Recently, I started a journey to find the best personal CRM to manage my contacts and remember who I’ve spoken to, and it seems I’ve found the perfect solution.
If you’re a bit older, you might remember a tool called a Rolodex. A Rolodex was that spinning plastic carousel-like thing that held business cards with special clips. You could spin it to quickly access a large number of contacts. Salespeople, up until probably the mid-1990s, used these Rolodexes extensively. It was invented in the mid-fifties before being replaced by digital tools. Dex, then, is a derivative of the name “Rolodex.”
This is the second article in a two-part review series, and you’ll find me comparing Dex to Clay all the time. If you’re curious about what Clay is, you could read my first article, or keep reading – just remember, I’ll be comparing those two throughout this piece.
In this article, besides answering the key question – Is this the perfect personal CRM? – I’ll cover the company behind Dex, who Dex is for, the key features of DEX, product support, briefly touch on the technical aspects, and of course, express my personal, completely unbiased, and 100% objective opinion.
Oh, and if you’re new here, my name is Jeff Tilley, and I’m a CRM consultant. I help companies and people build systems to work with other companies and other people. So, make yourself comfortable, and let’s jump right into the first part: Who is behind DEX?
The Company and Product Positioning
About the Company
As is my usual practice in all my reviews, I’ll start by talking about the company itself. It’s a very small company registered in Delaware. According to the last official document I could find, they have just two employees. Other estimates put the number closer to nine. I suspect a lot of their work is outsourced, which is quite common and normal these days. It’s nothing to be concerned about and is frequently seen in modern tech companies.
The company was founded in 2019 and was largely funded by Y Combinator and through crowdfunding, though they also have some private investors. The company is active, and it seems to be one of those cases where a company is doing well but doesn’t seek an excessive public presence. For example, the CEO of the company didn’t respond to me on LinkedIn, and at the time of this writing, he only had about 300 connections.
Which brings me to an important question: Who is DEX for?
Who Is the Product For?
On their website, they have a section called Use Cases, and they’ve listed three main ones: MBA students, investors, and creators – people like me who make podcasts or create content and need to keep track of their contacts. I have a strong suspicion that this section on the site has been there for a while and was an experiment that just stuck, but again, it’s my speculation. It’s likely they found some well-converting headlines or use cases that most often attract customers. You can often see this on my own site. I generally work in CRM, but if you read my site, it’s mostly about Salesforce. That’s simply because Salesforce converts better. So, I think they have a similar story with that section on their website.
Nonetheless, the truth is that this product is truly for professionals, for any person who works with other people and needs to remember many things like birthdays, kids’ names, and so on.
So, who is this product NOT for? It’s not for people in sales. It’s not for those who need funnels, sales stages, etc. If you need customer support functionality, that’s not what Dex is about. Dex is purely for contact management. By the way, they do have an application called RolodexCRM.com. This is their attempt to create a CRM for teams, sales, support, and so on. I won’t talk about that in this review, but in short, that application is very weak – I mean, extremely weak.
Experience and Adoption
User Interface
That brings us to a great time to talk about the user interface. Dex has roughly four versions: Web, Desktop, iOS, and Android. Let’s talk about the Web and Desktop apps. Regarding the desktop version, a quick clarification: I specifically used the app on a Mac.
So, it’s a very good, professional, and clean design. Everything is in its place. As you’ll read, the interface is very well-structured. It has convenient groups and categories. The search is in the right place, and it has great filters. It’s everything you’d expect from a modern, well-designed interface. For some, it might seem a bit boring, but in my opinion, it’s the ideal interface for my needs. It’s very clear, and there are many different ways to view the same information. I can take a contact and put them into a group, find them through a search, or add them to a list. In short, there are many different options, which is something we all love, especially experienced users.
