When I first discovered Monica two years ago, I thought it was a kind of social network, but the truth it was something much different and a very useful social tool. The idea you can think about it like a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software but to manage your friends and family instead of customers. People today are discovering the negative effects of social networks, and that there is nothing better than face-to-face social interactions, even if we are actually obliged to avoid such interactions due to Covid19 measures worldwide.
Monica is a web tool that will help you organize the social interactions with your loved ones. Can you remember the names of the children of all your friends? Can you remember the wedding anniversary of your brother? Can you tell the last time you called your grandmother and what you talked about? Monica lets you quickly and easily log all those information so you can be a better friend, family member or spouse.
The only issue with Monica is probably the personal data that you will share about your contacts, so if you find it problematic you can simply install your own copy of Monica, and that’s all ! Otherwise you can use the hosted edition of the software for $9 monthly with unlimited contacts, or the free edition which is limited to 10 contacts only.
With Monica you can keep track of everything that’s important about their friends and family. Like the activities with them. When you last called someone and what you talked about. It will help you remember the name and the age of their kids. It can also remind you to call someone you haven’t talked to in a while.
Some of the features of Monica include :
- Add and manage contacts
- Define relationships between contacts
- Reminders
- Automatic reminders for birthdays
- Stay in touch with a contact by sending reminders at a given interval
- Management of debts
- Ability to add notes to a contact
- Ability to record how you met someone
- Management of activities with a contact
- Management of tasks
- Management of gifts given and received and ideas for gifts
- Management of addresses and all the different ways to contact someone
- Management of contact field types
- Management of a contact’s pets
- Basic journal
- Ability to record how your day went
- Upload documents and photos
- Export and import of data
- Export contacts as vCards
- Ability to define custom genders
- Ability to define custom activity types
- Ability to favorite contacts
- Track conversations on social media or SMS
- Multiple users
- Tags to organize contacts
- Ability to define what section should appear on the contact sheet
- Multiple currencies
- Multiple languages
- An API that covers most of the data
In addition to the hosted edition, you can find detailed instructions to get Monica installed on your own server, it requires : PHP 7.2+ or newer, HTTP server with PHP support (eg: Apache, Nginx, Caddy), Composer, and a MySQL database. Otherwise you can deploy straight on a PaaS platform like: Platform.sh or Heroku.
Monica is written in Laravel and VueJs and released open source under an AGPL-3.0 License. More information at https://www.monicahq.com/
