In many companies, the most important piece of software still runs as an installed program: set up on every workstation individually, updated via setup files, reachable from home only through VPN and a terminal server. Moving it to the browser is an obvious thought – if only because new software is almost always built that way now. Still, the switch is not a formality. There are good reasons for it, a few honest counterarguments, and some points worth thinking through before you decide.

What actually hurts about the desktop model day to day

The problem is rarely the program itself; it is everything around it. Every update has to reach every machine. Setting up a new workstation costs half a day of installing and configuring. If one PC still runs an old version, data formats suddenly stop matching. And as soon as someone wants to work from the road or from home, the tinkering with VPN access and remote desktops begins.

Then there is device lock-in: the program runs on Windows PCs and nowhere else. The field technician with a tablet, the colleague on a Mac, a quick check from the phone – none of it works, or only through workarounds.

What the browser does better

A web app exists exactly once, on the server. An update is deployed, and from the next login everyone has it – no rollout, no version confusion, no colleague who has been on the old release for three months. A new workstation needs a browser and credentials, done.

The second big win is access: construction site, home office, client meeting – the same application, the same data, on any device with a browser. And because everyone works on the same data, the question of which copy of the database is current simply disappears. For companies whose desktop program sits on a shared file on a network drive, that is often the real reason to switch. The trend points the same way: according to Statistik Austria (2025), 52% of Austrian companies with ten or more employees use cloud services, up from 47% two years earlier.

Where the browser is worse – this belongs on the table

There are scenarios where desktop software simply remains the better choice, and you should know them before starting a project.

Offline work: no network, no web app. There are techniques to bridge short outages, but anyone who regularly works for hours without a connection needs a different concept.
Special hardware: label printers, cash drawers, measuring devices, old scanners with serial ports – the browser has limited reach into such devices. Much of it can be done, but it takes effort.
Heavy-duty data entry: someone who lives in the same entry dialog eight hours a day is often faster with a well-built desktop form and pure keyboard control. A web app can match that, but it has to be built for it deliberately.

The switch is not a 1:1 copy – and that is an opportunity

The first reflex of many clients: “Just rebuild it exactly the same, only in the browser.” Understandable, but usually the wrong brief. Fifteen years of a desktop program accumulate features nobody uses anymore, forms with forty fields of which eight are maintained, and workflows that are the way they are because someone set them up that way in 2010.

The switch is the moment you can sort that out – not must, but can. A sensible approach: first walk through which features are actually in use, then properly rethink the two or three central workflows, and consciously drop or postpone the rest. What has proven itself stays: if your people are used to a keyboard-only entry form and value it, that exact behavior belongs in the web app’s requirements.

Data and transition: don’t move on a single cutover date

The data from the old system moves over completely, history included – that is the standard, and technically it is almost always achievable. The risky part is not the move itself but the timing: a single cutover day on which everyone switches from old to new is the variant with the greatest crash potential.

Better: a transition phase in which the web app takes over one area first – say, order entry – while the rest keeps running in the old system. Real operation then shows what is still missing, and the way back stays open. The old program is only shut down once verifiably nothing runs through it anymore.

When you should stick with desktop

If the existing program is maintained, the vendor ships updates, the license costs are bearable, and nobody needs access on the go: stay with it. Switching for the sake of modernity alone is a waste of money, and we tell prospects exactly that.

You should start doing the math when several of the familiar signals coincide: the vendor has discontinued the product or no longer exists, the program only runs on old Windows versions, the shared database on the network drive causes regular trouble, or the team increasingly works distributed. Then the question is no longer whether but how – and there are proven paths for that which don’t bring operations to a halt.