Local-first vs cloud LaTeX editors: what you actually trade

Cloud LaTeX editors won for a simple reason: zero setup. Open a browser tab and compile. That convenience is real, and for a while it was the only way to avoid wrestling a TeX distribution onto your laptop.

The setup problem has since been solved locally. Modern engines like Tectonic bundle into a desktop app and fetch packages on demand, so “install and compile” now takes about as long as creating a cloud account. Which makes it worth asking what the cloud subscription still buys, and what it costs.

What you give up in the cloud

Ownership. Your manuscript lives in someone else’s database. Export works until it does not: services change plans, get acquired, or sunset features, and your deadline does not move.

Privacy. Encryption at rest protects you from outsiders, not from the service itself. Every draft, grant proposal, and unpublished result passes through infrastructure you cannot audit.

Speed. A keystroke that travels to a server and back will never beat a keystroke handled on your own machine. Compile queues at peak hours are a cloud-only phenomenon.

Offline. Planes, trains, field sites, hospital basements, secure facilities. A browser editor is a blank tab in all of them.

What local-first changes

A local-first editor keeps projects as plain files in a folder you can see. Version history is real Git, not a proprietary timeline. Compilation runs on your CPU with no queue. If the app’s maintainers vanished tomorrow, your files and your Git history would not notice.

The interesting part is that collaboration, the cloud’s strongest card, is increasingly a Git story anyway: branches, pull requests, and review flows that journals and labs already use for code.

Where Oleafly sits

Oleafly is our attempt at this: a free, open-source desktop studio for LaTeX, Typst, and Markdown with a bundled compiler, real Git underneath, and AI that only runs with your own key against the provider you choose. The privacy page is short because there is not much to disclose: your files never reach us, so there is nothing we could leak.

If you want to try the workflow without installing anything, the free browser tools are a taste: they run entirely client-side, exactly like the app treats your documents.