Personal CRM apps for iPhone

How the category divides

The first line runs between apps that build the record for you and apps that hold only what you enter. Cloze assembles a history automatically from email, phone calls, meetings, notes, files and messages pulled from connected apps. Dex draws on phone and email contacts together with a browser extension covering several social networks, plus messaging and calendar integrations. Mesh assembles contact cards from email, calendar, address book, LinkedIn, Twitter and iMessage. Contacts+ enriches entries from content found around the web, and CircleBack finds new contacts in the signatures of the mail you already receive. On the other side, Contacts Journal CRM is what you write down — a log per meeting, ToDos you create, files you attach — and Referra records interactions you tap to log.

Automatic capture is not free in the sense that matters most here. An app that assembles your history from your inbox needs access to your inbox, your calendar and in several cases your messages. That is the trade the automatic half of this category asks you to make, and it is the reason the manual half still has a market. None of the underlying comparisons settles how faithfully that capture reflects a real inbox in practice; each of them lists it as unverified, because no published source establishes it.

The second line separates apps that record a relationship from apps that maintain a contact list. Contacts+ and CircleBack are address book managers rather than CRMs: they merge duplicates, enrich entries and sync across accounts, but neither asks you to record what happened between you and a person. Cloze and Contacts Journal CRM are relationship CRMs rather than sales pipelines. Dex and Mesh sit on the CRM side while doing a good deal of address book work along the way. Referra is narrower than any of them. Working out which half of that line you are on eliminates about half the category before you compare a single feature.

The third line is what “free” means, and it varies far more than what paid costs. Contacts+ publishes a free tier that needs no card, syncing one account up to a contact ceiling. Mesh’s free plan carries a comparable contact ceiling but asks for a credit card to start. Referra’s free tier sets a much lower contact cap, plus a second cap on how many people can be on check-ins at a time; interactions, reminders and analytics are all included below those caps. Dex has no free tier at all; every plan opens with a trial and then requires a subscription. Contacts Journal CRM and CircleBack are both free to download with the paid part left undescribed. So free in this category means, variously: free with a card on file, free under a ceiling, free for the length of a trial, or free with an upgrade of unknown price attached.

The fourth line is not about the apps at all. It is whether the developer publishes a price you can read. Cloze, Dex, Mesh and Contacts+ each publish a pricing page that works. Contacts Journal CRM’s site returns a 404 for one, and circleback.com’s pricing address issues a redirect that ends at scanbizcards.com — a different product from a different company. In both of those cases the only way to learn what the upgrade costs is to install the app and open the purchase sheet, which is a real cost to anyone deciding between two apps. Dex is the one developer in this group that goes the other way, serving a plain-text version of its pricing page alongside the ordinary one. All of that is documented in where app developers actually publish their prices.

Automatic against manual

Cloze and Contacts Journal CRM are the cleanest statement of the first dividing line: two relationship CRMs, both free to download, that disagree completely about where the record comes from. Cloze watches the accounts you connect and builds the history without data entry, adding email tracking, mail merge and team features on top of it. Contacts Journal asks you to write the log yourself, and gives you tags, groups, custom fields, company accounts and a map of where your contacts are as ways to organise what you wrote. Cloze vs. Contacts Journal CRM is the page to read if you already know you want a relationship CRM and the open question is how much of your inbox you are willing to hand over.

Two personal CRMs, one with no way in

Dex and Mesh both build a picture of your contacts from email, calendar and social accounts, so the automatic-versus-manual question is answered the same way for each and drops out of the comparison. What is left is how you start. Mesh has a free plan carrying the core features up to a contact ceiling, but it wants a card on file before you reach it. Dex has no free tier; after the trial you subscribe or you stop. Beyond that, Dex has the deeper LinkedIn integration and ships clients across mobile, web, desktop and a browser extension, while Mesh assembles its cards from more sources and does not enumerate the platforms it runs on. Dex vs. Mesh is the page to read if you want a CRM that watches your accounts and you are deciding how much to commit before you have used one.

The address book half

Contacts+ and CircleBack are the pairing to look at when the problem is a messy address book rather than a forgotten follow-up. Neither is a CRM. Both clean up, merge, enrich and sync the contacts you already have, and on paper CircleBack does more of it — pulling new contacts out of email signatures, updating them as people change jobs, recovering contacts deleted by mistake, and exporting to Salesforce and ACT!. Against that, Contacts+ publishes a free tier with no card and prices its paid plans openly, and CircleBack publishes no price anywhere at all. Contacts+ vs. CircleBack is the page to read if you want contact hygiene rather than relationship history, and it is worth knowing going in that the comparison turns on disclosure at least as much as on features.

General-purpose against one kind of practice

Referra, which we publish, is the narrowest app covered on this page: it is built for a cash-pay or private-pay practice, tracking who refers business and checking back in with past clients and with prospects who chose to try insurance first, and does not try to be a general CRM. Contacts Journal CRM is the general-purpose case, a relationship CRM whose listing names sales professionals, small business owners, freelancers, consultants, real estate agents and lawyers among its users, with a much broader feature set and a much longer history behind it. Both are manual, so the pairing isolates scope rather than method: whether you want one kind of practice served closely or many kinds of work supported loosely. Referra is also the newer and much smaller of the two, and if your work doesn’t depend on referral sources or on reaching back out to past clients, the narrower tool has nothing extra to offer you. Referra vs. Contacts Journal CRM sets the two out row by row; read the ownership disclosure below before weighing what it says about our own app.

What we couldn’t verify

These questions are left open by the sources behind the comparisons above. They are carried here unresolved rather than guessed at.

• What Contacts Journal CRM’s in-app purchase costs; its developer’s site returns a 404 for a pricing page
• What CircleBack costs, or whether it has a paid tier at all; its listing names no figure and its own pricing address redirects to a different product
• What CircleBack’s free tier includes or limits, which its listing does not describe
• What Cloze’s free tier includes, since its pricing page presents a paid plan as the entry point while its listing describes the app as free to download
• Whether Mesh’s published Pro figure is a monthly or an annual-billed rate, and what Mesh charges a free user who passes its contact ceiling
• Whether Mesh’s free plan ever charges the card it asks for, or only holds it
• Whether Contacts Journal CRM syncs between devices, which its listing does not state
• Whether Referra or Contacts Journal CRM can export their data, which neither listing describes
• How completely the automatic apps’ capture and enrichment work against a real inbox or address book, which no published source establishes for any of them

Ownership disclosure