But there is one significant downside to the desktop app, and that’s the lag. I don’t know why this happens. I did a bit of research, and people are indeed saying that there are problems with the desktop version of Dex. It’s the exact same problem as with Clay, the alternative to Dex. Clay had the exact same desktop issues. I don’t know what’s wrong with their desktop apps, but it’s not an issue on mobile. We’ll talk about that next.
The lag is especially noticeable when you press Command-K. They promote shortcuts, and I’m all for them – I love them. By the way, the shortcuts are not as good as in Clay, but they exist. You press Command-K, type a name in the search, and in half of the cases, the name isn’t found. I don’t know why, even though the name is definitely in there. So that’s the story with the desktop app. The web version is a little better but not without problems. It also has search issues and works slowly.
Next, the Chrome plugin. It makes life so much easier when adding people, especially after events. I often just take a screenshot of a person’s profile I talked to, find them on LinkedIn, and screenshot it. Then, when I get home, I open my photo feed, find the person on LinkedIn. They’re often already added as a connection, but that doesn’t make it any easier for me because I still have to go to LinkedIn to find that person. But thanks to the Chrome plugin, there’s a Dex button. I click it, and it either redirects me to an existing contact card or creates a new one inside my Dex. It works about 8 out of 10 times. Sometimes, it redirects me to a card but doesn’t pull the name, so I have to add the name manually, but that’s not a problem. It’s easy, and there’s nothing terrible about it.
The mobile app runs very fast – much faster than the desktop version. Searches work smoothly, and everything is easy to find. The only drawback I noticed is with the interaction history, especially emails. For some reason, emails often don’t load, which makes it feel less transparent than the desktop app. In that regard, it just feels weaker. Notes are fine – they show up in chronological order, no issues there. Reminders… we’ll get to those later.
I tested the app on both Android and iOS, and the same problem appeared: emails don’t open. On the other hand, LinkedIn and WhatsApp do work, and that’s really convenient – you can open them and see the latest message Dex pulled in. Overall, the app is very functional, and the interface is clean and pleasant to use. Nothing more to add there.
Ease of Implementation
Which is a great time to talk about implementation, about how easy it is to implement. And here, I have to say that Dex works incredibly well with data migration from all possible applications. Both Clay and Dex make this very easy, but since this isn’t just a review but also my personal quest to find a product for myself, I have to note that I like the implementation process in Dex more.
The reason being there are more filter options. It was very straightforward for me to clean up my contact database.
Second, Dex handles data much better than Clay. Let me explain. When you import contacts into Clay, all notes are exported into a single file, stored in a single line. If you have a lot of notes, that quickly becomes unmanageable. The export format itself is also weaker compared to Dex.
In Dex, contacts and notes are stored separately. You upload one file for contacts, and a different file for notes. Each note is tied to the correct contact by first and last name. This makes importing and managing data much easier. Clay doesn’t work that way – you only get a single combined file, which makes handling and remigrating data a real pain.
Now, data migration is usually a one-time task, but I always pay attention to it. The reason is simple. Dex is a small company – just two or three people, as far as I can tell. And with such a small team, anything can happen: they might sell the product, shut it down, or move on. You can’t rely on one product lasting forever. If you ever need to migrate your data, Dex makes that process much easier because its data format is cleaner, notes are saved properly, and the structure is universal. Many other products use a similar approach, so re-migration would be straightforward. With Clay, it would be much harder.
So overall, Dex is simple to set up, its grouping features are convenient, and the whole implementation experience is smooth and enjoyable.
Now, it is a great time to talk about the features and functions available in Dex.
Feature Highlights
When I was reviewing Dex, for a long time I couldn’t figure out where to start. What functionality should I focus on when writing reviews? Since I’m an experienced user, I decided to focus on myself and how I use it. The app is made for people like me, and I primarily use it on the desktop. I’ll explain why: it’s faster to take notes, and all my communication mainly happens on the desktop where there’s a keyboard and I can simply type faster. If I have a meeting recording, I can transcribe it with Whisper – it’s a free speech recognition algorithm from OpenAI. I can put the meeting recording in there, transcribe it, and copy and paste it in a structured way into Dex. That’s why I use the desktop.
