Personal CRM for Friends and Family: The Lists Are Written by the Apps

The best personal CRM for friends and family depends on what you want it to run on and how much of your life you are willing to hand to a server. YourPond is the fullest iPhone option, free for 25 contacts, and the only one here that maps how your people know each other. Dextr has the cheapest paid tier here, $14.99 a year, also iPhone only. Kinu runs on iOS, Android and the web, keeps everything on the device, and is free for ten people. Monica suits you if you want the server to be yours. Inner Circle and Social Compass live in a browser and have no app on either store. Dex and Mesh are built for professional networks, and it shows on every screen.

Every price below comes from the product's own pricing page or its App Store listing, never from another roundup. The release dates were read from Apple's lookup API on 22 August 2026, and the three products with no app were loaded the same day to confirm they are still there. The dated line at the foot of this page says when each price was last checked, and links to the page it came from.

Every list in this category is written by one of the apps on it

You have a row of tabs open, and in more than one of them the app ranked first is the app that published the list.

There is nothing shady about that. It is what a small category does. Somebody builds a personal CRM, notices that nobody is writing about personal CRMs, and writes the article themselves. The article is usually accurate. It is also an advertisement, and nothing on the page tells you which sentences are which.

On 22 August 2026 we went and looked.

Inner Circle's "The 6 best personal CRM apps in 2026" starts at number one with "Inner Circle, for your personal life". Dextr's "Best Personal CRM Apps in 2026" opens its list with "Dextr: The Best Overall Choice for iOS Users" and closes with a section headed "Why Dextr Stands Out as the Best Personal CRM". YourPond's is fairer than either: it lists YourPond fifth of five, and its verdict section sends you to Dex, Clay or Monica first depending on what you want. Social Compass links its own roundup from its homepage, and every request we made for it came back as a 503 error, so we could not read it at all.

That last one is a fetch result, not a verdict on the company. It is here because we tried to check their page and could not.

The part that costs the reader something

Under "If you want simplicity above all else", YourPond's list sends you to Nat.

Nat's site loads. Its pricing page was still asking $370 a year when we opened it on 22 August 2026. When we went looking for anyone still building it, we found no public sign of development since early 2025, which is written up with the archived snapshots in our own piece on which personal CRM apps have actually shut down.

We are not in a position to be smug about that. The same piece exists because we published a wrong obituary of our own: we called Keepsake dormant in a comparison table when it had shipped three months earlier. Recommending a product that stopped moving and burying a product that had not are the same mistake pointing in opposite directions, and both of them come from writing about a category from memory instead of opening the pages.

So why trust this page?

You should not, particularly. This is published by Kinu, Kinu is in the table, and that is the same conflict every other list on your screen has.

What we can offer instead of a promise is a rule you can check in a minute. The table is ordered by the date each app last shipped, newest first. Where two shipped on the same day, the other app goes first. Release date is not a quality ranking; plenty of good software sits still and plenty of bad software ships weekly. It is simply the one fact about all of these products that a stranger can verify from outside, without an account and without taking our word for anything.

It puts us second. It would have put us first if we broke the tie in our own favour, which is exactly why the tiebreak is written down.

Which personal CRM for friends and family should you use?

Ordered by last release, newest first. Where two shipped on the same day, the other app goes first. The three with no app to release sit below that, in alphabetical order.

The bottom three have no app on either store, which is worth knowing before you type a hundred names into one. A browser product is not automatically fragile, and Monica has outlived most of the native apps in this category. It does mean the product exists only while somebody keeps paying for the servers.

The apps, one at a time

Dex

Dex is the biggest name here and the least aimed at you. It pulls contacts from LinkedIn, email, calendar and WhatsApp into one timeline, adds keep-in-touch reminders, and runs almost everywhere: iPhone, Android, the web, macOS, Windows and a Chrome extension.

It is genuinely good at what it is for. What it is for is a network. The plan tiers are sized in LinkedIn connections, 2,500 on Premium and 7,500 on Professional, which tells you who the product pictures when it pictures a user. If the people you are trying not to lose are eleven relatives and six old friends, most of Dex is machinery you will never switch on.

The limitation. There is no free tier, only a 7-day trial, and the month-to-month price is the highest on this page. Paying that to remember your sister's new job is a strange trade.

YourPond

YourPond is the most interesting of the newer apps, and the one doing something none of the others do. It draws the connections between your people: who knows whom, how they met, family trees, a map of where everyone lives. If your mental model of your life is a web rather than a list, no other product here matches it.

The free tier is 25 contacts, which is genuinely usable rather than a teaser, and it covers the mapping features rather than holding them back.

The limitation. iPhone only, with no Android version. It is a cloud product, so your people live on their servers rather than your device, and its App Store privacy label declares location, contacts and photos linked to you. That is the trade for the connection graph, which has to see everything to draw anything.

