15
votes
What is everyone using for managing their contacts?
Hi everyone, I'm struggling with contact management and was wondering if anyone could recommend some good solutions. My Google Contacts and iOS contact management has become unmanageable and I personally find them very awkward to use.
Carddav through my nextcloud
I use the old school Carddav service that my email provider (Fastmail) provides me. It has been working for me for ages, sync in all my devices and allows me to use apps such as Cardhop flawlessly.
Same on my end (carddav via Fastmail). I sync to the global contact list on my phone using DAVx5 so that contacts are available to other apps (messaging, non-Fastmail email clients, etc.).
This has worked pretty flawlessly and hasn't given me any issues.
Oh amazing, I read a good review of them as an email and calendar service as well
I've been very pleased with their email service, particularly with the API integration allowing me to generate masked email addresses quickly and easily via BitWarden/VaultWarden.
This is a syncing solution. But from OP’s post, it looks like he’s asking about more powerful client apps rather.
If you’re at a point where the default contact management apps aren’t sufficient, you might want to look at a personal CRM like Monica.
I can’t really give an opinion on these since the Android/iOS default apps have always been more than sufficient for me. But I’ve read good things about it.
I use iOS as my contact database but in order to be successful I've had to disable Gmail from automatically adding contacts to Gmail and I also do not sync my Gmail contacts to my iOS device.
This works for me but doesn't provide the greatest functionality at times such as when using a desktop computer and MS Outlook. In that situation, I'm still pulling contact info from my phone and entering it to Outlook if it's not already there.
It's not the most efficient, but I do have a single source of clean contacts that I maintain which has worked for me.
I use Obsidian.md - that way I can also take notes about each contact and integrate them with other notes!
Self-hosted CardDAV server (Radicale, which I also use to self-host calendars and tasks). CardDAV is very widely supported, and so if you self-host anything, it's worth adding; or a hosted solution like Fastmail is easy to use.
On the client side, I use the default contacts app (via DAVx5) on my phone and Thunderbird on my laptop. I could in theory do some fairly sophisticated stuff by direct manipulation of the contact database, but in practice all I really need is for it to store phone numbers and email addresses.