Manual template
Kept vs a Notion personal CRM template
A Notion database will do anything you tell it to, forever, as long as you keep telling it. Kept is built around the assumption that you won’t.
What a Notion template is
Notion is a general workspace. There are dozens of free and paid personal-CRM templates for it: a database of people, fields for how you met and when you last spoke, a couple of linked views, sometimes a formula that flags anyone you have not contacted in ninety days.
It is genuinely the most flexible option here and the cheapest. If you already live in Notion, the marginal cost of adding a people database is close to zero.
It is also the option with the highest ongoing cost, which is not measured in money.
Side by side
Capture
Kept
Hold a button, talk for nine seconds, confirm.
a Notion template
Open the app, find the database, create a row, fill the fields.
Setup
Kept
None.
a Notion template
Yours to design, and yours to redesign when it stops fitting.
Resurfacing
Kept
Pushed to you with the detail attached.
a Notion template
A view you have to remember to open.
Flexibility
Kept
Low. It does one thing.
a Notion template
Total. It will model anything you can describe.
Where it lives
Kept
On your phone. Notes are not synced to our servers.
a Notion template
Notion’s cloud.
a Notion template details checked on 15 August 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 failure mode of a Notion CRM is not that it works badly. It is that it works exactly as well as your discipline, and discipline is the thing in shortest supply at the moment that matters — walking out of a café, half thinking about the next thing.
The lifelogging literature ran into this decades ago from the other direction: capture was never the bottleneck, and an archive nobody revisits does nothing at all. A Notion database is very good at capture and entirely dependent on you to close the loop.
Kept is narrower on purpose. Nine seconds of talking is a low enough bar to clear in a doorway, and the resurfacing is pushed rather than pulled, because a view you have to remember to open has the same problem as the note you were going to write.
Where a Notion template beats Kept
Flexibility, and it is not a small advantage. If your needs are unusual — you want to track something Kept has no field for, join it to other data, or share it with a partner — a Notion template will do that and Kept will not. If you are the sort of person who genuinely maintains a system, you do not need us.
Don’t pick Kept if: You enjoy building systems and you actually keep them up. That is a real skill and it makes this whole category unnecessary for you.
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.
Recording everything produced huge archives and nothing useful
Sellen & Whittaker (2010) · Communications of the ACM
Reviewing a partial capture cues recall months later
Hodges, Berry, Wood et al. · SenseCam autobiographical memory research
Deciding when and where you’ll do something roughly doubles the odds you do it
Gollwitzer & Sheeran (2006) · Implementation intentions and goal achievement
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.