Dextr

Dextr calls itself a reimagined Contacts app, and that is the honest way to read it: it is for people whose address book got out of hand. One of its own testimonials mentions 2,500 contacts. The free tier puts no limit on how many people you add, which nothing else here does, and the paid tier is the cheapest on this page by a distance.

The limitation. iPhone only. Its audience is people managing professional and personal contacts in one pile, so its language and defaults lean networking rather than family. There is also a genuine pricing muddle: the App Store's own In-App Purchases list shows two differently priced items under one identical "Dextr Pro Lifetime" label, while the pricing page mentions no lifetime plan at all, so we cannot tell you what a permanent copy costs and have not guessed.

Mesh

Mesh is what Clay became after Automattic bought it. It watches your contacts for job changes, location changes and news mentions, and hands them to you without being asked. For keeping up with two hundred loose professional ties, that is a real capability and nothing else here has it.

The limitation. No Android. The free tier is capped at 1,000 contacts and asks for a credit card up front, which is a small thing that tells you the shape of the business. And the automatic life updates that make Mesh useful are the same thing that makes it a poor fit for a close circle: you already know when your brother moves.

Inner Circle

Inner Circle is the most directly aimed at the same reader as this page. Its own headline is "A personal CRM for friends and family," and its pitch is the one we would write: most CRMs exist to close deals, this one exists so you stop losing touch by accident. You talk to it, by voice or chat, instead of filling in fields.

The limitation. There is no app on either store; it runs in a browser and nowhere else. The free tier's 50 AI queries a month is a real ceiling if talking to it is the main way you use it. And the naming is a practical problem rather than a criticism: the site brands itself Inner Circle while its address is withincircle.com, and "Inner Circle" is already a dating app, a fitness app and several other things, so finding it again later is harder than it should be.

Monica

Monica is the oldest and most serious of the open-source options. Self-host it and you own the database outright, on hardware you chose, with source code you can read. That promise is why people put up with the rest of it, and it is a promise almost nothing else in this category can make.

The limitation. There is no mobile app; it is a web application. Self-hosting means a server, a database and the upgrades, which is a weekend hobby you are agreeing to for as long as you use it. And the code moves slowly now: Monica's main branch on GitHub has had no new commit since 30 August 2025, checked on 22 August 2026, while the pricing page announces a Monica rebuilt from scratch before the end of 2026. Both of those are worth weighing if you are about to install it. If it is the ownership you want and the server you do not, we wrote a whole page on Monica alternatives.

Social Compass

Social Compass is aimed squarely at friendships rather than networking, with reminders, a place to keep details, and gift suggestions generated from what you have written down. It also runs the best free-tools layer in the category: a friendship health quiz, a contact fade calculator, a WhatsApp friendship analyzer. Nothing else here, ours included, has anything like it, and they are worth a look whether or not you sign up.

The limitation. No app on either store. On 22 August 2026 every request we made for any post on its blog returned a 503 error, including the roundup its own homepage links to, so we could not read the pages it is best known for. And only its monthly price is quoted above, because the yearly figure could not be established from its own pricing page.

Where Kinu stands, including the awkward part

Kinu is ours, so weigh this section accordingly.

It is one of two here that run on iPhone, Android and the web, and the only one of those two with a free tier. Everything is written to a database on your phone rather than to our server, so it opens and works with no connection. The free tier is ten people with every feature switched on, and there is an export button on that free tier that hands you a JSON file built on your device.

The honest problems. It launched in July 2026, so there is no track record to judge it on, and an app that new is a real risk in a category that closed an eight-year-old product this year. Ten people is a close circle, not an address book; if you want 200 contacts you want something else on this page. There is an export but no importer yet, so what you get is a copy out rather than a restorable backup. Sync is the paid feature, and when it is on, an encrypted copy of your data sits on our servers as well as your phone. We do not claim that copy is unreadable by us, because the key is derived on our side and that claim would not be true.

And the table above ranks us second on a rule that measures how recently we shipped, which is not the same as being the right app for you.

If it sounds like the shape you want, try it with three people first, and press export before you trust it with the rest.

How to actually choose

Start with the platform, because it eliminates most of the list before you have to think. On Android, this page has two answers: Kinu, or Dex if you want the professional machinery. On an iPhone with no other constraints, YourPond and Dextr both open up.

Then ask what you want the app to be doing when you are not looking at it. If the answer is nothing, you want something local and quiet. If the answer is fetching news about people, Mesh is built for it and the others are not. If the answer is drawing the shape of your life, that is YourPond and only YourPond.

Then ask where the data should sit. Your own server is Monica. Your own phone is Kinu. Everything else on this page means somebody else's servers, which is a normal thing to accept and a bad thing to accept without noticing.

Whatever you pick, put three people in it and use it for two weeks before you enter the rest. Every app on this page is easy to leave after three names and painful to leave after ninety.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Related reading: friendship tracker apps for the wider set of reminder-first tools, the most private personal CRMs if where the data sits is the whole question, and which personal CRM apps have shut down before you trust any of them with ninety names.