Embrace

A sovereign, local-first tool for structured data — lighter than a spreadsheet, more powerful than a database, with built-in time travel.

Embrace fills a gap that, as of mid-2026, no mainstream office or open-source suite covers: the structured-data niche occupied so far mostly by proprietary tools such as Airtable, Microsoft Access or Microsoft Lists (and similar). It runs entirely on your own machine, stores data in an open file format, and treats your data the way version-control treats source code — every change is a commit you can branch, diff, and travel back through.

Embrace 2.0 is the first open-source (AGPL) release of a tool developed over several years. The proprietary 1.x line preceded it; 2.0 opens the core.

Why Embrace

• Editable perspectives ("shapes"). View and edit the same underlying data through different structural lenses without duplicating it.
• Data version control. Commits, branches and time-travel — applied to data, not just code. See what changed, when, and roll back safely.
• Structural refactoring with stable identity. Reorganise tables and fields while references and history stay intact.
• Low entry barrier. Start like a spreadsheet; grow into a relational, versioned model without a migration project.
• Open format & interop. Native .embrace files, XLSX import/export, and clipboard (TSV) copy/paste.
• Local-first & private. Your data never has to leave your machine. No cloud account required.

Download

Pre-built binaries are attached to each GitHub Release and mirrored at h3o.de. Both are self-contained: there is nothing to install alongside them.

Windows — embrace-windows-x64.exe, statically linked. Download and run.

Linux — embrace-linux-x86_64.AppImage, which bundles SFML/CSFML and the other non-system libraries it needs (host graphics libraries such as libGL come from the system, per the AppImage convention):

chmod +x embrace-linux-x86_64.AppImage
./embrace-linux-x86_64.AppImage

The AppImage needs libfuse2; on systems that ship only fuse3, run it with --appimage-extract-and-run.

Build from Source

Embrace is written in Crystal and uses crymble-ui (MIT) as its GUI framework, rendered with SFML.

Requirements

• Crystal >= 1.20.0
• On Linux, the X11 and graphics runtime libraries your distribution already ships (libX11, libXcursor, libXrandr, libXi, libfreetype, libudev, …). You do not need system SFML packages: crymble-ui vendors SFML 3 / CSFML 3, and shards install brings them in with it.

Build

shards install                  # fetches crymble-ui and its vendored SFML/CSFML
source setup.sh                 # puts those libraries on the build and run paths
shards build embrace            # or: shards build --release embrace
./bin/embrace

setup.sh has to be sourced after shards install, because it delegates to lib/crymble-ui/setup.sh — the GUI library owns the vendored libraries and is the single source of truth for the build environment. Source it in any shell that builds or runs the binary: a local build links against those libraries rather than bundling them, so without it ./bin/embrace cannot find libcsfml-graphics.so. (Bundling is exactly what the AppImage does for end users.)

Linux is the primary build target and is what CI exercises.

Windows. crymble-ui ships the SFML 3 / CSFML 3 static libs it needs. From an MSVC "x64 Native Tools" shell, after shards install --skip-postinstall, tools\win-build.bat produces bin\embrace.exe with the application icon embedded (via a standard .rc resource — no third-party post-processing). A polished Windows build guide is in progress.

License

Embrace is free software, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0-only).

A commercial dual license is available for organisations that cannot meet the AGPL's obligations (e.g. embedding Embrace in a closed-source product or offering it as a hosted service). Contact wolfgang.mayerle@h3o.de or see h3o.de for terms.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for the development setup, test, and pull-request process, and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md before participating.

Note that Embrace uses a dual-license (open-core) model, so contributions require signing a Contributor License Agreement — the process is automated via a bot on your first pull request.

To report a security issue, see SECURITY.md.

Trademarks

Airtable, Microsoft Access and Microsoft Lists are trademarks of their respective owners. They are referenced here only for honest comparison and identification — Embrace is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by them.