Kinu vs Monica

Kinu is a private personal CRM for remembering details and important dates about friends and family. It can remind users when a date arrives or when they have not been in touch for a while. For each person, users can keep moments, private and voice notes, dates, and rituals. It is designed for personal relationships rather than sales contacts or a larger social network, and has no feeds, followers, likes, or public profiles.

After sign-in, Kinu works offline and saves changes to the device first. Relationship data is local by default; users can enable free encrypted backup or paid encrypted sync. When either is enabled, data is encrypted on the device before it leaves and remains encrypted in transit and at rest. Voice notes stay on the device on every plan, and data can be exported at any time. Kinu is available on Android, iOS, and web. The free plan supports up to 10 people; Kinu Plus adds unlimited people and encrypted sync for $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year.

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.