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Ask HN: In 2024 what's the best way to manage contacts?

by raleighm on 10/19/24, 4:41 AM with 61 comments

• by LinuxBender on 10/19/24, 2:32 PM

  I can not speak for others or the consensus but since the 90's I have always just used a plain text file with simple delimiters in a format that I understand so that I can massage the output format to match whatever needs the information. This has worked great for me and is simple to back up and newer versions make this easy to get a good compression ratio of a single tarball of every version. Multiple files as many people have passed away and a few people are no longer friends but I keep older versions to remind me of them.

• by al_borland on 10/22/24, 11:46 AM

  I just use Apple’s Contacts app. I’ve been using it since 2003 (it was called Address Book on OS X back then).

  21 years ago I used it with Apple’s iSync to sync contacts with my flip phone. Later with my iPhone.

  I have some lists set up to sort out family, work, etc. I just looked and this can _finally_ be done on iOS as well. It was a Mac-only feature for far too long.

  Inside the Apple ecosystem everything assumes use of the Contacts app, so I’ve never really had to think about using anything else. Back when AIM was a thing, I could use Address Book to add people’s screen names and they’d show up in iChat (AIM is dead, but I still have their old screen names in my Contacts app). It supports adding social profiles, URLs, and creating relationships. I can add their birthdays and they show up in the Calendar. It’s always been pretty seamless and hasn’t left me wanting. It’s been pretty nice, but I wouldn’t call myself a heavy user.

  At work I don’t manage contacts. We have Outlook with Exchange and I just use the directory of everyone to send the occasional email. LinkedIn is just LinkedIn; I rarely look at it.

• by AStonesThrow on 10/19/24, 5:33 AM

  Like which apps and which contexts?

  I exclusively use Google Contacts. I have 3 devices and Contacts adequately manages everything in the cloud. It also adequately syncs to Outlook-style contacts, but I barely use anything in the Outlook ecosystem except for email itself.

  I find Google Contacts still quite deficient in a few respects:

  As with Outlook, it's clearly geared towards personal use (even in the enterprise-class Workspaces) and each individual Contact is meant to represent one individual person who's optionally associated with one individual business only.

  This makes trouble for many aspects. I rarely contact individuals who aren't associated with businesses. But within a business, there are usually multiple contacts needed to organize all the departments I interface with. Many do not have personal names or one person! They are, e.g. "Customer Service", or "Billing". Also, many contacts involve Robo-SMS, for security codes, or notifications, and those are paramount to be stored as Contacts, because of their sensitive nature, I want them whitelisted and identified and prioritized properly.

  So sometimes I cram more than one contact into an item, with multiple phone numbers/email addresses. But I've found that the tagging doesn't work so well; usually Contacts will "forget" that I tagged them as "Custom - <some string>" and blank them out. And that's uncool.

  It is not possible to make folders or containers of groups of contacts (other than tagging them). There is no inheritance or linking of data. So if I have 6 contacts from "example.com" they are all 100% independent of one another, even if they share data. So I must replicate that data and carefully update them all in unison. There's no syncing or associating them.

  I don't know any elegant solution for a single app or a single format, that still probably needs to conform closely to the .VCF type exports. But there clearly need to be richer features for organizing and linking data, for ease of maintenance, because I do maintain hundreds of contacts, even active ones, and it's a burden to keep them up-to-date.

  The Google integration helps a little bit; it's good when someone's profile avatar populates automatically, or it pulls in data from Maps. More of that, please!

• by zxexz on 10/22/24, 2:45 AM

  I have a master sqlite file with an arbitrary schema that is constantly evolving. I go hard with the constraints and primary keys - so hard, in fact, it's nigh-impossible to add a new contact without cascading changes. I'm always eager to keep my contacts, so this has kept my pretty sharp with sqlite.

• by tensorfloww on 10/22/24, 1:37 AM

  Word of warning: I tried Marissa Mayer's Sunshine contacts and it nuked my phone's contacts. Luckily I had a backup vcard export from way back I could restore from.

  Others I've tried:

  * Clay (https://clay.earth) is a great option for "batteries included". Based on what you described, it can pull from Google/Outlook, Linkedin, and messaging apps. Doesn't get all the duplicates but gets close enough, and they offer carddav for 2-way sync to phone.

  * Monica (http://monicahq.com) works for more barebones and self-hosted. They were working on a new version, not sure if it was ever merged into main product. I tried it once and it ended up being more of a gift and birthdays-focused notes app for me, but YMMV.

  * Otherwise a Notion doc or spreadsheet might be enough! Especially if you start with an export from something else.

