The Personal CRM for the People Your Work Depends On

A personal CRM keeps one record per person you know, with notes on what you discussed and a date for the next conversation. Customermates works as one when most of your network is professional (clients, prospects, former colleagues, recruiters, collaborators) and you want your email, LinkedIn or WhatsApp conversations next to each person. If you mainly want an app on your phone that alerts you to birthdays, syncs your phone contacts or keeps a private journal about friends and family, a dedicated personal CRM such as Monica, Dex or Queue fits better.

Customermates is an open-source, AI-native CRM built in Germany for small client-facing teams. Everything on this page works for a single user.

What a personal CRM has to do

An address book knows phone numbers, a spreadsheet goes stale, and neither tells you who to call this week. A personal CRM earns its place with four jobs:

• Context: how you met, what the person is working on, what you promised to send.
• A due list: one date per person and one list sorted by it. Without that, it is an archive.
• The last conversation: it usually sits in an inbox or on LinkedIn, not in your notes.
• Your existing contacts: Google Contacts and LinkedIn export files, so the CRM has to import them.

Dex and Queue add phone apps and keep-in-touch alerts on top. Customermates does the four jobs and leaves the phone side out.

Customermates or a dedicated personal CRM?

Customermates publishes this page. Vendor details were checked on 8 October 2026 on each vendor's own website.

A personal CRM setup in Customermates

Customermates starts with five lists, and a personal setup uses four of them; you can also add your own. In Configure you can rename any list under General: Contacts to People, Deals to Opportunities, Tasks to Follow-ups. The field names below are examples.

A contact stores its channels (email address, LinkedIn, WhatsApp number, Instagram, Telegram) and one notes field; a plain phone number goes into a Phone field. A former colleague who changed jobs can stay linked to both employers.

Two saved views do the reminding

Customermates sends no reminders, so the list you open is the system:

1. Due for a check-in: contacts sorted by Next check-in, ascending. The earliest dates come first, so anyone whose date has passed is at the top.
2. Gone quiet: contacts whose Updated at date is Older than… 90 days. This filter stays relative, so the list is current whenever you open it. It reads the contact record's own update date, so update Next check-in or the notes after each conversation.

On a custom Date field, filters compare against a fixed date; only the built-in created and updated dates offer relative choices. The records guide covers filters, sorting and views.

Conversations next to each person (Pro and above)

In Customermates Cloud from Pro, the unified inbox brings in email from Gmail, Outlook or IMAP, plus LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram, and you reply on the original channel. Once a participant is linked to a contact, every conversation with that address or handle appears on the contact's timeline; an email address from your import is enough for the match.

Pro includes 1 connected account per user, so pick the one where your professional conversations happen, usually your mailbox or LinkedIn. Mailbox, LinkedIn and WhatsApp together need Business, which includes 3. Phone calls and SMS are not channels.

Meeting prep and a Monday list with Mate (Customermates Cloud)

Mate, the assistant in Customermates Cloud, uses hosted AI credits that every cloud plan includes per active user; reading the inbox needs Pro or higher. Before a coffee meeting, ask in the chat:

For the weekly list, set up a routine: choose On a schedule, Every week, Monday at 08:00, and give it instructions like these:

Find contacts whose Next check-in is today or earlier, earliest first,
at most 10. For each one, read my notes and the latest inbox
conversation, then save a short, personal check-in message as a draft
reply in that conversation. Do not send anything and do not change
any field. End with a list: name, Circle, Next check-in, draft saved
yes or no.

Starter has no inbox, so drop the draft step and the routine returns just the list. Starter includes 1 routine per user and Pro includes 5. Prefer your own AI client? Connect Claude, ChatGPT or another client through MCP, on any plan or self-hosted, with model use billed by your AI provider.

Getting your contacts in

1. Export your contacts

   Google Contacts exports a Google CSV or a vCard file. LinkedIn's "Get a copy of your data" includes your connections as a CSV file, with email addresses only for connections who allow it.

2. Save the file as .xlsx

   The import reads Excel workbooks of up to 5,000 rows and does not accept CSV, so open the file in a spreadsheet program and save it as .xlsx. A vCard file needs converting first.

3. Import

   Create Circle, Cadence and Next check-in first. Then open More actions on the Contacts list, choose Add from file and map the columns, with email addresses and LinkedIn profile links going to the contact's channels. New contacts need a first and a last name.

4. Connect one channel

   On Pro or higher, connect your mailbox or LinkedIn under Settings › Channels.

The import is a one-time copy; nothing syncs afterwards. Export works the same way, one record type at a time as an Excel workbook.

What Customermates does not do as a personal CRM

• No native mobile app and no push notifications. Pages rearrange on narrow screens, so you can look someone up in your phone's browser.
• No sync with phone contacts, Google Contacts or LinkedIn, only one-time Excel imports.
• No reminders or birthday alerts. A Birthday date field stores the date and stays silent.
• No contact enrichment: it does not look up job changes, photos or company data.
• No business-card scanning, no calendar booking and no email sequences.
• No free plan. The self-hosted open-source core costs no licence fee but has no inbox, no Mate and no routines.

If one of these is why you want a personal CRM, pick Monica, Dex or Queue from the table above.

What it costs

Prices are per user per month, billed monthly.

Twelve months on Starter add up to €144, paid month by month. The first 7 days run with Pro features and need no credit card; the monthly hosted AI credits per active user are on the pricing page. A self-hosted installation keeps contacts, views, REST, webhooks and MCP.

Where your data lives

In Customermates Cloud, the primary production database is configured in the AWS Frankfurt region, a product setting rather than a contractual residency promise. Hosting and the other subprocessors, US providers among them, are on the subprocessors page, and requests to Mate are processed by external AI providers. To keep notes about people on your own hardware, self-host the core. Customermates holds no security certification.

Frequently asked questions