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
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.
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. Fast forward to today, and Craft 3 is the most personal, powerful, and flexible version of the app we’ve ever made.
Tool Stack of Craft
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 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.
Another core component of our stack is our own in-house sync protocol, which powers Craft’s real-time collaboration and seamless sync. 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.
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.
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 capturing ideas.
Craft updates
Noteworthy updates to Craft since this story went live.
Craft Agents Beta
An exciting update from Craft 〰️ Craft Agents. It connects Craft to everything else in your stack by turning instructions written inside a doc into assistants. Currently available in beta.