Does Noi Keep My Browsing History, Prompts, and Settings on My Device?

Yes. According to Noi's own site, its data approach is local-first: history, prompts, and settings stay on your device. The same page also lists session isolation as a feature, which keeps separate contexts clean and predictable. Those two claims are the core of Noi's privacy story as presented on noib.app — but they describe where data lives, not a full security or sync model, so read them as a starting point rather than a guarantee for every workflow.

What "local-first" means on Noi's page

Noi's site describes the product as "Less chaos. More flow." and lists these relevant features:

• Local-first data: history, prompts, and settings stay on-device.
• Session isolation: keeps contexts clean, separated, and predictable.
• Prompt management for AI chats: organize, reuse, and iterate on workflows.
• Multi-window management: run parallel workspaces side by side.

The practical reading: the browsing history you generate, the prompts you save for AI chats, and your app settings are stored locally rather than being described as uploaded to a Noi account or cloud service. Session isolation then limits how much one workspace's context bleeds into another.

What this does and does not cover

So if your concern is "does using Noi mean my prompts and history are sitting on someone else's server," the page's answer is no — they stay on your device. If your concern is "can I sync this across machines, or recover it after a disk failure," the page gives no answer, and you should not assume either capability.

Where local-first matters in practice

Consider a concrete case: you keep one Noi window for a work project with saved prompts for code review, and a second window for personal research with different prompts and a separate history. Session isolation is meant to keep those two contexts from mixing, while local-first storage means both sets of prompts and history live on your machine. That combination is useful when you want parallel workspaces without a shared cloud context.

The trade-off follows directly: because data stays on-device, the device itself becomes the place your history and prompts live. The site does not describe encryption at rest, backup, or cross-device sync, so plan for those at the OS level if they matter to you.

How to check it yourself

1. Install Noi from the build matching your platform: macOS (Apple Silicon arm64 or Intel x64), Windows x64 (.msi), or Linux (AppImage, x86_64.rpm, amd64.deb).
2. Use the app normally for a session — browse, save a prompt, change a theme.
3. Look for where Noi stores its data on your filesystem, and confirm history, prompts, and settings appear there rather than only in a remote account.
4. Open a second window with a different context and verify the two sessions stay separate.

Expected result: your data is present locally and sessions behave independently. If you cannot locate the local data, treat the local-first claim as unverified for your setup rather than assuming a cloud account exists.

Common sticking points

• Assuming sync exists. Local-first is the opposite of cloud-synced by default; the page lists no sync feature.
• Assuming local means encrypted. The site does not claim encryption, so disk-level protection is your responsibility.
• Confusing session isolation with privacy from other apps. Isolation separates Noi contexts; it is not described as a sandbox against other software on your machine.
• Expecting prompt sharing. Prompt management is described for organizing and reusing your own prompts, not for publishing them.

For the broader picture of what Noi is, see the related question on what Noi (noib.app) is; for installers, see the platforms and installers question.