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Contact Book: the alternative to Garden
What moving from Garden to Contact Book actually looks like in 2026.
Contact Book is what people use when Garden 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
Garden's appeal is that it can build a picture of your network from the channels you connect - mail, calendar, social - and surface who you're drifting from. Contact Book deliberately does none of that: we never read your email, calendar, or social accounts. You log what you choose, and nothing else is observed. Pick Garden if auto-surfacing your network from your accounts is the value you want; pick us if "the tool reads my channels" is exactly the line you don't want crossed, and you'd rather keep a deliberate, private record hosted in Germany.
Switching
What moving from Garden actually looks like
The switch goes in three rough phases: export from Garden, import into Contact Book, and reorganise what came over. Most people allocate an evening for it. The export side is where the time goes - Garden 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 Garden: feature comparison
When to pick which
Pick Contact Book when
Pick Garden when
The sync is the whole difference
Garden's power comes from connection: link your mail, calendar, and social accounts and it can reconstruct who's in your orbit, infer how often you talk, and flag people you're losing touch with - without you logging a thing. That's genuinely convenient, and for some people it's exactly the right trade. Contact Book refuses that trade by design. We never read your channels, because the moment a relationship tool has a pipe into your inbox and your social graph, it has a model of your entire life - and that model has to live somewhere, run against something, and be trusted not to leak. We'd rather you type a sentence than hand over the keys to everything.
Inferred attention vs chosen attention
A tool that reads your channels infers who matters from frequency - who you email, who's on your calendar, who you interact with. That's a reasonable proxy, but it quietly conflates noise with closeness. The colleague you email forty times a week about logistics ranks higher than the friend you call twice a year and would drop everything for. Contact Book asks you to decide, because only you know the difference. You set the cadence per person based on the relationship you actually want, not the one your message volume implies. It's more work up front and far more honest about who your weak ties and quiet loves really are.
Where we overlap, and where to choose us
Once you're past the sync question, the tools rhyme: both hold a network of people, both nudge you, both let you note what's going on. We go deeper on the deliberate side - dated life events, gift history, a relationship graph with custom edges, a conversation log built for picking a thread back up. The clean way to choose: if you want a tool that watches your accounts and does the surfacing for you, Garden is built for that. If you want a tool that watches nothing, observes nothing, and simply remembers what you decided to tell it, that's us - and it's why people who care about privacy land here.
Export from Garden
Find the export option in Garden'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. Garden'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
Garden-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 Garden 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 Garden subscription from their side. Contact Book keeps your export option self-serve in account settings - no lock-in either direction.
Switching from Garden
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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