Craft
Craft is a powerful writing and organization tool that helps you capture ideas, manage tasks, and create beautifully structured documents ‒ all in one place. It's native, highly customizable, and beautifully designed to adapt to everything from personal journaling to complex project planning.
Get to know Craft
Who’s behind Craft?
Hey, I’m Balint - CEO and co-founder of Craft. I like to think about myself as product thinker with a deep passion for design, someone who loves obsessing over the little details that make digital experiences feel intuitive, tactile, and meaningful. My background blends hands-on engineering with a strong focus on UX, and I’ve been building things for the web and mobile for over 15 years.
It all started back in the early 2000s, designing and developing Flash websites. That early curiosity eventually led me into native iOS development, where I found a deep sense of fulfillment in turning ideas into interactive, elegant touch experiences.
Before Craft, I built and ran a mobile-focused design and development studio, which was later acquired by Skyscanner. I stayed on to lead as Head of Mobile, an experience that taught me a lot about scaling products, building for global audiences, and setting a high bar for quality and performance.
After leaving Skyscanner, I felt drawn to a new challenge: rethinking how people create and collaborate on documents. That became Craft.
But Craft has never been just my project ‒ it’s a team effort through and through. While I lead the vision and design direction, I’m surrounded by a deeply talented and passionate team of engineers, designers, and creators. We’re united by a shared belief in quality, craftsmanship, and pushing the boundaries of what great productivity tools can be.
What’s Craft and what’s so cool about it?
Craft is a document creation and thinking tool built for the way people actually work today ‒ fast, visual, flexible, and always available, even offline. It helps individuals and teams capture ideas, organize knowledge, and create beautiful documents that are a joy to use and share.
The idea behind Craft was born out of a very personal frustration. Since the early 2010s, technology has evolved rapidly, yet the tools we use to think, write, and organize ideas have remained surprisingly stuck in the past ‒ many of them rooted in paradigms from the 1980s. I often felt like I was “fighting” with my tools. They lacked the fluidity I needed to think clearly and express myself effortlessly. Steve Jobs once said that “computers are like a bicycle for the mind,” but that never felt true for the software I was using.
That pain became even more apparent during a previous job that involved a lot of travel. I found that my time on the road was mostly wasted, not because I didn’t want to work, but because the tools simply didn’t work well on mobile devices, or without an internet connection. It was frustrating. I wanted something that worked like my brain did: quick, intuitive, and always ready.
Eventually, I decided to try solving this problem myself. I began building a tool that could help me plan, capture, think, and create, whether I was writing an executive summary or a simple grocery list. And it had to meet my own high standards: beautifully designed, offline-first, natively fast, and genuinely pleasant to use. Something that would feel like an extension of my thoughts, not an obstacle to them.
That project started life in 2019 under the code name Luki. For two years I built early versions and prototypes, reading deeply about productivity, cognition, and design. I shared these with close friends for feedback, iterated relentlessly, and eventually reached a version I believed could be something much more than a personal tool. That became Craft.
Fast forward to today, and Craft 3 is the most personal, powerful, and flexible version of the app we’ve ever made. It helps people go from quick tasks and notes, to full-fledged documents, structured knowledge bases, and everything in between. You can pick the perfect style for a doc, build a collection, or capture a thought mid-flight, with blazing speed and zero compromises. And by reducing the need to switch between apps, Craft lightens the cognitive load and helps you stay in flow.
Craft is offline-first, so you can work from anywhere, even in the middle of a flight. Every interaction is lightning fast. The experience feels native and intentional on every device, without taking shortcuts. And your docs look great by default, so you spend less time formatting and more time thinking. Whether it’s a note, a task, or a knowledge base, everything just works together seamlessly.
We’ve been honored along the way ‒ Craft was named Apple’s Mac App of the Year and recognized as a finalist for the Apple Design Award. But perhaps the most rewarding achievement is seeing how people around the world use Craft to build companies, plan weddings, write books, or simply organize their everyday lives. That’s what drives us forward.
Tool Stack of Craft
What’s under Craft’s hood? Which technologies were used and why did you chose them?
As a fully cross-platform product, Craft runs on a complex and evolving tech stack. There are many layers to how we build and scale the app, but two foundational pillars stand out: Mac Catalyst and our custom in-house sync protocol.
We’ve long believed in building natively for each platform, and Mac Catalyst has played a central role in helping us deliver a great macOS experience using a shared codebase. At a high level, Mac Catalyst lets developers run iOS code on macOS, theoretically allowing for faster desktop development by reusing existing mobile code. But while it promises convenience, the reality is more nuanced. Many Catalyst apps on the market feel like stretched-out iOS apps ‒ awkward on the Mac, with clunky interactions and inconsistent UI behavior.
