Does a free Personal Relationship System exist out there?

Question

I am looking for a free (either webbased / open source) application for use in our household for doing personal relationship management. So I am not looking for a CRM with leads, signals, etc... I want to manage our household not a company. Language / Server / Hardware requirements are no problem.

I need:

a. web access for me and my wife

b. not only enter seperate contacts such as millions of apps out there but the ability to also add households (a household ALSO has a phone number, anniversary date, possible weblinks and holds ofcourse the address so that I dont have to type this N times for each contact). So: one household (=address based) holds multiple contacts but a contact can be linked to multiple addresses (such as his company where he/she works for instance).

c. should have the option to link tasks to each person or household in the database with an overview page so that I can immeditately while reading my mail or on the phone add tasks for me or my wife linking to that person or service or household or company.

d. possible integrated e-mail and more features a wiki would be nice

e. reporting such as birthday calender and automated x-mas cards is also nice

f. direct view on his/her twitter feeds / facebook feeds / linkedin feeds etc... would be excellent.

g. synchronization to our phones / pda / possible other systems is also needed.

h. it should also support companies but only for registering people against and/or services we take from a company e.g. "the energy bill with address X for 100 euro a month" extra links to a budgetting plugin would be nice.

Does it exist?

1. I considered civicrm but this does not meet all requirements,
2. highrise is nice but expensive for a household,
3. familyware.nl offers a household addressbook and tasks but is also € 100 a year. The last one comes closest to what I need this one does offer households, relationships with contacts, tagging and lots of other household functionality.

update 1: i think this would be a system useful for everyone reading this (for your own household) i have been looking for it since 2005: http://wp.me/pexau-1ED and for the address->person relation here is what i wrote myself in asp back in the old days: http://edward.de.leau.net/images/lifehack.gif

update 2: i am still looking, i am using familyware.nl and it costs me €100 a year, however it seems to be no longer under development with the latest dev update from 2008/2009. For now I stick to it, but i am still looking.

Answer 1

Have you looked at Highrise from the guys at 37Signals? All of their products have a free version that (as long as you don't want too many contacts etc) works pretty well.

There is SugarCRM - an Open Source CRM Also Tiger CRM - another Open Source CRM

With both of the above you would need to host it yourself.

I think that if you have as many contacts as you stated below then you'll need to either pay for hosting (or host it yourself at home) and go Open Source, or fork out for something like Highrise.

Answer 2

I use Highrise HQ free version for this. I have fewer than 250 contacts.

Pros:

• established platform, with plug-ins
• a time line for each person
• tags

Cons:

• it's way too expensive if you want it for personal use and have more than 250 contacts
• sync'ing is a problem without 3rd party plug-in
• still too many 'clicks' required to do things on the web site
• no offline version, mobile app still requires connection.

When you think about it, Facebook is moving towards this direction, you can see interaction with another person as well their basic info on a page, except that everything is open and public and the other person has to be on Facebook too.

Another alternative is to have a shared OneNote or EverNote notebook. One page per contact. My experience with these tools:

• EverNote is more cross-platform, but it's designed for notes, you can't really sort the pages in a way that's useful for organizing contacts. Can't sync with address book.
• OneNote allows you to organize the pages the way you like, extremely powerful editing features, but it's limited to Windows and a Web version. You can insert date/time stamp but can't really add notes easily in reverse-chronological order like in HighriseHQ. Can't sync with address book.

There is another one called BatchBook which I'm going to try out when I get a chance.

Connected seems to be the answer

Answer 3

While conXt currently does not support all of your requirements, much of what you are describing here is where we want to get to. I wanted to contribute to the conversation here in the hopes that more people will give conXt a try and offer useful feedback. It's free, with no ads, so hopefully feedback is a small price to ask!

Edit: I'm the founder!