Head-to-head
Personal CRMs compared head to head
Our /vs pages put us against somebody. Here we are not in the ring — just two other tools and the question of which one fits you.
- Cloze vs Dex Both are relationship assistants for working professionals, but Cloze is far heavier. Since 2014 Cloze has pulled every inbox, your calendar, LinkedIn, X and iMessage into one contact-centric view — powerful, mature, and worth twice the price at $17/month if you use it fully. Dex is the leaner, more modern answer with LinkedIn at the centre. Cloze for realtors and sales, Dex for networkers.
- Covve vs Dex Both are for networking but they meet you in different places. Covve is mobile and starts at the business card: fast OCR, news alerts on tracked contacts, on-device end-to-end encryption, €4.99/month. Dex is desktop-shaped and starts at LinkedIn. Conference-goers take Covve, LinkedIn networkers take Dex — and on privacy Covve wins clearly.
- Dex vs Mesh Both build your address book for you, but from different sources. Dex pulls from LinkedIn and tells you when someone changes jobs — the single strongest feature in the category if your network is professional. Mesh pulls from email, calendar, LinkedIn and X and turns it into the best-looking address book on the market. Short version: LinkedIn networkers take Dex, everyone else takes Mesh.
- folk vs Attio Two modern team CRMs that differ in ambition. folk is the lighter tool for agencies and consultancies: pipelines, templates, LinkedIn capture, productive within a week. Attio is the more powerful one: a flexible data model with custom objects and real relations, built for go-to-market teams who want to shape their own CRM — and correspondingly more expensive and more work.
- Mesh vs folk Mesh is an address book for you; folk is a CRM for your team. Mesh builds a self-maintaining directory of your contacts from email, calendar and social accounts. folk builds pipelines, shared contacts and campaigns for agencies and consultancies, with an API and 6,000-plus connections. If nobody but you looks inside, folk is too much tool; if a team works in it, Mesh is too little.
- Monica vs Dex This is not a comparison of two similar tools but of two opposite answers. Monica is open source, self-hosted, and costs you almost nothing but time — in exchange you maintain everything by hand. Dex costs $12 a month and largely maintains itself, in exchange your contacts run through somebody else's servers. Choose by which you have more of: time or money.
- Monica vs Mesh The cleanest either-or in the category. Monica is entirely yours — open source, self-hosted, nobody but you reads along — and looks like 2017 in exchange. Mesh is the best-looking software in the field and maintains itself, in exchange it sits on US servers whose keys the vendor holds. There is no middle ground between them; you pick which half matters more.
- Notion vs Monica Two ways to avoid paying for a personal CRM. Notion is not one — it is a database many people press into service as one, which works for the first 50 to 100 contacts, especially if you already pay for Notion. Monica is one: open source and free when self-hosted. Notion if you want to tinker; Monica if you want it finished and can run a server.