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Contact Book: the EU alternative to Monica
Same job, hosted in the EU. Contact Book runs in Germany under German law - your data stays in EU jurisdiction end to end.
If your reason for moving off Monica is data sovereignty, the comparison gets simpler. Contact Book is hosted in Germany on infrastructure we operate ourselves - no US-headquartered company in the request path. The CLOUD Act does not reach what physically lives here.
At a glance
Monica is the elder statesman of the personal-CRM space - mature, open-source, actively maintained, and self-hostable. It is a genuinely good product and we recommend it without reservation to anyone who wants to run their own server. Contact Book is the answer to a narrower question: what if I want Monica's idea without running Monica's server? We're younger and lighter, with a sharper UI, live multi-tab updates, hosting in Germany, and a deliberately small surface. Self-host and tinker - pick Monica. Want a clean, fast, bilingual personal CRM you don't maintain, on a hosted plan from €1 a month - that's us. The short version: Monica without the server.
EU jurisdiction
What 'EU-hosted' actually means here, end to end
Contact Book runs on servers we manage, physically located in Germany. There is no US-headquartered subprocessor in the request path - the data plane (your records, your files, your audit log) lives entirely in EU jurisdiction. Two third parties exist outside that boundary: Stripe (payment information only, under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework) and the mail relay for transactional email. Neither sees your records. Monica's setup is the variable - if their primary infra is US-based, the CLOUD Act applies regardless of what their privacy page claims.
Contact Book vs Monica: EU comparison
When to pick which
Pick Contact Book when
Pick Monica when
EU-jurisdiction questions
Specific to where the data lives, who can subpoena it, and what crosses borders.
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, development, product direction, and most of the support replies that arrive in the morning.
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