Pure offline mode & online mode

Packle works with no network at all, and it works better with one. This is the page to bookmark if the terminology ever gets confusing — there are only two modes, and everything else on this page is detail underneath them.

Pure offline mode

Pure offline mode is Packle with no account at all. Open the app, start adding items, and everything — items, containers, tasks, tags, images — is stored entirely on your device, in the browser's own local storage. There's no signup step, no server round trip for your data, and nothing to configure.

What you give up is what you'd expect from something living on one device: it doesn't follow you to another phone or computer, and if that device is lost, wiped, or has its browser storage cleared, that inventory goes with it — there's no off-device copy to fall back on. What you don't give up is the app itself: pure offline mode isn't a crippled preview. Every feature covered in these docs — containers, tags, labels, barcode lookups, search — works fully in pure offline mode. The only thing missing is a second copy of your data somewhere else.

Online mode

Online mode is what an account gets you, and it's a superset of pure offline mode, not a different product. Everything above still works exactly the same; on top of it, your inventory syncs to your account and across every device you sign into, and it's backed up somewhere other than one browser's local storage.

Signing up migrates anything you already built in pure offline mode — every item, container, task, tag, and image — into your new account. That migration is automatic and one-directional: it runs once, folds your local data into the account you just created, and nothing gets left on the device unmigrated or silently dropped. You can go from "kicking the tires with no account" to "fully synced across my phone and laptop" without redoing any of the setup you already did.

Per-item sync modes

Even inside online mode, every item carries its own sync mode — a choice that doesn't disappear just because you have an account:

• Cloud — the default. Synced through your account, visible on every device you sign into.
• Local — kept on the current device only, never sent to the server. Useful for anything you deliberately don't want leaving one machine.
• Inherit — follows whatever its parent container is set to. Set a container to local and everything you drop inside it inherits that without you setting the mode item by item.

Sync mode is a per-item property, not an all-or-nothing account setting — you can have a fully-synced inventory with one deliberately local-only container tucked inside it.

Working offline in online mode

Having an account doesn't mean you need a live connection to use it. Changes you make while offline queue locally exactly the way they would in pure offline mode, and drain automatically the moment you're back on a network — nothing has to be manually retried or re-sent.

Resolving conflicts

The one situation sync has to actually think about: the same item changed on two devices while one of them was offline. When that happens, Packle doesn't silently pick a winner — it surfaces the conflict in a dedicated dialog so you can see both versions and choose how it resolves, rather than quietly overwriting one edit with the other.

If you're deciding which mode fits how you want to use Packle, Getting started walks through your first item either way — and Get started free is there whenever pure offline mode stops being enough.