Question
How do you manage your contacts?
My phone's contacts app is perpetually a mess, filled with old contacts I don't need anymore, duplicate contacts from merging email accounts and upgrading to new phones, and more.
Is there a better way to manage details about the people you know? Do you have a favorite tool to organize your family, friends, and colleagues' contacts and keep up with phone numbers, addresses, birthdays, and more?
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I am using Monica as a personal CRM. But honestly I am not the best at it, so really interested to see how the others manage it.
It is simple and efficient. It is open source and you can self-host if you don't want to share the data, very private by nature.
You can import your contacts from your phone, but I don't think it is possible to sync them.
Are you self-hosting, and if so was it reasonably (WordPress-level) easy to set up?
I am self-hosting indeed. The installation is a bit harder than a WordPress but following the documentation it is not so hard.
I 'm currently on a journey to find a personal CRM. I've also tried Monica and it's nice and simple. I've also been trying Dex, Clay and Folk.
If you're just looking to manage family, friends and colleagues, something like Monica or UpHabit might be enough but the nice thing about Clay and Folk is they enrich your contacts which is nice for networking.
Yeah, personal CRMs are quite the hot space right now.
Just from a branding perspective, it looks like Clay is the Superhuman of contacts, Folk is the Notion of contacts, Dex is a standard CRM slimmed down, and Monica is ... the WordPress of contacts?
On Clay and Folk: Do either sync your enriched contacts back to your phone's contacts app? Or for the most part do you need to commit to using their apps for everything? And have you found Clay worth the price?
Neither Clay/Folk have any sort of two-way sync. You pretty much are committed to using their apps although Clay does have a Zapier integration. I'm planning to use it strictly for new business so I don't use need that. Contacts+ has something that might work for that.
In terms of pricing, not yet but I'm giving them at least a few months.
Hi @yippadesign, I've been trying to find a personal CRM as well. I've tried Clay so far and don't feel like it's ready for primetime yet because it doesn't have some key features like importing contacts and putting them into circles. I've spoken to the team at Folk but don't yet have an invite. What are your thoughts now that you've tried them all? My current solution is a Personal CRM template in Airtable that works fine, but not as automated as I would like.
I f you're wanting to put contacts into circles, Folk might be worth checking out. It has more flexibility in working with the data and also supports custom fields. I find it a bit slow; there won't be a mobile app until 2021 but support has been responsive. It's also not ready for primetime.
This week, I'm focused on Clay but to be honest, I'm not thrilled with any of them yet.
For Folk, if you want an invite, feel free to send me a message through the info in my profile.
From a pure contacts app perspective—something trying to hue closer to an address book than a CRM—there are several apps that are interesting but only feel like they solve part of the problem.
Cardhop (from the team behind Fantastical) adds a nicer UI to the contacts experience, lets you add contacts in a plain text sentence that it then parses out into contact details, and adds more detailed notes to contacts than the standard iOS contacts app allows—but it doesn't have detailed tools to merge contacts or sync from other sources.
BusyContacts (again from a team behind a calendar app) does sync social network contacts—but surprisingly doesn't have a way to remove duplicate contacts, nor a mobile app. It might be a good option for a native Mac CRM, though, without a subscription.
Then, I was thinking that FullContact had a mobile app that'd been shut down, but turns out it's been reborn as Contacts+, and that seems like it might be closest to what I'm looking for. It can remove duplicates and says it combines similar contacts, can scan business cards (the original feature I'd used in their older iOS app), and offers contact enrichment. I may have to take it for a spin.
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Neat, how has it worked for you so far? Does it have any tools to sync/merge contacts from other sources, and then sync the cleaned up results to your phone's contacts app? Anything about it that you like in particular?