Kept vs Coleva

Coleva describes itself as a private personal CRM and relationship journal for iPhone. You type a line or tap the mic and say it, and it picks out the people, relationships, dates and small details, then shows you what it filed with a one-tap undo for each item. It launched in July 2026 and is made by one independent developer in the UK.

Its privacy design is unusually thorough. Voice is transcribed on the iPhone, and the people and details are pulled out on the phone using Apple’s language frameworks, Apple Intelligence where the phone has it, and its own local model. There is no account and no Coleva server; the journal is included in your normal iCloud or computer backup. The one exception is an optional Cloud Assist switch for Plus subscribers on phones without Apple Intelligence, which sends uncertain sentences through its relay to OpenAI.

Each person gets a card with how you met, their story so far and what to ask next, and everyone sits on a colour-clustered map of family, friends and work. Ask Coleva answers plain questions from your notes. Birthdays and check-in nudges are free; important dates and a calendar-linked nudge an hour before you meet someone are part of Coleva Plus. It is free for your closest twenty people.

These two are closer than anything else on this site. Both start from a sentence you say after seeing someone, both file it under the right person, and neither asks you to make an account. If you are choosing between them, the platform probably chooses for you: Coleva is iPhone only and needs iOS 26, and Kept is on Android today with the iPhone version in review.

Past that, the difference is where each one put its effort. Coleva put it into keeping every step on the phone, and into seeing the whole picture: a map of everyone, and questions you can ask of it. Kept put it into the moment something comes back: a detail tied to the day it matters, a briefing before you talk, a plan that has come and gone. Deciding in advance when and where you will do something has a medium-to-large effect on whether you do it, and that is the part Kept is built around.

The privacy trade is real and worth saying plainly. Kept sends the audio out to be transcribed and the text out to be filed, and keeps the result on the phone. Coleva keeps the whole chain on an iPhone that can run it. If nothing leaving the device is the deciding point for you, Coleva is the stricter of the two.