Let’s go through the Dex features starting with the home screen. On the home screen, you’ll see calendar events, birthdays, reminders, and network updates.
Let’s start with network updates: just like in Clay, Dex tracks certain changes in your contacts’ networks. Unlike Clay, from what I understand, it only tracks LinkedIn – or at least, it didn’t work for me with Twitter.
Next up are reminders, and what I love so much about Dex is that I can see all my future reminders. For example, I want to talk to someone a month from now, but I know I’ll be away next week. I can see all the reminders I have set for next week and take care of them this week instead. You can’t do this in Clay – a reminder comes to you on the very day it’s set for. Second, reminders in Dex have a great function to be set by date, not by time. Unfortunately, if you need to set a reminder for a specific time, you can’t – you’ll have to set an alarm or something similar. Nevertheless, when I compare the two apps, I much prefer how it’s done in Dex.
What I don’t like about reminders, especially on the home screen, is that when you hover over a person and then move your mouse away, the reminder gets a bit “stuck.” I understand why this is done – it’s an interface feature that allows you to mark a reminder as done or postpone it. But it would be cool if they figured out how to de-focus when you move the mouse away, like on mobile apps. Usually, when you hover over something, a focus mode is activated, and when you move the mouse away, the focus is deactivated. Here, it feels more like a minor bug than a deliberate choice, and it’s quite annoying. What I did like is that you can link a reminder to two people at once. For example, if I want to introduce two people, I can set a reminder for both of them at the same time, and the reminder will show up for both contacts.
Moving on to birthdays – there’s not much for me to say here. The only thing I can note is that, subjectively, I feel like Clay did a better job of pulling in birthdays than Dex. In Clay, I noticed that most of my contacts had birthdays listed. I don’t know where it pulled them from – I assume from contacts, Instagram, and so on – but it did pull them in, and it worked well. In Dex, you have to add them manually, but they work great and remind you that it’s someone’s birthday so you can call or text them.
There’s a very convenient feature called the timeline. Several things go into the timeline: notes, calendar events, and reminders. Why did I like it? Let’s say you’re at a meeting, and you quickly take some notes without linking them to anyone. You get a history of what happened in the order you created the notes. Sometimes you might forget a person’s name, but you remember you left a note about them, and in the feed, that person will appear, and you’ll see what happened. This is a very useful feature, and you can filter the feed – you can filter by reminders only, or by calendar events only. You can also see future events in the feed and filter the timeline by date. This is a super convenient feature that Clay didn’t have but which I’ve really taken to. It’s done very, very well.
The next feature is the map. I don’t know how much I’d use this map, but it’s probably useful if you’re flying somewhere and you’ve noted the addresses of all the people you’re in contact with. You can see where a person lives and maybe see if you can meet up with someone while you’re there. It’s convenient, no question.
Then there are what they call tree maps where you can view people by groups. If a person is in a group, it’ll show them by groups and where that person is located. I think this has a very limited application – I can’t think of a way it would really help me right now, except maybe to find people. But mostly, it’s about groups.
What’s interesting is the related people feature. If you’ve noted connections between people, they will then be shown on this map. The thing is, to actually connect two people – let’s say you introduced them – you don’t add this information in notes. You actually have to go into the contact itself where there’s a field called “related contact,” and you have to find the contact that is related to this one and add them there. It doesn’t happen automatically. It would be cool if it could find the connections itself, but it doesn’t do that.
Dex has a great feature: the ability to organize views in different ways, as I mentioned earlier. You can organize the same contacts in two different ways. The first way is with groups – this is pretty straightforward. You create a group and add people to it through a manual process.
