Introducing Quip Desktop

By Bret Taylor, Kevin Gibbs

Today, we're thrilled to release a native desktop app for Quip. The app runs on both Mac (version 10.8+) and Windows (version 7+), and it's free to use. To download Quip, click the button below, or visit quip.com/download on your laptop.

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Embracing the Desktop

Quip is the modern productivity suite that simplifies your life and helps your team get work done faster. Over 30,000 companies and millions of people around the world use Quip for team collaboration — from technology companies like Instacart and Stripe to media companies like CNN and Al Jazeera to non-profits like Lean In.

As Quip's list of customers has grown exponentially over the past year, our desktop web app has exploded in popularity. At the beginning of 2014, our desktop web app accounted for only 20% of our daily usage. Just a year and a half later, it's grown to 50% — driven almost exclusively by the rapidly growing number of people using Quip at work.

As we watched our customers’ usage evolve, we knew we wanted to invest in the desktop experience. Most people in the world still use a native desktop app — Microsoft Office — to write their documents, and for good reason: native desktop apps are faster, work offline, and can provide a user experience that the web still can’t match.

So we decided to match that experience, by bringing Quip natively to your Mac and PC. With the launch of Quip Desktop, Quip is the best productivity suite on every device, including your laptop. And it’s up to 2.6 times faster than Microsoft Word.

Quip Desktop

Quip Desktop is our vision for how cloud software should work. Sign in to Quip, and every document in your company is available, offline or online, on all your devices.

The product blurs the line between a desktop app and a cloud service. You get all the benefits of the cloud, like real-time collaboration and syncing across devices, with none of the user experience downsides.

Fast as Heck

The best part of Quip Desktop is its speed. Every document opens instantly.

When you're using Quip Desktop, all your documents and messages are synced to your computer's hard drive. So when you open a document, it opens immediately — no downloading and no waiting.

Offline & Online

Quip Desktop works whether you're on a fast WiFi connection or completely disconnected from the Internet. When you're offline, you can continue creating documents, editing documents, and sending messages. As soon as you have an Internet connection, all your edits sync with the network, and everyone you’re working with will see your changes.

When you’re online, everything happens in real-time. You can see people typing as you work together on a document and chat with them in real-time.

The transition between being online and offline is completely seamless. So if you’re on an excruciatingly slow airplane internet connection, other people’s updates will stream in as fast as we can get them, but the slow network won't hold up your experience.

Native Experience

We put a lot of effort into making Quip Desktop feel like a part of your computer — a truly native experience.

On the Mac version of the app, all your Quip documents show up in Spotlight Search. When you're searching your computer, all your team's collaborative documents will show up side-by-side with your personal files. It's a really cool experience — when you sign into Quip Desktop, all your team's knowledge is indexed and instantly searchable on your computer.

Quip Desktop also includes beautiful, native notifications. When someone sends your a message or shares a document with you, a push notification will pop up in the corner of your screen, and you can respond immediately.

Works with all your devices

Every change you make on your desktop is instantly synced to your phone and tablet. Quip supports iPhone, iPad, Android phones, and Android tablets.

If you have an iPhone or iPad, Quip Desktop also supports Handoff, so you can start editing on your desktop and pick up right where you left off on your phone with a swipe of your finger.

The End of Files

Personal computing used to be defined by files — transferred and copied and synced and misplaced every time we got a new computer. Now, instead of lugging around thousands of MP3s, we just sign into Spotify and have the entire world of music available at our fingertips. Instead of downloading movies or television shows, we sign into Netflix and stream almost any movie ever made. Instead of copying photos from laptop to laptop, we store them in Google Photos and look up old photos whenever we want. And now with Quip Desktop, instead of downloading email attachments and syncing shared folders, all your company's documents are instantly available the moment you sign in.

Your company's knowledge shouldn't be trapped in files. Whether they're on someone's hard drive or attached to someone's email, files are not reliably accessible, searchable, or collaborative. With Quip, everything your team is working on is available on every device. And with Quip Desktop, you’ll experience none the traditional downsides of “the cloud” — no internet access required, no loading indicators, and unbelievable speed.


Quip is the way modern teams work together. If you’re sick of your team’s outdated tools, download the app, or contact our sales team if you want a live demo.