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Contact Book: the alternative to Covve
What moving from Covve to Contact Book actually looks like in 2026.
Contact Book is what people use when Covve 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
Covve's headline feature is a business-card scanner plus an AI engine that decides who you should reconnect with and nudges you. Contact Book doesn't scan cards and doesn't decide for you - you log a sentence when something happens, set the cadence you actually want, and the dashboard surfaces overdues. Pick Covve if scanning a stack of conference cards is the daily job; pick us if you'd rather keep a thin, deliberate log you control, hosted in Germany.
Switching
What moving from Covve actually looks like
The switch goes in three rough phases: export from Covve, import into Contact Book, and reorganise what came over. Most people allocate an evening for it. The export side is where the time goes - Covve 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 Covve: feature comparison
When to pick which
Pick Contact Book when
Pick Covve when
The scanner is the fork in the road
Covve's centre of gravity is the card scanner: snap a business card, the OCR pulls name / title / company / numbers, and a contact appears. That's genuinely useful at trade shows and conferences where you walk away with forty cards. If that's your week, Covve removes real friction. Contact Book has no scanner by design - we assume most of the people worth remembering arrived through a conversation, a DM, or an introduction, not a printed card. The difference isn't quality; it's which world you live in.
Who decides who you reconnect with
Covve adds an AI layer that ranks your network and nudges you toward people it thinks you're neglecting. Some people love this; it does the deciding so you don't have to. We took the opposite bet: you set a cadence per person (every few weeks, quarterly, yearly, never), and the only thing the tool does is surface what's overdue. No ranking, no scoring, no algorithm deciding a friend matters less this month. If you want the relationship priorities to stay yours, that's the meaningful split.
Where we go deeper
Beyond the scanner question, the surfaces diverge. We carry a full relationship graph (who's whose sister, partner, chosen family), a life-events timeline with dated entries, and gift tracking so you don't repeat last year's present. Covve's strength is the front door - getting people in fast - while ours is the texture you build over years. If the relationships you keep are few but deep, the texture is what you'll feel; if they're many and shallow-but-numerous, the scanner is what you'll feel.
Export from Covve
Find the export option in Covve'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. Covve'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
Covve-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 Covve 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 Covve subscription from their side. Contact Book keeps your export option self-serve in account settings - no lock-in either direction.
Switching from Covve
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.
Written by
Julia Yukovich
Co-Founder + CEO
Julia is one of the Co-Founders. She handles design, product direction, and most of the support replies that arrive in the morning.
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