web development

Monica is your own personal CRM solution

Hazem Abbas

Nov 17, 2021 — 4 min read

Ever felt trapped while managing dozens of contacts, activities, pets activities, reminders, and follow-up social events like birthdays and so on?

Well, you can easily manage all of this and more with Monica.

What is Monica?

Monica is a free, open-source self-hosted personal CRM solution to help you keep tracking all of your social events, activities, work information and strengthen your interaction with your family members.

The system excelled beyond my expectation in contact management, as it keeps track of contacts, allowing the user to add a note, state communication type, set a long call, set the contact basic information, and more.

Features

You can use Monica to remind you of a certain contact's birthday or set a call reminder, tasks, or buy a gift for a specific contact.

It can also help you track your debts and set a reminder for these debts.

Monica comes with a strong journaling system that helps you log and create rich journal entries about all important events and interactions either in general or with a specific contact.

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

Who is it for?

This project is for people who have difficulty remembering details about other people’s lives – especially those they care about. Yes, you can still use Facebook to achieve this, but you will only be able to see what people do and post, and not add your own notes about them.

We’ve also received lots of positive feedback from users who suffer from Asperger syndrome, Alzheimer’s disease, or simply introverts who use this application on a daily basis.

Missing features

I like Monica, but I would like to see it customized with more additional features

Family members: Monica is a great contact manager, but it should get some minor customization for family members, to work as a minimal family management system. Tasks can be used to manage chores, households, and more, but it would be nicer to have specific features for families.
PHR: As a doctor, I see a great opportunity for Monica to perform as a simple personal health record system, where it can log, create health-related specific journals, follow-up doctor/ dentist visits, set medication reminders, and more.
Mobile/ Desktop integration: Monica is a web-based system, but it can still offer more desktop/ mobile integration like push notification, desktop notification, better contact, and calendar integrations.

Technical note

Monica is built using PHP 7.4+ and uses Composer, MySQL, and Redis.

It can be installed on Ubuntu, Debian either from source or using Docker or Vagrant.

What Monica isn’t

Monica is not a social network and it never will be. It’s not meant to be social. It’s designed to be the opposite: it’s for your eyes only.
Monica is not a smart assistant. It won’t guess what you want to do. It’s actually pretty dumb: it will only send you emails for the things you asked to be reminded of.
Monica is not a tool that will scan your data and do nasty things with it. It’s your data, your server, do whatever you want with it. You’re in control of your data.