monicahq/docs-gitbook

Welcome to Monica

Monica is an open-source personal CRM. It lets you document your life and your contacts. We've been doing this project since 2017 as a side project, and it has grown beyond our expectations.

It is accessible from https://app.monicahq.com.

Personal CRM?

A CRM is a Customer Relationship Management software. It is used in the sales world to keep track of who you've spoken to, who's ready to buy your stuff and follow up during the entire customer lifecycle. A CRM however, is not suited for documenting your contacts or your life, although the intention is similar. A personal CRM is a set of tools that let you mimic this behaviour and document your personal contacts, but not in a business context.

Open source?

Open-source means that the code is free, and freely available for everyone to read or change. The code is available on Github.

It also means that Monica can be host by anyone for free, on your server or wherever you want. We provide an official Docker image for the software that you can use, and we also have a bunch of other non official installation methods. The only thing that you can't do is try to make money out of it. Apart from that, there is no limitations.

In fact, even this documentation is open source and hosted on Github. If you see something that seems wrong, or inaccurate, you can update its content yourself and request a change.

Side project

Monica is born out of our passion to work on tools that improve people's lives. We, the authors (Regis and Alexis) as well as the hundred of contributors around the world, work most of the evenings and weekends on this project.

We aim to offer a tool that everyone can use to their advantage. Hearing your stories about how Monica improved your life brings us immense joy.

We’re not a typical project. We don’t prioritize revenue or marketing—we care about our users and whether our project is useful, cool, and fun. Other founders might focus on the amount of money they’ve raised, but we measure success by the number of stars our GitHub repository has. We want to create a tool that people love and find cool.

The primary benefit of Monica being a side project is the heightened creativity and freedom it offers. Side projects are not tied to the same commercial demands as traditional business projects, allowing us to explore new concepts and take risks we may not have taken otherwise. It also provides more autonomy and control over the project’s direction and outcome. We are only accountable to our users (and ourselves).