Contact management software that keeps people, companies and conversations together

Contact management software keeps every person and company you deal with in one shared list, together with what has happened with them. In Customermates, a contact is linked to the organizations they work for, their deals and tasks, the teammates assigned to them, and the email addresses and messaging handles you reach them on.

These records and links work on every plan, self-hosted included. The conversations themselves need the unified inbox, which starts on Pro in Customermates Cloud.

What a contact and an organization hold

The field types are Text, Formatted text, Number, Money, Yes or no, Date, Date and time, Date range, Date and time range, Single choice, Multiple choice, Email, Phone, Web address and Member. A landline or a mobile number without WhatsApp goes into a Phone field. Notes are a Formatted text field and can hold tables and images.

One email address or handle can belong to several records, for example a contact and an organization. Global search (Cmd/Ctrl+K) finds contacts by name, channel value or linked organization; custom fields are reached through filters.

Organizations as accounts

If you manage accounts rather than single people, the organization is the account. In Configure you can rename any list for the whole workspace: open it, change Name and Plural name under General and save, for example Organizations to Accounts and Contacts to Clients.

An account setup needs three pieces. A Single choice field Role on contacts says who decides, who handles the day-to-day work and who sits in accounting. A Date field Contract end on organizations holds the renewal date. And the deals board, grouped by organization, shows each account's number of deals and their total value. Customermates calculates no account health, churn risk or score; if your team rates accounts, keep the rating in a Single Select field.

A worked setup for a five-person consultancy

1. Name the lists

   In Configure, rename Contacts to Clients and Organizations to Accounts if that is how your team talks.

2. Add four fields

   On contacts: Relationship (Single choice: Prospect, Active client, Past client, Referral partner) and Role (Decision maker, Day-to-day, Accounting). On organizations: Contract end (Date) and Source (Single choice: Referral, Event, Website, Outbound).

3. Save three personal views

   "My active clients": Assigned set to yourself and Relationship is Active client. "No organization yet": Organizations has none, for cleaning up after an import. "Gone quiet": Updated at older than 90 days.

4. Switch one view to the board

   Group contacts by Relationship and drag a card from Prospect to Active client when someone signs.

5. Decide who sees what

   In the role editor, set Contacts read access to Assigned for people who should only see their own clients, or All for everyone.

"Gone quiet" looks at the last edit, not the last message. Saved views are personal, so each colleague sets the same filters and saves their own view. The records guide documents every control.

Moving contacts in from Excel, Outlook or Google

1. Export and convert

   Outlook and Google Contacts deliver their download as a comma-separated text file (Google also as vCard). Open it in Excel and save it as an .xlsx workbook, because Customermates does not import CSV files.

2. Clean up first

   Remove duplicate rows and split the list into one workbook for organizations and one for contacts. An import cannot be undone.

3. Import organizations

   On Organizations, open More actions › Add from file, choose the workbook, map the columns and import.

4. Import contacts

   Map the name, the email column to the Channels field, the company column to Organizations and the rest to your fields. Failed rows are listed with their reason.

5. Correct in bulk

   Export the list, edit it in Excel and import it again as Existing records, so it updates them instead of adding new ones.

One file currently takes up to 10,000 rows and 10 MB. The import adds channels to new contacts only. There is no ongoing sync, so after the import your Outlook or Google address book and Customermates are separate lists.

Conversations on the contact (Pro and higher)

In Customermates Cloud on Pro or higher, you connect Gmail, Outlook, IMAP, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram or Telegram, and conversations are matched to contacts through their channels. When an unknown address writes in, click Link on that participant in the inbox and pick or create the contact. Every conversation with that address, not only this one, then shows on the contact's timeline.

You see conversations from your own channels and those teammates share with the CRM. On Business a whole channel can be shared, so several colleagues' conversations with one client sit on one timeline. On Starter and when self-hosting, channels are stored and searchable, but there is no inbox.

AI on your contacts: Mate and MCP

In Customermates Cloud, Mate, the hosted assistant, works on contacts in plain language and uses hosted AI credits:

Create contacts for everyone in this email signature and link them to the organization Hartmann Consulting. Set Role to Decision maker for the managing director and Day-to-day for the others. Check first whether any of them already exist.

Mate creates and updates records without asking for approval; deleting a contact asks every time. A routine, also Cloud only, can run an instruction every Monday, such as "List every account whose Contract end falls in the next 60 days. Do not change any records."

On every plan, self-hosted included, your own AI client such as Claude or ChatGPT can search, create and update contacts through MCP, with 53 tools, billed by your AI provider. Webhooks fire on record.created, record.updated and record.deleted for the Contacts list.

Who sees which contacts, and where the data lives

Each role sets read access per list to All, Assigned or None, plus Create, Edit and Delete. Export needs read access, import needs Create. A record's change history shows for roles with read access All on Audit Log, such as Admin. Permissions apply to whole lists, not to single fields.

In Customermates Cloud, the production database is configured in the AWS Frankfurt region. Service providers, including US companies, are listed on the subprocessors page, and a data processing agreement is available. Customermates holds no certification. If contact data must stay on your own servers, run the AGPL core self-hosted, without the inbox and without Mate.

What it does not do

• No sync with Outlook, Google or phone address books in either direction.
• No merge function. Clean duplicates before importing.
• No tags. For several values per record, use a Multiple choice field.
• No file attachments on records. Message attachments stay in their inbox thread, not on the contact.
• No reminders, due dates or birthday alerts. Store dates in custom fields and let a Cloud routine list the ones that have passed.
• No newsletters, mass email, sequences or data enrichment.
• No mobile app. Customermates runs in the browser.

Client files in therapy, care or social work that hold health data belong in specialised practice software, not in a general CRM.

Which kind of tool fits

Customermates publishes this page. Vendor details were checked on 8 October 2026 on the official pages listed at the end.

For more options side by side, read the client database software comparison.

What it costs

A solo consultant on Starter pays €12 a month, with 1 routine. Five people on Pro pay €145 a month and get the inbox with 1 connected account per user. Billing is monthly and per user, never per contact. Each Cloud plan includes monthly hosted AI credits per active user; see pricing.

Frequently asked questions

Third-party details checked on 8 October 2026: Outlook contacts, Outlook export, Google Contacts export, HubSpot pricing, Zoho CRM free edition, CentralStationCRM prices, Dynamics 365 Sales pricing.