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Contact Book vs Garden: an auto-built network vs a memory you tend
Garden leans on syncing your accounts to surface your network and suggest who to reach. We don't read your channels at all. Here's the honest split.
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.
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.
Try Contact Book
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