Atomic Review: Monica Personal CRM

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Monica is an open-source project, which is an advantage in my book.

You can install it on your server or deploy it on Heroku. You can also use a hosted version if you don’t want to deal with the technical bits.

Links

• Hosted version: https://www.monicahq.com/
• Project: https://github.com/monicahq/monica

Evaluation

• Design

The design is simple and efficient but also very basic. It has a pragmatic database flair but is hardly exciting.

• Performance

It’s a web application. Pages are rendered server-side, so there’s a loading time after each click. As a result, it’s not snappy but very decent with a couple of hundreds of contacts.

• Platforms

As a web app, it works everywhere. However, it’s annoying that the layout is only very partially responsive, and on mobile, it becomes hard to manipulate the data. That’s one of the two issues I encountered that I’d consider a blocker right now.

• Integrations

None. It offers an API, but one must build their integrations, something I do not have time to do.

From what I read on the developer site, this is intentional: you own and control your data and manipulate it directly, without sharing it or pulling updates from social networks.

• Flexibility

It is very flexible and customizable. You can turn on and off almost every field, you can add more, and the default choices can all be modified, which is a great point in favor.

• Cost

You can deploy it on Heroku for free and have full access to all features.

The hosted version has a very limited free plan and a premium option that costs $9/month or $90/year to access all features.

Conclusion

The lack of integrations to pull data from other services and the mobile experience are why I won’t use it today, but I’ll surely keep monitoring the project as I love the idea of an open-source PRM.