Head-to-head
Covve vs Dex
Two rivals, compared by somebody who sells a third tool — and says so on the page.
Short answer
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.
Where they differ
| Dimension | Covve | Dex |
|---|---|---|
| Where contacts come from | Physical business cards via OCR, plus your phone book. | LinkedIn profiles via browser extension, plus Gmail, Outlook, Facebook, iCloud. |
| Encryption | End-to-end on the device for notes, interactions, reminders and family details. | Hosted; the service needs readable access for the automation to work. |
| Platform | Mobile-only — no desktop client. | Web and mobile plus a Chrome extension. |
| Price | Free tier with limited scans, Pro €4.99/month — about €180 over three years. | Premium $12/month — about €430 over three years. |
| Contact depth | Shallow: name, company, role, tags, free text. Optimised for capture. | Middling: interaction timeline, Kanban stages, per-person cadence. |
As of 2026-08-06
Pick Covve if…
…you collect cards and your phone is your working device. Covve's OCR is the best in the category, the news alerts on tracked contacts are genuinely useful for the "stay present with two hundred acquaintances" case, and at €4.99/month it is less than half of Dex. The strongest point, though, is privacy: Covve encrypts notes and interactions on the device, which is rare at this price and unusual in this category.
Pick Dex if…
…nobody hands you business cards any more because your network forms on LinkedIn. Then Covve's core feature has nothing to do, and Dex's job-change alerts are exactly the information you would otherwise miss. Add a desktop workspace that Covve simply does not have — if you do your contact work at a computer rather than on a phone, that is the practical daily difference, not the price.
And where do we sit?
Closest to Covve's stance, not to its use case. We also encrypt on the device and do not hold the keys — but we do not scan cards and are not built for networking. If you are looking at Covve for the encryption rather than the OCR, our comparison is worth reading.
Common questions
- Does Covve have a desktop client?
- No, Covve is mobile-only. If you want to work at a computer there is no choice here — that is the point where Dex wins regardless of price.
- Is Covve really end-to-end encrypted?
- Covve states that notes, interactions, reminders and family details are encrypted on the device and that Covve cannot open them without your key. We have not verified this ourselves — the claim is Covve's.