---
url: /use-cases/local-first-software.md
description: "Take the network off the interaction path and build software that works offline and is resilient\_by\_design."
---

## Building resilient software that works offline

Cloud-first software needs to be online in order to work. If the network connection fails or the back end is down, the software breaks.

Local-first software defaults to working. It's resilient by design. If the network connection fails, it still works. If the back end is down, it still works.

Electric is a sync engine that supports building local-first software. Making your apps more reliable as well as faster, more modern and naturally collaborative.

## Cloud-first software

With cloud-first software, you're always coding across the network. This means you always need to be aware of potential network latency and failure modes like network errors.

## Local-first software

Local-first is a new architecture, where your app code talks to a local data store and data syncs in the background. With local-first, you don't need to think about the network, it's abstracted away and your app code can just work against local data.

## Benefits of local-first

Local-first apps are:

* faster, with zero network latency making them feel super snappy and instant to use
* collaborative, with realtime sync and multi-user collaboration built in
* resilient, working offline and tolerating downtime

### Product-led growth

As examples like Figma, Linear and Superhuman have shown, apps build on a local-first architecture provide a significantly better UX. This is a key ingredient of product-led growth, in categories where users can vote with their feet and choose their own software.

## Sync engine architecture

With local-first software, instead of talking to web-service APIs, you app code talks to a local data store that is available offline. Data is then synced in the background, when you have connectivity. To sync data in the background, you need a sync engine.

Local-first apps are built on sync engine architecture.

### How does Electric help?

Electric is a sync engine. It syncs little subsets of your Postgres data into local apps and services.

This keeps your local data up-to-date and in sync between users and devices. Allowing you to build local-first apps that are resilient and work offline.