Personal CRM for Mac
A personal CRM for Mac — your home base for the relationships that matter.
Phones are where moments get captured; the Mac is where you sit down and think. Endearist's native macOS app treats the desktop as the home base of your relationship vault — the place for the longer journal entry after a hard conversation, the quarterly look at who is drifting, the cleanup pass over twenty years of contacts. It is local-first: the vault lives on your Mac's disk, fully usable offline, and syncs to your iPhone or other devices only if you opt in — end-to-end encrypted with AES-256-GCM through your own iCloud, a WebDAV server, or Endearist Cloud. If you keep your thinking in plain text, you will feel at home: a keyboard-first quick-log gets a note onto a contact without touching the mouse, and the whole vault exports to plain Markdown, which slots straight into an Obsidian vault or an iA Writer folder. Your relationship history stays a set of files you can read in thirty years, not rows in someone else's database.
Using Endearist with Mac
-
Install the Mac app and create your vault
Download Endearist for macOS and open it — your vault is created locally on disk, with no account or server in the loop. The free tier covers 25 contacts, enough for the inner circle that a personal CRM is really about. Everything that follows happens on your machine unless you explicitly enable sync.
-
Do the big import and cleanup at the big screen
The desktop is the right place for the one-time archaeology: export your people from Apple Contacts as vCard (or from anywhere as CSV) and import them into Endearist. The dedup tool surfaces the doubles and near-doubles a large screen makes easy to judge. An hour of merging on the Mac saves months of mess on the phone.
-
Make the keyboard quick-log a reflex
After a call or a long email exchange, log what mattered without leaving the keyboard: open the quick-log, type the contact's name, write two sentences, done. The bar for capture has to be lower than the urge to skip it — that is the entire design goal. Notes land on the contact's timeline next to everything you've logged before.
-
Sync to your iPhone — or keep it Mac-only
Enable E2E-encrypted sync via your own iCloud or a WebDAV server and the vault appears in the native iPhone app, ciphertext all the way — you hold the key, AES-256-GCM does the math. Or don't: a Mac-only vault is a perfectly valid setup for people who want their relationship notes on exactly one machine, and the app never pressures you otherwise.
-
Review weekly, export to Markdown whenever you like
Once a week, scan the warmth scores and cadence reminders with your Apple Calendar overlaid read-only — who is due, who is drifting, what's coming up. And because the vault exports to plain Markdown (plus CSV), your notes can flow into Obsidian, iA Writer, or a git repo whenever you want a second home for them. Exit is a feature, not a threat.
What works — honestly
| Capability | Status | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Native macOS desktop app, fully offline | Works | The vault lives on your Mac's disk and every feature works without a connection. The desktop is a first-class citizen, not a companion view. |
| Keyboard-first quick-log | Works | Open the quick-log, type a name, write the note, hit enter — capture without touching the mouse, designed for the moment right after a call. |
| Plain Markdown export (Obsidian / iA Writer friendly) | Works | Export your whole vault as plain Markdown files (CSV too) — readable in any editor, today and in thirty years. No proprietary format holds your history hostage. |
| E2E-encrypted sync via iCloud or WebDAV | Works | AES-256-GCM, key held by you — iCloud or your WebDAV server stores only ciphertext. EU-hosted Endearist Cloud is the managed alternative on paid tiers. |
| Apple Calendar overlay | Works | Read-only overlay of your calendar next to contact notes — prep before a meeting, log after it. Endearist never writes events. |
| Import from Apple Contacts | Manual | Export a vCard from Apple Contacts (or CSV from anywhere) and import it; dedup merges the doubles. Deliberately one-time — no background contact sync. |
| Email integration (Apple Mail or otherwise) | Not supported | Endearist does not read your inbox or log emails automatically. If an email matters, give it two sentences in the quick-log — you are the editor of your record. |
Frequently asked questions
- Is there a personal CRM with a real Mac desktop app?
- Yes — Endearist ships a native macOS app, not a pinned browser tab. The vault is stored locally on your Mac, works fully offline, and the desktop gets first-class features like the keyboard quick-log and the big-screen dedup and import tools.
- Does Endearist work with Obsidian or my plain-text notes?
- Endearist exports your entire vault as plain Markdown files (plus CSV), which drop cleanly into an Obsidian vault, an iA Writer folder, or any text-based system. There's no live plugin — it's a deliberate, file-based bridge, so your data stays portable either way.
- Does Endearist sync between my Mac and my iPhone?
- Yes — enable E2E-encrypted sync via your own iCloud or a WebDAV server (or EU-hosted Endearist Cloud on paid tiers) and the same vault opens in the native iPhone app. AES-256-GCM, key held by you; the storage provider only ever sees ciphertext.
- Can I keep my relationship vault on the Mac only, with no cloud?
- Absolutely — that's the default. Sync is opt-in, so until you enable it, nothing ever leaves your Mac. A single-machine vault plus an occasional Markdown export as backup is a fully supported way to run Endearist.
Last updated: 2026-06-10
Try Endearist free.
Local-first personal CRM. Free up to 25 contacts. Pro Lifetime €69 — once.
Start free