Personal CRM

Kept vs Dex

Dex consolidates contacts from your accounts and reminds you to stay in touch. Kept records what people told you and brings that specific thing back.

What Dex is

Dex is a personal CRM. It syncs from LinkedIn, Gmail, Google Calendar, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Outlook, auto-updates job titles as your network changes, and runs on iOS, Android, web, desktop and a browser extension.

It stores how you met someone, important dates and event history, and sends keep-in-touch reminders so relationships do not go quiet. Its stated privacy position is that it is subscription-funded rather than ad-funded and will not sell your data.

It describes itself as built for people rather than sales pipelines, and its own use-case pages are founders, investors, job seekers and students. It drafts messages for you with AI Assist, and has an AI copilot that searches and organises your contacts.

Side by side

Where the record comes from
Kept
You say it, out loud, in about nine seconds.
Dex
Sync from LinkedIn, Gmail, Calendar and social accounts, plus manual notes.
What the reminder says
Kept
The detail, anchored to a moment: "Maya's interview is Thursday — ask on the bus home."
Dex
Keep-in-touch reminders based on how long it has been.
Keeping in touch
Kept
An optional reminder per person, at their usual rhythm or one you pick. No list of who is overdue.
Dex
A keep-in-touch cadence per contact or group, counted from the last interaction.
Where it lives
Kept
On your phone. Notes are not synced to our servers.
Dex
Cloud-synced across iOS, Android, web, desktop and extension.
Getting started
Kept
Talk about one person. Nothing to connect.
Dex
Sign up, choose a plan, then connect your accounts to bring contacts in.
Trying it
Kept
14 days of everything with no card, then a free plan if you do not subscribe.
Dex
A 7-day free trial on both paid plans; a card is required to start it.
Platforms
Kept
Android today. iPhone in App Store review.
Dex
iOS, Android, web, desktop, browser extension.
Does its AI write your messages
Kept
Never. The AI transcribes and files; the words are yours.
Dex
Yes: AI Assist drafts messages from your notes and history.
Streaks and scores
Kept
A weekly streak for the journal as a whole. Nothing is counted per person.
Dex
Not something they advertise.

	Kept	Dex
Where the record comes from	You say it, out loud, in about nine seconds.	Sync from LinkedIn, Gmail, Calendar and social accounts, plus manual notes.
What the reminder says	The detail, anchored to a moment: "Maya's interview is Thursday — ask on the bus home."	Keep-in-touch reminders based on how long it has been.
Keeping in touch	An optional reminder per person, at their usual rhythm or one you pick. No list of who is overdue.	A keep-in-touch cadence per contact or group, counted from the last interaction.
Where it lives	On your phone. Notes are not synced to our servers.	Cloud-synced across iOS, Android, web, desktop and extension.
Getting started	Talk about one person. Nothing to connect.	Sign up, choose a plan, then connect your accounts to bring contacts in.
Trying it	14 days of everything with no card, then a free plan if you do not subscribe.	A 7-day free trial on both paid plans; a card is required to start it.
Platforms	Android today. iPhone in App Store review.	iOS, Android, web, desktop, browser extension.
Does its AI write your messages	Never. The AI transcribes and files; the words are yours.	Yes: AI Assist drafts messages from your notes and history.
Streaks and scores	A weekly streak for the journal as a whole. Nothing is counted per person.	Not something they advertise.

Dex details checked on 29 September 2026 against their own site. Everything on this page about the other product was read off their own site on the date shown. We don’t list prices, because they change and a stale one would be misleading.

The difference that matters

The real split is what a prompt carries. Dex tracks time since last contact and tells you when it has been too long. Kept tracks what was said and gives you that back. One tells you that you are overdue; the other tells you what to say.

This is not a preference. Deciding in advance when and where you will do something has a medium-to-large effect on whether you do it, and a prompt that names a moment and a specific thing to say is closer to that structure than one that reports an elapsed interval.

There is also a quieter difference. A cadence shown as a list of who is overdue is a ledger — it is counting your inputs. The research on communal versus exchange relationships is fairly direct about what happens when ledger machinery gets applied to close relationships. Kept has reminders too, but each one carries a detail rather than an interval, and nowhere does it show who is owed a message.

Where Dex beats Kept

Dex does the contact-management job properly and Kept does not do it at all. If you want one place where every contact is current, deduplicated and synced back to your address book, across desktop and phone, Dex is built for that and Kept has no answer to it. It is also on iOS today, which Kept is not yet.

Don’t pick Kept if: You want your address book maintained, you work across several devices, or you want every contact you have ever had in one place with a cadence on each.

Why we built it this way

The design choices above aren’t preferences. Each one traces to published research, and each of these has its own page with the finding, the method and what it doesn’t show.

Other comparisons

If Kept is the one you want

Nine seconds of talking after you see someone. Kept files it against the right person and hands it back the day before it matters. Free for 14 days, no card needed.

Get it on Google Play