Dex vs Monica

Dex is a personal CRM that brings together LinkedIn, email, and daily tools to help users maintain relationships and remember context. Contact records can hold details such as how people met, education, work, important dates, family, gift ideas, and event history. Dex can remind users to reconnect and alert them to upcoming birthdays. Its integrations include Gmail, Outlook, Google Calendar, two-way contact sync, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, iMessage, Superhuman, CSV, Granola, Zapier, and Dex MCP Server. Users can connect Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or other MCP-compatible tools to their account and relationship data. The mobile app supports quick contact notes and meeting preparation information; desktop downloads are available for Mac and Windows. Premium costs $12 a month and includes LinkedIn sync for up to 2,500 connections. Professional costs $20 a month and supports up to 9,000 connections, with Mail Merge for personalized email workflows to up to 200 contacts. There is no free plan, but a 7-day trial is listed. Dex describes its focus as personal relationships rather than sales pipelines.

Monica is an open-source personal CRM for organizing information about friends, family, colleagues, and other important people. Contact records can include contact methods, significant others, children, pets, private notes, reminders, gifts, and money owed. The service also stores relationship notes, journal entries, and activity history for calls, meals, trips, events, and other occasions. Contacts can be imported from vCard or CSV files, with duplicates displayed before merging. A REST API supports contact-data imports and exports and automation of parts of the application. Monica says it does not sell personal data, show ads, or use private account contents to train models. Hosted accounts include managed backups and email support; self-hosting uses Docker or manual installation, with users maintaining infrastructure and backups. Self-hosted Monica is free; Hosted Monica is $90 a year.