• by RyanHaraki on 10/20/24, 1:34 AM

  I use Clay (https://clay.earth/) but haven't used it much as I found the search was lacking (my primary use case is searching for contacts that fulfill X criteria)

• by kyletns on 10/22/24, 2:09 AM

  I use Fastmail which has CardDAV syncing, and generally it's worked great. One or twice I've noticed it stops syncing and I have to remove + re-add the sync profile, but generally speaking I've been pretty happy with the results.

• by froggerexpert on 10/22/24, 6:27 AM

  CardDAV.

  I host this end-to-end encrypted on https://www.etesync.com/ .

  I sync to my Android phone with the etesync app.

  I use the Android contacts app to manage details.

  I don't keep detailed records. Just contact details, how I know them, name of children, etc.

• by dizhn on 10/22/24, 11:37 AM

  I use nextcloud contacts. I did try a few things before it but nothing worked as well as nextcloud. I couple this with Davdroid on Android. It can be set as the default address and calendar source. Highly recommend davdroid.

• by sandreas on 10/19/24, 7:50 AM

  Google may be a privacy issue... So I would love to have the possibility to prevent anyone putting my info in their contacts in Google.

  I personally use a paid E-Mail service (mailbox.org) and a self hosted nextcloud.

  The APP myphoneexplorer can be used to sync offline.

• by zvr on 10/23/24, 9:50 PM

  I look every few years to see whether there is a solution for me, but unfortunately I have not found anything.

  Among all the people I interact with, the only set of contacts that I do not need to save their info is co-workers in the same company; the enterprise-wide LDAP (ActiveDirectory in this case) has everything.

  My functional requirements that I have not found anything to satisfy them:

  I have different devices and clients, and some contacts only make sense on one (or some) of the devices. It would be ideal if the sync process could use some group/tag and operate on a subset of all data. I have not found this anywhere and essentially gave up on this, willing to live with having all data in all places.

  Another point is data shared amongst contacts: many employees of company X share the same work address; or married couple John and Jane share the same home address and the same landline phone. If I duplicate the info and this phone rings me up, which name should be displayed as caller?

  In the end, I use a completely self-made setup. Data are entered via text files in a custom markup, then translated into graph data (RDF to be exact) and stored in a data store. Export to VCF (among other formats) helps with importing the data into a CardDAV server, from where all device/client sync.

  I would love to find something that will allow me to abandon this setup, but nothing is there yet.

• by keizo on 10/22/24, 1:42 AM

  I use my note app for casual personal crm. No outside sync features, but entry is easy if you’re looking for some variation of simple.

  https://grugnotes.com

• by GianFabien on 10/19/24, 9:03 AM

  I use a very low-tech approach. A spreadsheet (LibreOffice) with name, position, company and phone number in the leftmost columns and then a column for each form of contact. Copy and paste into the various apps and over-time the apps build their individual contact lists. People don't change their identities often enough for me to want to automate synchronization across the various apps.\

  If you are contacting more than a hundred or so persons, then you are running bulk emails which is a different issue.

• by offmycloud on 10/22/24, 1:56 AM

  My source of truth is a self-hosted Radicale CardDAV server with git revision control of vCard data in the backend. Clients are anything that speaks CardDAV, including Thunderbird or DAVX on Android. Raw vCard data is only a "git clone" away, and is an input to scripts to handle birthdays and mailing list updates.

• by dingensundso on 10/22/24, 5:22 AM

  I use my Nextcloud and sync via CardDAV (DAVx5 on mobile, Thunderbird on desktop).

• by elseleigh on 10/22/24, 6:01 PM

  I have a CardDAV server on my NAS and sync contacts across all my devices. I've been using this for more than ten years now with all types of phones, tablets and computers, and it's not let me down.

• by JohnFen on 10/19/24, 12:21 PM

  I keep things very simple. I have a Single Source of Truth for all my contacts. Right now, I'm using a contact app on my phone for this, but over the years I've used different things. The exact method isn't important to me, what's important is having an authoritative contact list.

  I don't sync anything with anything. I look up a contact and enter whatever detail I need manually wherever it's needed. I lean a lot on the frequently-used autocomplete lots of applications have, too, but that's a convenience that I don't take as authoritative.

• by noman-land on 10/21/24, 10:23 PM

  Nextcloud CardDav.

• by taholder on 10/22/24, 5:45 PM

  Our product https://contactzlila.com is a b2b solution providing team based CardDAV. It's perhaps not quite whay you're looking for but we have a new version coming early 2025 which should tick all the boxes. Feel free to sign up for a free trial now and drop me a line if you have any questions! Google luck in your Contact organization journey!

• by d_burfoot on 10/22/24, 3:42 AM

  Since other people are recommending home-brewed solutions, I will mention my platform WebWidgets.io, which allows you to create lightweight webapps using vanilla JS and sync the data to SQLite DBs. It would be very easy to create a simple contact DB that has all the features you need and none of the bells+whistles that you don't care about.

