How to choose a personal CRM

Every personal CRM demos well. They all show a clean contact card and a satisfying import. The differences only appear in month three, when you are busy and the thing has to work without your enthusiasm propping it up. These are the questions worth asking before you commit your network to one.

Does it tell you who is going cold, or just store people?

This is the whole job. A searchable address book you have to remember to open is not a personal CRM; it is a database you will abandon. The system should compute something — days since last contact, measured against how often you said you wanted to be in touch — and put the overdue people in front of you without being asked. If a product cannot show you that list in one click, it is a contact manager with better typography.

What happens in a busy month?

The honest test of any habit tool is what it does when you ignore it for three weeks. Good behaviour: a short digest that says who slipped, and a list you can clear in ten minutes. Bad behaviour: 94 red overdue badges, which teaches you to close the tab. Ask whether reminders accumulate or roll, and whether there is a weekly summary you can act on from your inbox.

Where do the contacts come from?

• Can it sync from the accounts you already use, rather than demanding manual entry?
• Does it import a CSV, and your LinkedIn connections export?
• Does it show you a preview before an import lands, or dump everything in and leave you to clean up?
• Does it merge duplicates, or will you end up with the same person three times from three sources?

You can test the LinkedIn question before signing up for anything: the free connections analyzer parses your export in the browser and shows what is actually in it.

What does the free tier really include?

Free tiers come in two shapes. One is a contact cap on the real product. The other is a crippled version with a timer, where the features that matter are behind the wall and the free plan exists to start a clock. The first is a fair trial of the actual thing. The second tells you what the company thinks of you.

Check specifically whether reminders, cadences and the overdue list — the parts that do the work — are included free, or whether free means a read-only address book.

Can you get your data out?

Your network is the most portable asset you have, and it should stay that way. Look for a plain export in a format you can open elsewhere, available without contacting support. An API is a stronger version of the same promise, because it means the data is reachable by something other than their user interface — see A.R.O's API docs for what that looks like in practice. If the only way out is a support ticket, assume there is no way out.

Privacy, concretely

Ask three things: is the data sold or shared, is it used to train models, and what exactly does a connected account grant access to. A policy that answers those in plain language is a signal in itself. Contact data privacy covers what to look for, and what the permission screens actually mean.

Then compare the specific options

Once you know what you need, the field narrows fast. We keep dated, fair comparisons of the main options — including where they are better than us — at /compare: Dex, Clay, Monica and Folk, plus a head-to-head on Dex vs Clay.