What Is a Personal CRM, and Which Should You Choose?

As our personal and professional networks continue to expand, it’s increasingly difficult to keep track of people's lives and stay connected. In fact, Dunbar’s Law is a well-known social network theory that argues that cognitive limitations restrict humans to around 150 meaningful relationships. However, with the rise of social media platforms, our networks have long surpassed these limits. On LinkedIn alone most users have 500+ connections. This article shortlists top personal CRMs; features, pricing and limitations.

What is a Personal CRM?

A personal CRM is a tool designed to help individuals manage and nurture their personal and professional relationships. While other types of CRMs often emphasise transactional aspects like sales and customer support, personal CRMs help scale meaningful relationship-building. They centralise and streamline contact management with unique features such as integrations with social media platforms, note-taking and reminders to stay in touch.

Who Can Use a Personal CRM?

Personal CRMs tend to follow a B2C model, targeting individual professionals who most strongly associate with Porter Gale’s motto: “Your network is your net worth”. These users want to organise their own network without a team and may include professionals like entrepreneurs, freelancers, consultants and journalists. Personal CRMs help manage and build more meaningful relationships, beyond the 150 limit defined by Dunbar’s Law. Given that most professionals’ networks have long exceeded Dunbar’s numbers, it becomes extremely difficult to manage relationships at scale without a contact management software.

Which Features Do Personal CRMs Offer?

Most personal CRMs streamline relationship management by combining the following features:

Contact management: personal CRMs should always support the organisation of your personal and professional relationships. Bonus features include automatic duplicate detection and merging, expanded contact search using keywords e.g. “UI/UX Designer” and smart grouping of related contacts.

Note-taking: essential for remembering key takeaways from conversations and personal details, which help you be more thoughtful and genuine.

Personalised messaging: customisable templates and Chat GPT-generated messages are great time-saving features that enable you to scale communications while maintaining a personal touch.

Follow-up reminders: reaching out on important occasions or at regular intervals can nurture long-lasting professional relationships. With personal CRMs you can set reach-out reminders for individuals or entire contact groups.

Integrations with social media platforms: a handful of personal CRMs sync with LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Contacts to import relevant additional contact information such as profile photos, birthdays, job position, etc. The vast majority of CRMs, including no-code CRMs like Notion, lack social media integrations.

Top 4 Personal CRMs

To help you navigate the personal CRM product offers, we’ve cherry-picked the 4 most sophisticated personal CRMs:

1. Dex

Pros: integrates with LinkedIn, Facebook and emails to import all your connections and calendar events. Contacts are automatically grouped by industry based on their LinkedIn bio and can be visualised on a world map. Dex also offers a dashboard that summarises daily to-dos and reach-out reminders. The software is available on desktop and as a mobile app, which has the bonus feature of scanning business cards.

‍Cons: users have to manually input most contact details excluding name, bio and birthday, and the grouping by industry feature is not entirely reliable. You can make lists, but cannot build project pipelines useful to manage work streams like sales, fundraising, recruiting etc.

‍Pricing: Monthly $20, Annual $144

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2. Clay.earth

‍Pros: Clay’s social media integrations (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook) are the most advanced we’ve seen. In particular, from LinkedIn it imports contact details like career experiences, skills and education. Additionally, Clay tracks bio and location changes on Twitter and summarises all email interactions. The personal CRM also offers advanced contact search functionality and generates messages from suggested prompts e.g. friendly catching up request.

‍Cons: Clay’s integrations with social media platforms are only available for Mac and iOS. Sorry to my fellow Android users 🙁. It also doesn’t recognise a large amount of contact duplicates.

‍Pricing: Freemium (1000 contacts free), Monthly $20, Annual $120

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3. Kinship

‍Pros: Kinship integrates with iOS to sync your calendar, email and contacts. Similarly to Dex, the home page reminds you of upcoming events, contacts to reconnect with and special occasions. Two unique features are the voice recording option for your notes and the ability to share a contact’s details with a QR code.

‍Cons: offered exclusively on the App Store and only integrated with Apple Mail, no desktop version available. The integrations are rudimentary, so you have to manually add all details beyond contact names.

‍Pricing: Monthly $6.99, Annual $62.99

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4. Covve

‍Pros: the only CRM to provide a news tab per contact with articles relevant to their interests and industry. You can log your interactions, set up reminders and reach out via SMS, Whatsapp or email with in-app AI-generated messages. Based on the contact management goals you set, Covve tracks your performance and delivers regular networking analytics reports.

‍Cons: only available as an app that syncs your phone’s contacts, so manual information input beyond their phone number is required. The personalised news tab only works if you invest a lot of time adding relevant details such as employer and personal interests.

‍Pricing: Freemium (20 contacts free), Monthly $12.99, Annual $120

What If Personal CRMs Aren’t Enough?

Although the offerings of a personal CRM can be sufficient for some individuals, there are a number of drawbacks to keep in mind:

No team collaboration: users of personal CRMs are typically restricted to independently managing their own network, and cannot invite team members or other collaborators. This is usually not possible even for users of the same personal CRM.
Lack of data enrichment: personal CRMs target a very broad audience, so they are not tailored for industry-specific use-cases. For example, while focusing on individuals’ contact management, personal CRMs neglect data enrichment features for companies like logo, URL, location etc. These may be essential for users like angel investors and headhunters.
Limited CRM features: by only specialising in importing and structuring contact information, personal CRMs have very basic CRM functionality. They typically don’t offer features for project management, marketing automation, lead tracking, sales forecasting or reporting.

Why Choose Tiva Instead?

Some users quickly outgrow their personal CRM given its limitations. Tiva offers the best of both worlds - extensive integrations for contact management as well as advanced CRM functionality. You benefit from the refined relationship management tools of a personal CRM, without needing to sacrifice team collaboration, data enrichment and standard CRM functionality.

Here are 5 features on Tiva that give you a competitive edge relative to personal CRMs:

Team collaboration: manage your private and company networks in one place with granular permission control and ownership. Work with colleagues on shared lists of contacts while keeping other lists private.
Sophisticated integrations: seamlessly integrate with LinkedIn, private and company emails, calendars, and phone contacts. Duplicate contacts are detected automatically and can be merged with one click.
Advanced search: search using custom or auto-generated tags, industry, location, calendar events or other keywords to instantly find relevant contacts or companies.
Dynamic lists: define key parameters to group contacts into smart lists, that update themselves automatically as new contacts are added to your network. For example, you can group everyone with the keyword “Strategy Consultant” into a “Management Consultants” list. Tiva will suggest new contacts to be added there who match the criteria.
Notifications: proactive alerts and updates on key changes in the companies and contacts you want to track e.g. job change, increase in number of employees, fundraising milestones, etc.

Get ready for a world of flexible team collaboration, expanded integrations, advanced search features and a CRM that's as cool as you are. It's time to upgrade to Tiva and rock your contact management game! Join the waitlist for early access!