• by yochem on 10/22/24, 7:57 AM

  A bit off topic but I absolutely HATE that the Contacts app in ios feels like a one-day hobby project. How is it still so america-centric? Why can't I sort my contacts in Dutch sorting order? Why can't I add other important dates (like their day of death) that also shows up in my calendar?

• by G_o_D on 10/22/24, 3:39 AM

  """DAIRY""" with attached Sticky Notes, Bussiness cards Manual Bookkeeping far better For digital JSON Structure better rather than csv or spreadsheets Jsons are plain text, on shell can parse with jq, can parse inside browser devtools manipulate add edit delete

• by elric on 10/23/24, 9:28 AM

  I don't, nor do I particularly want to. My phone contacts exist locally on my phone, my email contacts exist in Thunderbird, etc. There is no benefit for me in centralizing those. They are backed up along with the rest of the rest of the data.

• by zeagle on 10/22/24, 2:21 AM

  I switched my self hosted baikal and previous nextcloud to icloud. I need redundancy and persistence if I pass away for my family that uses iPhone. I manage it with emclient and my android phone (sync'd via davx5). I find I am able to edit what I need to between those.

• by ajr0 on 10/21/24, 11:00 PM

  I plan to use MonicaHQ , I failed to self host behind a reverse proxy and the effort was no longer prioritized but I would be interested if anyone else is using it.

  https://www.monicahq.com/blog

• by txtsd on 10/22/24, 2:04 AM

  I wrote a scraper to create vCard contacts from Facebook a few years ago when I still used Facebook.

  https://github.com/txtsd/fb2vcard

• by client4 on 10/22/24, 6:01 AM

  I've been planning to use https://twenty.com/ but it's on the Todo list, so I can't comment as to how great it is.

• by calini on 10/22/24, 1:41 PM

  I just rely on Apple's iCloud contacts, you can add people into groups if you just want to see subsets of them, and it's enough. Sometimes simple is good.

• by Brajeshwar on 10/22/24, 3:25 AM

  Here is my setup. It is always in progress, and I keep tinkering. I treat most of my approaches as an Onion Layer of abstraction, from security to privacy to contacts. My final decision factor is to answer YES to my question, “Can I walk out of this?”

  Let’s do contacts for this discussion thread.

  I’m still in the Apple ecosystem, so I let the OSes (macOS, iOS, etc.) handle that. The sync is almost seamless, or rather, this is the best of all the devils. My personal and work are intertwined; thus, it is more of a tag-ish layer of friends, acquaintances, etc. Yes, sometimes I mix the joke of friend Archetype-A with friend Archetype-B and vice versa. ;-)

  Last time I checked, my Contacts had almost 5,000 entries in there and I don’t mind this part growing. I’ve tried Dex[1] for about a year+ but found it slow. Their work seems to have slowed and stalled, while you expect them to “move beyond a tool that seems to be still in beta.” This was a few years ago, and hence I’ve no idea about their current situation.

  I also tried Monica,[2] but she do not know how to keep things in sync. The developer/team also seems to be focussing on an office suite that has been “Coming Soon in 2002” since 2021.[3] If you want to try out Monica and see if this fits, I suggest spinning one quickly with PikaPods[4] for less than $2 a month.

  Now, I’m trying out Clay[5] for broader outreach and staying in touch with people with whom I’ve interacted or connected via the networks that I was and am part of.

  For the closer and final few inner layers of my Onion of Contacts, I use a simple spreadsheet inspired by Derek Sivers[6] and Jakob Greenfeld.[7] This is where I have the people with whom I can be in touch regularly (monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, and yearly). This is not very strict, and I tend to have these as recurring tasks in my calendar, along with my usual digital chores. The spreadsheet's contact list will ideally be between 20-100 at max. These are the ones I call/write/text regularly, wish/attend birthdays, parties, remember anecdotes, their family, etc.

  1. https://getdex.com

  2. https://www.monicahq.com

  3. https://www.officelife.io

  4. https://www.pikapods.com/apps

  5. https://clay.earth/

  6. https://sive.rs/hundreds

  7. https://jakobgreenfeld.com/stay-in-touch

• by Terretta on 10/22/24, 11:30 AM

  For your use case(s), try https://clay.earth/

• by snielson on 10/22/24, 10:42 AM

  I use Contacts+. It's not free, but it syncs Google and Microsoft contacts nicely, which is my primary need.

• by big-green-man on 10/19/24, 6:02 AM

  What apps and contexts?

  I use synching and vcard files.

• by rossant on 10/23/24, 6:27 PM

  I miss Windows Phone. It fixed this problem so nicely.

• by renewiltord on 10/22/24, 2:52 AM

  I use a personal version of Monica administered by a friend.

• by secwang on 10/22/24, 3:18 AM

  csv