Dex Alternatives in 2026: Which Personal CRM Fits Your Reason to Switch

Dex is a paid personal CRM that pulls your contacts from email, calendar, LinkedIn and messaging apps into one place and reminds you to stay in touch. The right Dex alternative depends on what's pushing you away: the lack of a free plan, a networking life that happens at events rather than online, wanting your records on your own server, or wanting help writing the follow-up rather than a reminder to do it.

Maybe you're midway through the trial, or you opened the pricing page and paused. Below is a fair account of what Dex does well, what it costs, the documented limits that send people elsewhere, four alternatives matched to those reasons, and how to take your contacts with you if you switch.

What Dex does well

Dex is a personal CRM for keeping up with people rather than tracking deals. Its homepage says it merges contacts from more than 15 sources, removes duplicates, and keeps a single timeline of meetings, calls, emails and messages for each person, with notes, tags, groups and custom fields on top.

• Wide reach into where you talk to people. The integrations page lists Gmail, Outlook, Google Calendar, WhatsApp, iMessage, Facebook, Instagram, CSV import, Zapier and a Granola notes connection, and the homepage adds LinkedIn and phone contacts.
• LinkedIn job-change alerts. Dex syncs your LinkedIn network and sends network updates when a connection changes roles, useful when new jobs are your cue to say congratulations or ask for an introduction.
• A reminder system that resets itself. You give each person a cadence. Per Dex's keep-in-touch guide, the next reminder is your last interaction plus that cadence, it arrives by email on the morning it's due (and as a push notification if you use the phone app), and an optional Sunday digest lists what's coming up.
• Briefs before meetings. Shortly before a meeting (Dex says roughly ten minutes), it emails you a brief with each attendee's title and your recent emails, meetings and notes with them, according to its pre-meeting guide.
• Apps everywhere. Web, iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and a Chrome extension, plus an MCP server and a REST API for people who want their AI assistant to read and update Dex.

If you live on LinkedIn, switch between a phone and a Windows laptop, and mostly need a nudge to reach out, Dex is a strong choice and switching may not be worth it.

What Dex costs in 2026

Dex has no free plan; every plan is paid per user, and the price depends on how far ahead you pay. These are the prices on Dex's pricing page, in US dollars per user per month:

Premium covers the mobile, desktop and web apps, WhatsApp and messaging sync, email and calendar, custom fields and a map view. Professional adds Outlook, more than one email account, mail merge, voice mode, notetaker integrations and API and Zapier access. Premium and Professional start with a 6-day trial that needs a card; you're charged when it ends unless you cancel. Students get 50% off for a year.

Why people look for a Dex alternative

The reasons are usually practical, and each one points to a different tool:

• No free tier. If you want more than a few days to decide, Dex's trial is 6 days with a card on file, and after that every plan is paid.
• Outlook costs more. Dex's pricing page lists Outlook integration and syncing several email accounts under Professional, so someone with a work Outlook account and a personal Gmail pays $20 a month billed yearly, or $34 month to month.
• Networking happens in person. Dex is strongest where there's a digital trail: LinkedIn, email and messages. People who collect contacts at conferences and trade shows often want a scanner first.
• Where the data lives. Dex's security page says it is funded by subscriptions, never sells your data, encrypts data in transit and at rest, and hosts all servers and databases in the US. Some people want their relationship notes on a server they run themselves.
• Help with the reply, not only the reminder. Dex's AI drafts messages, but its Copilot guide says it sees email metadata only (sender, subject, date and snippet), never full email bodies, so it can't read a long thread and answer the question in it.

The best Dex alternatives, by reason

Mesh: if you want a free plan

Mesh, the personal CRM formerly called Clay, is the nearest like-for-like swap. Its homepage describes the same idea: bring in everyone you've met, keep their details current and surface job changes automatically, with apps for macOS, Windows, web, Android and iOS.

The difference is the entry price. Mesh's pricing page lists a free Personal plan for up to 1,000 contacts, with imports from email, calendar, LinkedIn, iMessage and social accounts, groups, and reconnect, reminder and birthday alerts. Pro is $10 a month for unlimited contacts, and the Team plan is $40 per seat a month. Mesh asks for a credit card even on the free plan, which its FAQ says keeps out spam and bots; new members start on a 14-day Pro trial and can drop to Personal before it ends.

Choose Mesh if Dex's features suit you but you'd rather not pay until your network passes 1,000 people. Our Mesh alternatives page covers Mesh's own trade-offs in more depth.