But you can also create lists. Lists can be created with filters. For example, you can make a list of all the designers, or all the founders, or all the people in the IT industry. You can set up complex filters based on last interaction, name, keyword searches in job titles, company names, descriptions, contact frequency, groups, social media links, and so on. You can add filters for many parameters – down to things like location and education. So you can create many different lists based on many parameters. I don’t use this feature much myself yet because I did a major review of my contacts and decided to archive almost all of them, keeping only a few hundred people in my active list. I’m slowly bringing back other contacts – volleyball contacts since I used to be a professional athlete, school contacts, university contacts and so on. I personally realized that at this point in my life, I only need contacts related to my professional activities. When my life stage changes, I’ll need different contacts, and they’re there in my archive, and I’ll create other groups one day. For now, I don’t use these views, but it’s a very convenient feature when you have thousands and thousands of contacts. It’s really good.
The next thing I liked in Dex is the contact card itself. What’s unusual is that the fields on the right side are immediately editable. As someone who is used to using various online systems, I’m used to having to click an edit button or a pencil icon to make fields editable. Here, the fields are immediately editable. At first, I found this very unusual and inconvenient because you really want to click some kind of “edit” button. But here, you look at a field, you want to click on the phone number, and it immediately becomes editable. The logic here is a bit different. You have all the actionable buttons, like the send message button on the top and on the side you’ve got editable fields for fast editing. Probably useful, I just haven’t got used to this interface yet.
Speaking of messengers, Telegram is here, unlike in Clay, and it’s here by default. You just enter a link or the person’s username, and you can click on Telegram, and it’ll take you to the Telegram app. It’s so simple. Yes, it doesn’t pull information from Telegram, just like Clay, but at least it can direct you to Telegram. So, this panel on the right – all the fields are editable, yes, but they’re editable so you can quickly interact with them. All the non-editable fields and interaction fields are in the middle, at the top.
The top section has several interesting features. First, there’s an AI assistant that can help you draft a quick email, for example. There’s also a button for quick actions like setting reminders or sending emails. Here’s a criticism of Dex though: unlike Clay, there are no keyboard shortcuts for these actions, which is really annoying.
There’s also a button to “Enrich Contact” using a LinkedIn profile. Clay has enrichment from Instagram as well, which actually works much better than LinkedIn enrichment. Beyond that, you can start a contact, merge it with another contact, or import a V-Card. A V-Card is a universal format for saving contacts that works great on both iPhones and Androids. You can also invite this person to Dex, archive the contact, or delete the contact entirely.
Next Notes.Notes are well-done. There are different types of notes – I don’t really understand why this is necessary since I just take notes. Here, you can specify if it was a meeting, an email, or coffee, but I don’t really see the point. A note is a note. You can tag people in notes and also tag different groups using hashtags. If you write a hashtag in a note and select a group, the person is automatically added to that group. This is very convenient if you want to type quickly on a keyboard and have it link back to the contact later.
There’s another cool feature: you can quickly note when the last interaction was. For example, if I’m chatting with someone on Telegram, I don’t have to write a note about it. I can just find the “last interaction” button, click it, and it will update the last interaction to “just now.” I do have a big question about the trustworthiness of this feature, though, because if I go back in three, four, or five months and see that the last interaction was back then, I feel like I’m missing some transparency. Like, how did it know there was an interaction? Did it pull the information from somewhere, or did I click it myself? It should show that you clicked it three months ago – that’s what’s missing.
These functions are convenient, but they’re not quite fully fleshed out. Because when it’s a black box like this, I always ask myself where it pulled this information from. Is it an AI feature? An AI hallucination? Or did I genuinely click it myself? I can’t remember clicking it. So, in this case, I usually write a note to make sure I remember there was an interaction. If they added a note that said you clicked it yourself four months ago, I’d trust the feature. So it’s literally just a tiny bit unfinished.
Product Support and Technical Review
Product Support
Which brings me to the next section of my review: product support. And here, there’s nothing much to say. Product support seems to exist. I can’t say anything bad about it, but I can’t say anything good either.
