Strictly speaking, air-gapped originally meant physically isolated, no network connections at all. But in practice, the definition has broadened a bit, especially in enterprise and defense settings.
Today, it may include closed private networks with no internet access, still isolated, but with internal connectivity for practical reasons (like backups, logging, or internal auth).
Yes, agreed, if you build with air-gapped in mind from day one, it should just work.
In our case, we had to unwind a bunch of assumptions baked into modern SaaS: license checks, analytics, image pulls, update pings… even small things like font hosting or third-party embeds needed rethinking.
Not hard in principle, just a lot of invisible cleanup to make it truly self-contained. Learned a ton doing it.
Yes, absolutely, in a way, we’re just bringing back the old-school model — full package, zero dependencies, runs on your own infra — but with modern tooling and UX.
Really appreciate that — and totally agree.
We’ve been surprised by how many teams in defense, healthcare, and critical infrastructure are still stuck choosing between bloated legacy tools or cloud-only products that don’t check the right boxes.
We built the air-gapped edition of Plane exactly for this.
We ran our company on a whiteboard, until we couldn't, so I get it.
And honestly it does beat a lot of bloated tools out there. But when you need permissioning, history, workflows, audit logs—and your infra lives in a bunker—we try to be the next best thing.
.so is widely used by software companies as a domain availability solution - think Notion. For regulated environments, the domain doesn’t matter, the architecture does.
With air-gapped deployments, Plane doesn’t rely on any external DNS or domains — .so or otherwise. No license pings, no telemetry, no outbound calls. Everything runs in complete isolation, and customers have full control over the environment.
Also worth noting: Plane’s open-source core (AGPLv3) allows for full transparency and auditability. So any notion of a backdoor is counter to how we operate — and how our users deploy us.
Today, it may include closed private networks with no internet access, still isolated, but with internal connectivity for practical reasons (like backups, logging, or internal auth).