What is a personal CRM program?
Unlike business-oriented CRM solutions, personal CRM applications are minimal versions of CRM aimed to help individual users organize their contacts.
It is challenging to keep track or manually organize your contacts, events, and notes.
A Personal CRM system is a minimal CRM app that helps you organize your contact, events, journals, and appointments in one software package.
Some personal CRM solutions took it further by managing family members, tasks, chores, shopping lists, and more.
Some may disagree with the term CRM "Customer Relationship Management", and they prefer to call it PRM "Personal Relationship Management", a solution.
What is a personal information manager (PIM)?
Personal information managers are another term that describes a similar app that aims to help users organize their private information and records like notes, contacts, and events.
In this article, we highlight the best personal CRM and assistant software that anyone can use.
1- Monica
Monica is our first pick on this list, simply because it is a miniature version of a complete CRM solution.
With Monica personal CRM, you can manage your contacts, events, relations, contact information, and log all important events and records.
It also offers a debt manager, tool to manage your pets, helps you record information about family members, activities, gifts, and ideas.
Monica CRM is a web-based system written with PHP and uses MySQL (MariaDB).
2- Personal Management System
This one is a feature-rich open-source personal assistant and management system for busy individuals. As a web-based system, it can be installed on a remote or a local server and allows people access from anywhere.
The Personal Management System app comes with a rich informative dashboard and a long list of features that you can access from the sidebar.
Installation of this app may seem easy for experienced technical users, but it is not hard or easy for non-technical users.
3- Personal CRM
Originally built for personal usage, Personal CRM is a minimal CRM open-source system, built to manage contacts, interactions, and contact cards.
Personal CRM supports importing Trello cards directly to the system.
The system is built with Django the popular Python web framework. The developer is working on new features and updates, so stay tuned for the next updates.
It can be installed using Docker with simple commands.
4- My Personal RM (PRM) Android
If you are an avid user of Android phones and/ or tablets, then this app is for you. It is a native skeletal personal relationship manager for Android devices.
My Personal RM helps you to organize your contact, relationships, add notes, use tags, set reminders, and offers a simple graphical timeline.
You can download the application for free from Google Play Store, or the source code from GitHub.
The main downside is that it did not receive any update since 2019.
5- NextCloud
NextCloud is a modular, open-source, self-hosted cloud solution for individuals, families, teams, and enterprises.
NextCloud offers more than file uploading, storing, and sharing, it has a vast ecosystem filled with official and community extensions for almost anything.
With a simple NextCloud setup, you can manage your contacts, notes, events, reminders, files, and even office documents.
NextCloud comes with a rich set of apps for desktops and mobiles.
6- Osmo
Osmo is a lightweight personal organizer application that many Linux users use and love. It helps to manage contacts, address book, calendar, personal tasks, record notes, and journals.
Osmo offers a private encrypted backup, a simple easy-to-use, and highly customizable interface, and detailed task with attached notes.
7- Thunderbird
Thunderbird is a free multi-platform desktop email client, contact manager, and calendar (with extension) application for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Thunderbird can be transformed into a rich personal information organizer with the help of dozens of extensions listed for free download.
We highly recommend Thunderbird for non-technical users on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
8- TiddlyWiki
TiddlyWiki is a highly customizable, free, and open-source one-file wiki system. TiddlyWiki is my favorite tool in this list, simply because I modify it as I require.
You can use it as a note-taking app, a task manager, project manager, a simple to-do list, or even a handy tool for writing a book.
While it may lack many built-in features, like a built-in calendar, and sometimes it requires some coding and modifications, it is a powerful personal organizer tool that can work for almost anything.
9- Evolution
Evolution is a complete personal information management suite that comes as a part of the Gnome desktop.
It is an email client, task manager, contact manager with compatibility with Google Docs, a built-in spell checker, and several plugins to extend its functionalities.
If you are looking for a complete Linux-based personal information system for your Gnome desktop then Evolution is your best choice.
10- Kontact
Kontact helps users to organize their contact, address book, tasks, emails, manage multiple calendars, records notes, and journals, and manage dozens of feeds in an organized fashion.
Kontact is a part of KDE desktop for Linux systems, however, it can be installed for Windows systems as well.
11- Personal CRM Studio Starter for Sanity
Sanity is an open-source platform for structured data which comes with a studio for building rich apps.
Although it is meant for experienced developers, we attached a personal CRM app sample that you can run with Sanity.
This app is a personal CRM studio starter that helps the user track their people, plan and record events, define custom structures, and build a customizable informative dashboard.
You can download the app sample and customize it with Sanity, then deploy it on Netlify in simple steps.
Final note
Personal information organizers and personal CRM apps help users keep track and organize their contact, events, tasks, and notes. They are essential for all sorts of users, especially technical ones.
As we listed our top picks for you. If you know of any other open-source, free programs that we did not mention here, let us know.