Monica (MonicaHQ) review: the open-source personal CRM for tracking friends and family. See features, pricing, self-hosting, pros, cons and alternatives.
Monica, often called MonicaHQ, is an open-source personal relationship management (PRM) tool — essentially a CRM for your personal life instead of your sales pipeline. It was created by Montreal-based developer Régis Freyd, who built the first version in June 2016 to help himself stay in touch with friends living in other countries, then open-sourced it in May 2017, where it went viral on Hacker News and reached the number one spot on the front page.
Built on the Laravel PHP framework and released under the AGPLv3 license, Monica is designed so anyone can self-host the exact same software the official hosted version runs, with no artificial feature restrictions. The project has grown a large community of contributors and translators since its 2017 launch.
Monica lets users log details about each contact — how they met, what matters to them, notes from past conversations — and set reminders (including recurring ones) so important check-ins and birthdays don't get missed. It also supports mapping relationships between contacts, logging gifts, activities, debts, and tasks, and journaling personal reflections.
A defining feature is its privacy stance: Monica states it is not and will never be ad-supported or tracking-based. The self-hosted deployment option means privacy-conscious users can run Monica entirely on infrastructure they control, with data never leaving their own server.
Monica's hosted version (app.monicahq.com) offers a free plan limited to around 10 contacts plus data export, and a paid plan around 9 dollars a month that removes the contact limit and adds email reminders, data importers, and other advanced features.
Self-hosting Monica is completely free, with all features unlocked, since it uses the same open-source codebase as the hosted product under the AGPLv3 license. Users only pay for their own server (typically 5 to 10 dollars a month for a basic VPS).
Yes. Self-hosting Monica is completely free with all features included. The official hosted version also offers a free plan limited to about 10 contacts, with a paid plan around $9/month for unlimited contacts and extra features.
Monica was created by Régis Freyd, a developer based in Montreal, Canada, who built it in 2016 and open-sourced it in 2017.
Yes, Monica is open source under the AGPLv3 license and can be self-hosted via Docker or a standard PHP/LAMP server stack, running the same codebase as the official hosted version.
A personal relationship management (PRM) tool, or personal CRM, applies CRM-style organization — contact records, notes, and reminders — to personal relationships with friends and family rather than sales prospects.
Monica is built on the Laravel PHP framework and is open source under the AGPLv3 license.
Alternatives include Dex, Cloze, and Clay, though these are closed-source, subscription-based apps, whereas Monica's main differentiator is being free and open source with self-hosting.