We took a different approach. We didn’t just enable Catalyst and ship. We heavily customized the UI and UX layers to feel truly native on Mac, optimized for keyboard-first workflows, full-screen behavior, and traditional window management, and ensured feature parity across platforms without sacrificing platform conventions. This careful tailoring means Craft on macOS doesn’t feel like a port ‒ it feels like a proper Mac app. That’s critical to our user experience philosophy.
Another core component of our stack is our own in-house sync protocol, which powers Craft’s real-time collaboration and seamless sync. Early on, we evaluated existing solutions like Firebase, Realm, and other CRDT-based protocols, but none fully met our needs, especially when it came to offline support, real-time sync across multiple devices, scalable collaboration without conflict, and performance with large documents. So we decided to build our own sync engine from the ground up ‒ a decision that’s paid off tremendously.
Our custom sync system uses a state-machine-driven, operation-based model that enables reliable conflict resolution and minimal data transfer. It supports multi-device, real-time editing, whether you’re online or offline, and is optimized for speed and scalability. Today, we can support hundreds of thousands of blocks per document, with a roadmap to reach millions. More importantly, it gives us complete control over the product experience ‒ from data consistency to how we tune performance across platforms and network conditions.
Choosing to build these core systems in-house wasn’t just about performance ‒ it was about owning the experience. Craft is built for thinkers, creators, and professionals who expect responsiveness, reliability, and polish. Off-the-shelf solutions couldn’t deliver the same level of nuance or flexibility we needed to support that vision. These technical choices let us move fast, iterate boldly, and deliver an app experience that feels delightfully native, no matter what platform you’re on.
TL;DR: Craft runs on a foundation we’ve custom-tailored for quality: Mac Catalyst for native-feeling cross-platform development, and a proprietary sync protocol for real-time collaboration that works as intuitively as pen and paper.
Do you use any other tools to run the business?
For our engineering team, the primary development environments are Xcode and Visual Studio Code. Xcode is mainly used for iOS and macOS development, while VS Code spans a broader range of needs ‒ from web to backend and cross-platform work. Together, these tools give our developers the flexibility and depth they need, whether they’re shipping a new iOS feature or iterating on backend infrastructure.
When it comes to design and marketing, Figma is our go-to. It powers everything from UI design and interactive prototypes to marketing creatives. Its collaborative nature fits seamlessly with the way our teams operate, whether we’re working on campaign assets, feature previews, or broader product branding.
For project management and issue tracking, we take a hybrid approach. Craft, our own product, is the central hub for documentation, planning, and visibility across the team. It’s where we align on goals and ideas at a high level. For more structured development workflows, we use Linear to manage sprints and track issues. This dual setup gives us the flexibility to support both cross-functional collaboration and focused engineering work.
On the analytics and customer support side, Amplitude helps us understand how people are using the product and make data-informed decisions. Zendesk is the backbone of our support experience, allowing us to respond quickly and manage user feedback effectively.
Slack and Zoom handle our real-time communication and meetings, but a huge part of how we stay aligned happens directly inside Craft. One of the most important rituals in our hybrid work setup is the daily note. At the end of each day, every team member writes a short update in Craft. These notes serve as the foundation for the next morning’s standup, and because they’re shared in a visible space, anyone in the company can catch up on what others are working on. We have a clear standard: daily notes are written by the end of the previous workday, so no matter when someone starts their day, they always have the full context of what’s happening across the team.
While we use a variety of tools to support development, design, support, and communication, Craft is the glue that ties it all together ‒ from planning and documentation to day-to-day collaboration.
What’s your personal stack? Which apps do you and your team love?
Most of my development is done in XCode, though nowadays I'm experimenting a lot with Cursor/Claude Code/ChatGPT - and try to make these work well with Swift, which is starting to get better and better, but still lots left to desire. For quick visual mockups I use Sketch, for bitmap editing Pixelmator Pro, and I do most of my thinking inside of Craft. I use Safari for my browsing, and use the desktop GitHub app (I don't like terminals...) for source control. For some reason I still love Zoom (not the interface for sure..), and really dislike any other video calling solution.
Anything else you’d like to share?
There are actually quite a few things going on behind the curtains while things may evolve, we’re thrilled to bring you along for the journey.
One of the most anticipated updates is our Navigation and Settings overhaul, including a new “Me” section for better control and personalization. This will be rolling out soon to our beta group.
But that’s just the beginning.
We’re hard at work on block-level Tags, a long-requested feature that will unlock powerful ways to organize and connect your content. It’s coming to a selected beta group before summer, and we can’t wait to show more.
And for all our Android users: full editing capabilities on Mobile Web are coming later this year. That means a complete, powerful Craft experience, right from your phone or tablet, with no compromises.
2025 is shaping up to be a massive year, and we’re just getting started.
Now, discover Craft for yourself
Huge thanks to Balint for sharing the story behind Craft and the details on the building blocks that make it such a remarkable and unique tool. Now try it yourself and rediscover the joy of creating documents, managing tasks, and capture ideas.