Watchlists

Local-first data

Projects that let an application hold its own data and still sync — CRDTs, embedded stores, and replication that does not require a service in the middle. The spine of the sovereignty thesis: if the data cannot leave the provider, nothing else about portability matters.

5 projects, in the order the list declares.

yjs/yjs22.8k

Why it is here — The CRDT most other collaborative editors build on. Its ubiquity is the point: a shared substrate is harder to withdraw than a product.

Growth
31 stars per week
Last commit
6d ago
Last release
5d ago
License
non-standard

Why it is here — A newer CRDT engine with a rich-text focus. Worth watching for whether it converges with yjs or fragments the space.

Growth
18 stars per week
Last commit
today
Last release
7d ago
License
MIT

Why it is here — Replication as the primary feature rather than an add-on, with pluggable backends.

Growth
5.5 stars per week
Last commit
today
Last release
39d ago
License
Apache-2.0

Why it is here — Small enough to read end to end, which makes it a useful reference for what local-first actually requires.

Growth
4.5 stars per week
Last commit
5d ago
Last release
4d ago
License
MIT

Why it is here — A product rather than a library — the test of whether local-first survives contact with real users.

Growth
32 stars per week
Last commit
3d ago
Last release
6d ago
License
non-standard

Membership and order are curated in radar-watchlists.json. Metrics come from the radar’s own measurements — growth is sampled daily from GitHub’s star counts, and maintenance is read when this page is built. A metric with nothing behind it reads unknown rather than zero.