Does Softr work offline?

Last updated 3 November 2026.

Short answer: no. A Softr app needs an internet connection, even when people install it on their phone.

That comes from Softr’s own guide, How to create a mobile app from a Softr app (read on 3 November 2026): “Your users will still need to have Internet access to be able to use your Softr app as a PWA.” A PWA is the “add to home screen” version of a website. It looks like an app, but it still talks to Softr’s servers for every page and every record.

Someone on Softr’s forum asked this exact question in 2023, because the wifi in the building where they used their app was poor. The one reply: “I wish it was, but unfortunately, it’s not possible”.

What that means at work

• A weak-signal building (a warehouse, a basement plant room, a school with patchy wifi): pages load slowly or not at all, and a half-filled form can be lost.
• No signal at all (a farm, a site visit, a road trip): the app does not open.
• When Softr itself is down, nobody can reach their records until it is back.

None of that matters if everyone sits at a desk with good internet. Softr is a good fit there. It matters when the work happens somewhere the signal is not.

An AI app builder that works with no signal

Bionic Forms builds an app from a sentence or a spreadsheet, like Softr does. The difference is where the records live. Our desktop app for Windows, macOS or Linux keeps a full, encrypted copy of the database on the computer. Adding, editing, search, files and printing all work with no connection, for as long as you like. When it finds a connection, changes go up and come down by themselves. If two people changed the same record while apart, both versions are kept and a person picks.

Bringing a Softr app’s data across

• If it runs on Airtable or a Google Sheet, that is your data. Export each table as CSV from there (in Google Sheets: File, then Download, then CSV).
• If it runs on Softr Databases, Softr’s Export docs show how to add a Download button to a table block that saves the rows as CSV or Excel.

Then drop the file on our home page. You get the records back as a database, and you can describe the screens you want in a sentence. Free covers unlimited apps and 10,000 entries per app. Business is $29 a month for the whole team, with unlimited users.

Where this is honest

• Offline is the desktop app only. In a browser, ours needs a connection too.
• No phone app yet. If your people only carry phones, look at AppSheet or Power Apps, which do work offline on a phone.
• Building an app needs a connection. The AI that builds it runs on our server. Using it afterwards does not.
• Softr’s pages and blocks do not come across. The records do, and the screens are rebuilt.
• We are small and pre-launch. We say plainly which parts are not finished, and your data can always be exported again.