Covve Alternatives in 2026: Card Scanners and Personal CRMs Compared

The best Covve alternative depends on which Covve you use. Covve.com today sells a business card and event badge scanner with lead capture, from $12 a seat a month. A separate app, Covve - Personal CRM, reminds you to keep in touch. If the scanner's price is the problem, look at other scanners; if follow-ups slip even with the personal CRM, look at relationship tools.

The two products share a name, a publisher and some features, which muddies most comparisons. This page separates them, says what each does well, and matches four alternatives to the common reasons for moving on.

Two apps called Covve

Covve Visual Network Limited publishes two different apps on the App Store, and they answer different searches.

Covve - Business Card Scanner

This is the product covve.com is built around. Its homepage describes scanning unlimited business cards, event badges and LinkedIn QR codes, online or offline, with recognition in more than 60 languages, voice capture for leads and notes, an AI research assistant that enriches leads, and syncing to a company CRM. The App Store listing calls it "the fastest and most accurate business card scanner on the market" and lists iPhone, iPad and Apple silicon Macs. It offers a 14-day free trial and then a subscription.

Covve - Personal CRM

The other app is a contact book with reminders. Covve's personal CRM page says it tells you when to reach out and when you're losing touch, shows curated news about your contacts, and tracks the health of your network. Its App Store listing adds notes, tags, weekly and monthly networking stats, card scanning, a digital business card and end-to-end encryption of notes and contacts on your device. Covve's help center says calls, texts and emails started from the app are logged against the contact, and after a call it asks for notes and offers to schedule a follow-up.

The personal CRM is free to download with in-app purchases. The US App Store lists Covve PRO at $12.99 a month or $119.99 a year, along with several cheaper Pro options, without saying how they differ.

Where Covve is the right tool

Covve is at its best on a trade show floor. A rep scans a badge, even with no signal, adds a voice note about the conversation, and the lead reaches the team's CRM with AI research attached. Offline scanning, badge scanning, recognition in 60-plus languages and native CRM sync all sit in one app on the Pro and Enterprise plans.

Covve also publishes its security credentials. Its homepage says it is ISO 27001 certified and GDPR compliant, and that all data is encrypted both while it travels and while it's stored. If your company buys software through security review, that matters, and so do the Enterprise extras on the pricing page: SSO, audit logs, a data processing agreement and a 99.95% availability SLA.

A team that runs events every month and lives in Salesforce or HubSpot has little reason to switch.

What Covve costs

Covve's pricing is per seat, and every plan is paid. The pricing page lists three tiers:

• Essential: $12 per seat a month, or $119 per seat a year. Unlimited card and QR scanning, offline scanning, notes and groups, instant bios on leads, export to phone contacts or Excel, and Outlook, Google Contacts and Zapier integrations.
• Pro: $20 per seat a month, or $199 per seat a year. Adds event badge scanning, custom fields with CRM mapping, a web admin portal with analytics, team collaboration and branded digital cards. Direct CRM integrations are an add-on with no published price.
• Enterprise: custom pricing. Adds native HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho and Microsoft Dynamics 365 integrations, SSO, audit logs and a dedicated account manager.

There's a free trial, and the page says you won't be charged until it ends, but no free plan. Event badge scanning starts at Pro, which matters if your contacts come from conference lanyards rather than paper cards.

Reasons to leave Covve

The reasons are mostly practical, and each points somewhere different:

• You scan a handful of cards a month. At $119 a year, Essential makes most sense if you scan cards often. Someone who goes to two conferences a year may be better served by a free scanner.
• Your team already has a CRM with a scanner. If contacts end up in HubSpot anyway, a separate per-seat scanner can be a cost you don't need.
• You may have the wrong Covve. Both apps scan cards and keep notes, so check which one you're paying for before you compare anything else.
• Scanning was never the hard part. A card in the system doesn't write the follow-up. People who lose touch after the event want reminders or help with the reply itself.

Alternatives to Covve's business card scanner

HiHello: occasional scanning on a free plan

HiHello is a digital business card app with a contact scanner built in. Its homepage says the scanner reads business cards, badges, QR codes, or a name and number written on a napkin, and that contacts can reach your CRM in real time, tagged to the event.

