PeopleBlade compared with Monica

What Monica does

Monica is an open-source personal CRM started in 2017. It gives each person a record with notes, journal entries, activities such as meals and calls, reminders, relationships to other people, gifts and debts, and custom fields. The code is AGPL v3: run it yourself with Docker or a PHP setup, or pay for the hosted version at $9 a month or $90 a year, both with unlimited contacts.

Monica imports vCard and CSV files and flags duplicates before merging. Each contact page offers a vCard export, a CardDAV endpoint can serve the whole address book to a compatible client, and a full account export is available. The pricing page treats export as a right rather than a paid feature.

The part a reader needs to weigh: the newest stable release, v4.1.2, shipped in May 2024. The project's own site announces a rebuilt Monica expected before the end of 2026, and the repository's newest tags are 5.0.0 beta pre-releases. Choosing Monica today means running the 4.x line as it is or waiting for the rebuild; Monica says a migration path for existing accounts is planned.

• Monica's own site
• monicahq/monica on GitHub

What PeopleBlade does

PeopleBlade keeps the contacts you already have in one SQLite file on your computer. It imports macOS Contacts, Google Contacts, Beeper, WhatsApp, iMessage interaction metadata without message text, and your official LinkedIn, Instagram, and X exports. Each detail records where it came from, and two records join only on a matching email, phone, or account ID you approve.

You keep private Markdown notes beside each person, with history, and they are never synced or uploaded. Your agent works the book through peopleblade commands that all print JSON, and a Soulscrape packet hands one person's background to an agent without exposing your other contacts. An optional cloud sync copies a listed set of contact details to a private dashboard, and optional hosted research costs prepaid credits per contact.

Public CLI · npm 0.6.0. Install it with bun add --global @hraness/peopleblade@0.6.0 on macOS or Linux.

• Read the contact-book guide
• See every supported source

How they compare

Monica is a web app you put your relationships into. PeopleBlade is a local book built out of the accounts and archives your relationships already live in. The table maps the difference row by row.

Moving from Monica

There is no Monica importer in PeopleBlade, and there is no generic CSV or vCard import either. The workable path runs through macOS Contacts: get your Monica contacts into the Mac's address book, then let PeopleBlade sync it. Names, organizations, job titles, birthdays, email addresses, and phone numbers carry over. Journal entries, activities, reminders, relationships, gifts, debts, and Monica's notes do not; they exist only in Monica's own export.

1. In Monica's settings, download the full data export and keep it somewhere safe. It is the only complete copy of your journal, activities, reminders, and relationships.
2. Bring the contacts into macOS Contacts. For a small book, open each Monica contact, use Export as vCard, and open the resulting .vcf files on the Mac. For a larger book, add Monica's CardDAV account in Contacts instead: the base URL Monica shows under Settings, DAV Resources (https://app.monicahq.com/dav on hosted Monica), your Monica email as the username, and an API token from Settings, API as the password.
3. Run peopleblade contacts sync --json to read the local address book into PeopleBlade, then peopleblade stats --json to see what landed.
4. Run peopleblade identity suggest --limit 25 --json to review likely duplicates, decide each one with peopleblade identity decide TOKEN accept --note "reason" --json, and reverse any accepted join later with peopleblade identity separate DECISION_ID --json.
5. Rewrite whatever you still need as PeopleBlade notes: reminders to call someone, the context of past conversations, or anything else that lived in Monica's journal.

This route needs a Mac, because contacts sync reads the macOS address book. On Linux there is no equivalent path: a vCard file alone is not something PeopleBlade imports, so Linux users leaving Monica are limited to the supported live sources, such as Google Contacts.

• Review identity joins
• Monica's CardDAV guide

Which one fits

Choose Monica when you want a self-contained web app for documenting relationships: journal entries, call logs, reminders, and records you maintain by hand, on infrastructure you control or at $9 a month hosted. Its open question is timing, since the stable release predates the current rebuild.

Choose PeopleBlade when your contacts already exist across your phone, messaging apps, and export archives and you want them unified in one private, free book that you and your agent can both work with. If the rebuild gap is what pushed you to look around, the export route above moves the address book; the relationship history stays in the full export you keep.

Is PeopleBlade a replacement for Monica?

For the address-book part, it can be. PeopleBlade has no journal, activities, reminders, gifts, debts, or relationship linking, so anyone who used Monica to document a life rather than unify contacts will miss those pieces.

Does PeopleBlade import vCard or CSV files?

No. Imports come through named sources: macOS Contacts, Google Contacts, Beeper, WhatsApp, and the official LinkedIn, Instagram, and X exports. Leaving Monica means going through macOS Contacts by vCard or CardDAV, then running peopleblade contacts sync.

Can I run Monica and PeopleBlade at the same time?

Yes. Adding Monica's CardDAV account to macOS Contacts keeps the same people in both places: you edit in Monica, and peopleblade contacts sync picks the changes up on the next run.

How do the licenses differ?

Monica's source is AGPL v3 on GitHub, so you can inspect, modify, and host it. PeopleBlade's public CLI is MIT-licensed on npm; you can inspect the published package but there is no public source repository.

Which is more private?

Different trusts. Self-hosted Monica keeps your data on a server you administer, and hosted Monica keeps it on theirs under a no-resale pledge. PeopleBlade keeps the whole book on your own computer and sends nothing anywhere unless you turn on sync or hosted research.