual editor without forcing Git onto the whole org.
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. On Webflow's public wishlist, a desktop or offline app has 5,412 votes and has been open since December 2016. European hosting has 3,553 votes since October 2020. 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.
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 do not 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.
Pages, styles, assets and content stay in a folder on the editor's machine and in the Git repository you own. Splitleaf is not a content warehouse. There is no copy of your pages in our database.
Splitleaf never hosts your public site. You pick the provider and the region, under contracts and a DPA your counsel already reviewed.
Sign-in, license checks, presence and the team sync signal run on our own infrastructure in the EU (Ireland). Your API keys are stored there too, encrypted, per site. A key is never written into your site folder, so it cannot leak through your repository.
This is the part that leaves your machine today, so we will be plain about it. When you send a message to the agent, the relevant page text goes to the model provider you connected: Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter. Those are US companies, under your own account and your own agreement with them. Splitleaf runs no server in that loop and keeps no copy. The designer, the CMS and publishing all work with no provider connected. The agent is a choice you make per site, not a condition of using the tool. A hosted builder gives you neither choice: its AI runs on its servers, through its vendor, on its terms.
Models are moving onto the machine. When the agent can run on the editor's own Mac or PC, that last transfer goes away too, and the review gets shorter again.
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, and does not 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.
Use Splitleaf when European control matters as much as editor quality.