The draw is the free tier. HiHello's pricing page lists a Personal plan that's free with no credit card and includes five paper card or badge scans a month. Professional is $6 a month billed yearly ($72 a year), or $8 month to month, with 20 scans a month and contact enrichment. Business costs $60 per user a year ($5 a month), with a five-user minimum, 50 pooled scans per user each month, and Salesforce, HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics integrations.

Fits the person who scans a few cards after each event and also wants a shareable digital card. The scan caps are the trade-off: a busy trade show can use up a month's allowance in an afternoon.

HubSpot's business card scanner: free, if your contacts live in HubSpot

HubSpot's mobile app includes a scanner. According to HubSpot's scanner page, it's free on iOS and Android with "no arbitrary limits": you open the app, choose to create a contact, and HubSpot reads the card and maps each detail to the right contact property. The page says you can use it without HubSpot's other CRM tools, but the scanned cards become HubSpot contacts.

Fits a sales or marketing team already working in HubSpot that is paying for Covve mainly to scan. You lose Covve's offline badge scanning and the web portal's lead analytics, so event-heavy teams should compare before cancelling.

Alternatives to Covve's personal CRM

Dex: keep-in-touch reminders with LinkedIn

Dex is a paid personal CRM. Its homepage offers keep-in-touch reminders and network updates when connections change roles. On its pricing page, Premium costs $12 a month per user if you pay for a year, $16 if you pay quarterly and $20 month to month, and syncs up to 2,500 LinkedIn connections; Professional raises that to 9,000. There's no free plan, and the 6-day trial asks for a card.

Fits Covve personal CRM users who want keep-in-touch reminders but find their network lives on LinkedIn rather than in a phone address book. Our Dex alternatives page covers Dex in more depth.

Merlin: when the follow-up is the hard part

Merlin is the Mac app we make, so weigh this section knowing that. It doesn't scan cards and isn't a contact database you fill in. Its People panel reads your Gmail and Google Contacts and shows who has emailed you personally in the past month and is still waiting on your reply, anyone with a birthday within two weeks, reminders that have come due, and people you used to email regularly who have gone quiet for two months.

Each person's drawer opens with Merlin's own recap of the relationship, followed by your shared history (emails, scheduled and recorded meetings) and anything you've noted, set as a reminder or logged as time together. Mention in chat where you met someone, or that you had lunch with them today, and Merlin files it on their record. When you ask it to write back to someone, the draft waits for you to change and approve it; nothing is sent until you do. About ten minutes before a calendar event, the Meeting Brief arrives with attendee backgrounds, relevant earlier discussions, open commitments and agenda ideas.

The limits are real. Merlin runs only on a Mac, with no phone app, so it can't scan at a booth. It reads Google accounts (two on the free plan, five on paid plans), not Outlook. Waiting and gone-quiet signals come from email only, so people you mostly call or text won't show up correctly, and Merlin doesn't place calls or send texts. There are no custom fields, no team plan, and no way yet to delete a person from People. The free plan includes 5,000 credits a month, which Merlin spends as it works, with no card; Pro costs $29 a month, with 20% off billed annually (Merlin's pricing).

Fits people who network through Gmail on a Mac, and it can sit alongside a scanner: Covve Essential lists a Google Contacts integration, and Merlin's People search covers your Google contacts.

Covve and the alternatives side by side

Prices are each company's published US-dollar prices, with the billing period.

How to choose

• Your team works trade shows and needs badges, offline scanning and CRM sync: stay on Covve Pro or Enterprise.
• You scan a few cards after the odd event: HiHello's free plan, moving to Professional if five scans a month runs out.
• Every lead ends up in HubSpot anyway: try HubSpot's free scanner before renewing Covve seats.
• You used Covve's personal CRM for reminders and your network is on LinkedIn: look at Dex.
• Your conversations happen in Gmail and the replies you owe are piling up: keep whichever scanner you like, send contacts to Google Contacts, and let Merlin list the people you haven't answered.

Whatever you pick, export first. Covve Essential lists export to phone contacts and Excel, plus Outlook and Google Contacts integrations, so your scanned contacts can come with you.