Monica

Monica is a self-hosted personal CRM built for the relationships in your life rather than a sales pipeline. The idea is straightforward: you keep notes on the people you care about. When you last talked, what they mentioned about their job, their kids’ names, a gift idea, a favour owed. The kind of detail that used to live in your head and tends to slip when life gets busy.

It runs on Laravel and PHP with support for SQLite, MySQL, or PostgreSQL. The feature set covers contacts, interaction logs, reminders for birthdays and anniversaries, a journal, task tracking, and gift ideas. The self-hosted version is free and has no contact limit. The managed cloud plan charges a flat monthly fee for unlimited contacts if you would rather not run your own server.

The limitations are significant and worth knowing upfront. Monica has no email sync, no calendar integration, no LinkedIn import, and no native mobile app. Every single interaction has to be logged manually. If you want a CRM that pulls data from your inbox or enriches contacts automatically, this is not that tool. The UI is server-rendered and feels dated compared to modern single-page apps. The team has been working on a full rewrite called Chandler for over a year, which will shift the focus further toward personal journaling rather than contact management, but it is not publicly available yet.

For someone who wants a private, deliberate record of their personal relationships and is comfortable with manual entry, Monica does that job well. For networking or sales use, look elsewhere.

Monica: Pros & Cons