Ask HN: In 2024 what's the best way to manage contacts?

Like which apps and which contexts?

I exclusively use Google Contacts. I have 3 devices and Contacts adequately manages everything in the cloud. It also adequately syncs to Outlook-style contacts, but I barely use anything in the Outlook ecosystem except for email itself.

I find Google Contacts still quite deficient in a few respects:

As with Outlook, it's clearly geared towards personal use (even in the enterprise-class Workspaces) and each individual Contact is meant to represent one individual person who's optionally associated with one individual business only.

This makes trouble for many aspects. I rarely contact individuals who aren't associated with businesses. But within a business, there are usually multiple contacts needed to organize all the departments I interface with. Many do not have personal names or one person! They are, e.g. "Customer Service", or "Billing". Also, many contacts involve Robo-SMS, for security codes, or notifications, and those are paramount to be stored as Contacts, because of their sensitive nature, I want them whitelisted and identified and prioritized properly.

So sometimes I cram more than one contact into an item, with multiple phone numbers/email addresses. But I've found that the tagging doesn't work so well; usually Contacts will "forget" that I tagged them as "Custom - <some string>" and blank them out. And that's uncool.

It is not possible to make folders or containers of groups of contacts (other than tagging them). There is no inheritance or linking of data. So if I have 6 contacts from "example.com" they are all 100% independent of one another, even if they share data. So I must replicate that data and carefully update them all in unison. There's no syncing or associating them.

I don't know any elegant solution for a single app or a single format, that still probably needs to conform closely to the .VCF type exports. But there clearly need to be richer features for organizing and linking data, for ease of maintenance, because I do maintain hundreds of contacts, even active ones, and it's a burden to keep them up-to-date.

The Google integration helps a little bit; it's good when someone's profile avatar populates automatically, or it pulls in data from Maps. More of that, please!

What apps and contexts?

I use synching and vcard files.

Thanks for the response. I've added more information above.

Thanks for the detailed response. I totally agree, Google Contacts can feel limiting, especially when dealing with a lot of business-related contacts where roles and departments come into play. The lack of robust tagging and organization tools like folders or containers is definitely a pain point.

Google may be a privacy issue... So I would love to have the possibility to prevent anyone putting my info in their contacts in Google.

I personally use a paid E-Mail service (mailbox.org) and a self hosted nextcloud.

The APP myphoneexplorer can be used to sync offline.

I use a very low-tech approach. A spreadsheet (LibreOffice) with name, position, company and phone number in the leftmost columns and then a column for each form of contact. Copy and paste into the various apps and over-time the apps build their individual contact lists. People don't change their identities often enough for me to want to automate synchronization across the various apps.\

If you are contacting more than a hundred or so persons, then you are running bulk emails which is a different issue.

I keep things very simple. I have a Single Source of Truth for all my contacts. Right now, I'm using a contact app on my phone for this, but over the years I've used different things. The exact method isn't important to me, what's important is having an authoritative contact list.

I don't sync anything with anything. I look up a contact and enter whatever detail I need manually wherever it's needed. I lean a lot on the frequently-used autocomplete lots of applications have, too, but that's a convenience that I don't take as authoritative.

I can not speak for others or the consensus but since the 90's I have always just used a plain text file with simple delimiters in a format that I understand so that I can massage the output format to match whatever needs the information. This has worked great for me and is simple to back up and newer versions make this easy to get a good compression ratio of a single tarball of every version. Multiple files as many people have passed away and a few people are no longer friends but I keep older versions to remind me of them.

I use Clay (https://clay.earth/) but haven't used it much as I found the search was lacking (my primary use case is searching for contacts that fulfill X criteria)

Nextcloud CardDav.

I plan to use MonicaHQ , I failed to self host behind a reverse proxy and the effort was no longer prioritized but I would be interested if anyone else is using it.

https://www.monicahq.com/blog

Word of warning: I tried Marissa Mayer's Sunshine contacts and it nuked my phone's contacts. Luckily I had a backup vcard export from way back I could restore from.

Others I've tried:

* Clay (https://clay.earth) is a great option for "batteries included". Based on what you described, it can pull from Google/Outlook, Linkedin, and messaging apps. Doesn't get all the duplicates but gets close enough, and they offer carddav for 2-way sync to phone.

* Monica (http://monicahq.com) works for more barebones and self-hosted. They were working on a new version, not sure if it was ever merged into main product. I tried it once and it ended up being more of a gift and birthdays-focused notes app for me, but YMMV.

* Otherwise a Notion doc or spreadsheet might be enough! Especially if you start with an export from something else.

I use my note app for casual personal crm. No outside sync features, but entry is easy if you’re looking for some variation of simple.

https://grugnotes.com

are you somehow related to any of these products?

Yep. I can avoid saying yes to all of the apps that want to access my contacts, but I can't prevent everyone I know, from doing the same :-(

Some of my team worked with Marissa at Google, and I worked with the former CTO of Sunshine which is why I originally tried it.

My source of truth is a self-hosted Radicale CardDAV server with git revision control of vCard data in the backend. Clients are anything that speaks CardDAV, including Thunderbird or DAVX on Android. Raw vCard data is only a "git clone" away, and is an input to scripts to handle birthdays and mailing list updates.

I wrote a scraper to create vCard contacts from Facebook a few years ago when I still used Facebook.

https://github.com/txtsd/fb2vcard

I use Fastmail which has CardDAV syncing, and generally it's worked great. One or twice I've noticed it stops syncing and I have to remove + re-add the sync profile, but generally speaking I've been pretty happy with the results.

I switched my self hosted baikal and previous nextcloud to icloud. I need redundancy and persistence if I pass away for my family that uses iPhone. I manage it with emclient and my android phone (sync'd via davx5). I find I am able to edit what I need to between those.

I have a master sqlite file with an arbitrary schema that is constantly evolving. I go hard with the constraints and primary keys - so hard, in fact, it's nigh-impossible to add a new contact without cascading changes. I'm always eager to keep my contacts, so this has kept my pretty sharp with sqlite.

I use a personal version of Monica administered by a friend.