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Contact Book: the alternative to Cardhop
What moving from Cardhop to Contact Book actually looks like in 2026.
Contact Book is what people use when Cardhop stops fitting. Below is the honest side-by-side - same product surface, different posture: hosted in Germany, no third-party trackers, one honest price - plus the migration mechanics that decide whether the switch lands in an evening or in a quarter.
At a glance
Cardhop (from the Fantastical team) is a polished replacement for the stock Contacts app - fast search, natural-language entry, dialing and emailing in a tap, all reading your existing Apple / Google contacts. It's an address book done right. Contact Book is a different category: a relationship memory with cadence reminders, conversation logs, life events, gifts, and a family graph. Pick Cardhop if you want your existing contacts to feel great to use; pick us if you want to track the relationship, not just the phone number.
Switching
What moving from Cardhop actually looks like
The switch goes in three rough phases: export from Cardhop, import into Contact Book, and reorganise what came over. Most people allocate an evening for it. The export side is where the time goes - Cardhop hands you a CSV/JSON dump and the field mapping isn't always obvious; once that's resolved the import is a couple of minutes. We don't paywall the import path or pretend it's a pro-only feature, and you can run both side-by-side while you decide.
Contact Book vs Cardhop: feature comparison
When to pick which
Pick Contact Book when
Pick Cardhop when
Two tools that don't actually compete
It's worth saying plainly: Cardhop and Contact Book can live side by side. Cardhop makes the address book on your devices fast and pleasant - it's where you go to call someone or fix a typo in a phone number. We sit one layer up: the place that remembers you last spoke in March, that her dad's surgery is this week, that you gave her a cookbook last birthday so pick something else. Cardhop answers "how do I reach this person right now"; we answer "what do I need to remember about this person".
Where the address-book model runs out
An address book - even a beautiful one - is a static record: name, number, email, maybe a birthday. It has no concept of time passing. It can't tell you that you're overdue with someone, because it doesn't know what the right interval was. It can't hold a thread of "what we talked about last time", because that's a log, not a field. The moment you start wishing your contacts app remembered context across months, you've outgrown the address-book model - and that's exactly the seam we're built on.
Export from Cardhop
Find the export option in Cardhop's account settings. Most tools provide a CSV or JSON download. Save the dump locally - that's the source of truth for the next step.
Map fields in Contact Book
Open the import tool in Contact Book. Cardhop's field names rarely match Contact Book' 1:1; the import flags any unmapped columns so you can pair them up before anything commits.
Run the import
Run the import. Contact Book shows a preview of the first parsed rows in the import dialog so you can sanity-check the column mapping + a sample of records before anything commits. If you're nervous about a large dump, import a small subset first, verify it landed the way you expected, then run the full file.
Re-create your views, tags, saved searches
Cardhop-specific UI metadata (custom views, saved filters, in-app annotations) doesn't transfer with the data export. Spend an evening rebuilding the views you used most - usually a 30-minute job once you've done it once.
Cancel Cardhop when you're confident
Run both side-by-side for a couple of weeks if you want to be sure. When you're confident, cancel the Cardhop subscription from their side. Contact Book keeps your export option self-serve in account settings - no lock-in either direction.
Switching from Cardhop
The five questions we get most often before someone moves their data over.
Start with Contact Book
Free plan, no credit card. We host in Germany. Export + delete are self-serve.
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