Covve: if you meet people in person

Covve is a business card scanner and lead capture app rather than a keep-in-touch tool. Its homepage centers on scanning business cards, event badges and LinkedIn QR codes, with voice notes, recognition in more than 60 languages and offline scanning, and an AI assistant that researches leads and helps you personalize follow-ups.

Covve's pricing page lists Essential at $12 a month or $119 a year per seat, with unlimited card and QR scanning, notes and groups, and export to phone contacts, Excel, Outlook, Google Contacts and Zapier. Pro, at $20 a month or $199 a year, adds event badge scanning, custom fields with CRM mapping, a web portal and team collaboration. The page offers a free trial and doesn't list a free plan. The pricing page doesn't list keep-in-touch reminders, so Covve works best as the front end of your network: capture at the event, then send the contacts on to wherever you manage them.

Choose Covve if most of your new contacts arrive as a stack of cards after a conference.

Monica: if you want to own the data

Monica calls itself "the open-source personal CRM" on its homepage. You build each record by hand rather than syncing accounts: notes, journal entries, activities such as meals and calls, relationships between people, reminders for important dates, and custom fields. It imports contacts from vCard and CSV files. Monica says your data is never sold, never used for advertising and never used to train AI models.

There is a catch in 2026: Monica's homepage says registration is currently closed, so new accounts on the hosted service ($90 a year or $9 a month, per its pricing page) aren't available right now. Self-hosting is still $0 from Monica, but you supply the server and handle updates, backups and security patches yourself, with community support. Monica also says a version 3 with an API, an MCP server and native phone apps is expected before the end of 2026.

Choose Monica if keeping your relationship records on hardware you control matters more than automatic syncing, and you're comfortable running a small web app.

Merlin: if the follow-up is what slips

Merlin is the Mac assistant we make, so weigh this section with that in mind. It isn't a contact database you maintain. Its People panel reads your Gmail and Google Contacts and lists who is waiting on your reply (someone who emailed you personally, not a list or a company, within the past month and is still without an answer), birthdays in the next 14 days, reminders that are due, and people who have gone quiet after you used to email them regularly. Opening someone shows a short summary of where things stand, a timeline of emails, meetings and recorded calls, and the notes, reminders, to-dos and moments you've added.

Where it differs from Dex is the next step. Ask Merlin for a reply to someone and it reads the actual thread, then shows you a draft to change and approve before anything is sent. Its Meeting Brief arrives shortly before each calendar event and pulls in attendee backgrounds, earlier discussions and commitments, and suggests an agenda. You can also tell it things in chat ("we met at the design meetup last spring") and it files them on that person's record.

Merlin is narrower than Dex in ways that may decide it for you. It runs only on a Mac, with no phone or Windows app. It reads Google accounts (two on the free plan, five on paid plans), not Outlook, and it doesn't sync LinkedIn, WhatsApp or iMessage, so there are no job-change alerts. It has 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 with no card; Pro is $29 a month, with 20% off billed yearly, per Merlin's pricing.

Choose Merlin if most of your contact with people runs through Gmail and your Google calendar, you work on a Mac, and the replies you owe are the real problem.

Dex compared with Mesh, Covve, Monica and Merlin

Prices are each company's published US-dollar prices for its first paid plan, with the billing period shown.

How to choose

• You like Dex and the price is fine: stay. Nothing below matches its reach across LinkedIn, messaging apps and every device at $12 a month billed yearly.
• You want to try a personal CRM without paying: start with Mesh's free plan and move up only past 1,000 contacts.
• You use Outlook at work: compare Dex Professional at $20 a month billed yearly with Mesh, which lists Outlook among its integrations.
• You collect most contacts at events: scan them with Covve, then export to the contacts app your CRM reads.
• You want nobody else holding your notes: self-host Monica, and check its homepage for when hosted sign-ups reopen.
• You're on a Mac with Gmail and you keep owing people replies: try Merlin's free plan and see who it lists as waiting on you.

How to move your contacts out of Dex

Dex exports everything as CSV files, so leaving doesn't mean retyping your network. Its export guide gives the steps:

1. In Dex, open Settings, then Workflow, then Sync & Import/Export, and choose the Export tab.
2. Click Export Contacts for names, jobs, birthdays, custom fields, tags and keep-in-touch dates.
3. Click Export Timeline for your notes and logged events.
4. Click Export Network Updates for the record of LinkedIn job changes.

You need all three files for a full copy, and Dex has no dedicated reminders export: your cadences come through as the frequency and reminder-date columns in the contacts file. Mesh and Monica both import CSV. To bring contacts into Google Contacts, where tools like Merlin can read them, use Import in the left menu of Google Contacts; Google's import guide suggests splitting files of more than 3,000 contacts and notes a limit of 25,000 contacts per account.