The documentation is comprehensive and covers all of Dex’s capabilities and integrations. Dex offers an API with extensive functionality, including the ability to extract reminders – a significant advantage over Clay. However, it integrates through Zapier rather than Make. The technical documentation is thorough and demonstrates Dex’s ability to extract various data types, making it suitable for building workflows like syncing reminders to Todoist.
They don’t have a community, but they have a cool feature that I don’t often find with companies. They have a roadmap. And the roadmap is set up as a poll where users can go in and vote for the best or most needed feature. By voting, the user gives points to a feature, and the developers decide if they want to build it or not. Currently, there are over 400 feature requests, which shows that the community is developing in that sense. They also have a “Give Feedback” button, which is comparable to the roadmap. In general, it’s a smart approach. They listen to their users and essentially develop a lot of features based on what users say they want. Of course, they prioritize them sometimes based on their own goals and priorities, but for the most part, it’s all great.
Technical Review
Which brings me to the ultra-short technical overview. Dex is a simple product. I don’t think you’d want to build anything on it. And if you do want to build something on Dex, I have a lot of questions for you.
In short, I’ve decided to test what Zapier integration could do. I wondered if I could transfer all of this to my Todoist. And unfortunately, no. What Zapier does is it can create contacts, create reminders, and create notes. This is more than Clay, by the way, through Make.com. Clay can only create contacts through Make. So here, you can create contacts, notes, and reminders, but you can’t, for example, set a trigger that if a new reminder is created, it goes to your Todoist and creates a new task with a link to that contact. So, in any case, you’ll have to use two applications. It’s not a tragedy, but it’s not ideal.
Pricing and Value
Which brings me to the important question: the price. And there’s nothing simpler than Dex’s pricing. They have only one subscription option: $12 a month if you pay annually and $20 if you pay monthly. That’s it. It’s very simple and clear. Is it worth it? Tell me in the comments.
Personal Take: My Final Decision
But it’s time to talk about the most important thing: what do I really think? And which application will I choose for myself to manage my personal contacts? And I’ll be honest, the choice was incredibly difficult because the apps are different. Clay has a killer feature that really made me think hard. It’s the Instagram integration. It pulls birthdays from Instagram. This is incredibly convenient. My contact database is much richer. Overall, the data enrichment in Clay feels better, at least from my personal experience.
But! Clay has a very big flaw. In their desire to simplify everything, they went so far that there are no lists. They replaced everything with search, but the search works poorly. Dex’s search works better, objectively better. The only thing I can say is, for example, I was looking for videographers in my contact database, and Clay seemed to find them better. I searched for “videographer,” and Clay figured out that this was probably related to “video” and “cinematography” because people have different titles on LinkedIn, and it found these synonyms. Dex is a bit dumber. It didn’t find the synonyms. Dex has that AI agent, but you have to be very precise and write something like “all things related to video,” and then it might find something. These are all minor things, but they’re not a dealbreaker for me. They’re just nuances you need to be aware of.
So, what was my final decision? I decided to stick with Dex. Although I really came to love Clay. I’m incredibly grateful for their philosophy. They have a great blog, which Dex doesn’t have, by the way. They have a great philosophy. It’s a very beautiful product. But, a) it’s only on iOS; they don’t have an Android version. b) The desktop app is very laggy. Dex’s is too, but it’s not comparable. And c) I’m missing those filters. I’m missing more convenient groups than what’s in Clay. Although Clay does have groups, I can’t create the filters and views that I know I will definitely use. I need them. Dex is much better at managing lists, and it has those filters with options that I can select. Unfortunately, Clay doesn’t have this. So, for myself, I’ve made an unambiguous decision. I’m going with Dex.
But what do you think? Clay or Dex? Android or iPhone? BMW or Mercedes? Let me know in the comments below.