Document your life

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Monica is an open source personal relationship management system, that lets you document your life.

Warning

This branch is in development. It’s our beta version.

If you want to browse the stable and current version, see the 4.x branch.

Introduction

Monica is an open-source web application that enables you to document your life, organize, and log your interactions with your family and friends. We call it a PRM, or Personal Relationship Management. Imagine a CRM—a commonly used tool by sales teams in the corporate world—for your friends and family.

Features

Add and manage contacts
Define relationships between contacts
Reminders
Automatic reminders for birthdays
Ability to add notes to a contact
Ability to record how you met someone
Management of activities with a contact
Management of tasks
Management of addresses and all the different ways to contact someone
Management of contact field types
Management of a contact’s pets
Top of the art diary to keep track of what’s happening in your life
Ability to record how your day went
Upload documents and photos
Ability to define custom genders
Ability to define custom activity types
Ability to favorite contacts
Multiple vaults and users
Labels to organize contacts
Ability to define what section should appear on the contact sheet
Multiple currencies
Translated in 27 languages

Who is it for?

This project is for people who want to document their lives and those who have difficulty remembering details about the lives of people they care about.

We’ve also had a lot of positive reviews from people with Asperger syndrome, Alzheimer’s disease, and introverts who use our app every day.

What Monica isn’t

Monica is not a social network and it never will be. It’s not meant to be social. It’s designed to be the opposite: it’s for your eyes only.
Monica is not a smart assistant. It won’t guess what you want to do. It’s actually pretty dumb: it will only send you emails for the things you asked to be reminded of.
Monica does not have built-in AI with integrations like ChatGPT.
Monica is not a tool that will scan your data and do nasty things with it. It’s your data, your server, do whatever you want with it. You’re in control of your data.

Contribute

Do you want to lend a hand? That’s great! We accept contributions from everyone, regardless of form.

Here are some of the things you can do to help.

Contribute as a community

Unlike Fight Club, the best way to help is to actually talk about Monica as much as you can in blog posts and articles, or on social media.
You can answer questions in the issue tracker to help other community members.
You can financially support Monica’s development on Patreon or by subscribing to a paid account.

Contribute as a developer

Read our Contribution Guide.
Install the developer version locally so you can start contributing.
Look for issues labelled ‘Bugs’ if you are looking to have an immediate impact on Monica.
Look for issues labelled ‘Help Wanted’. These are issues that you can solve relatively easily.
Look for issues labelled ’Good First Issue’. These issues are for people who want to contribute, but try to work on a small feature first.
If you are an advanced developer, you can try to tackle issues labelled ‘Feature Requests’. These are harder to do and will require a lot of back-and-forth with the repository administrator to make sure we are going to the right direction with the product.

Principles, vision, goals and strategy

We want to use technology in a way that does not harm human relationships, unlike big social networks.

Principles

Monica has a few principles.

It should help improve relationships.
It should be simple to use, simple to contribute to, simple to understand, extremely simple to maintain.
It is not a social network and never will be.
It is not and never will be ad-supported.
Users are not and never will be tracked.
It should be transparent.
It should be open-source.
It should do one thing (documenting your life) extremely well, and nothing more.
It should be well documented.

Vision

Monica’s vision is to help people have more meaningful relationships.

Goals

We want to provide a platform that is:

really easy to use: we value simplicity over anything else.
open-source: we believe everyone should be able to contribute to this tool, and see for themselves that nothing nasty is done behind the scenes that would go against the best interests of the users. We also want to leverage the community to build attractive features and do things that would not be possible otherwise.
easy to contribute to: we want to keep the codebase as simple as possible. This has two big advantages: anyone can contribute, and it’s easily maintainable on the long run.
available everywhere: Monica should be able to run on any desktop OS or mobile phone easily. This will be made possible by making sure the tool is easily installable by anyone who wants to either contribute or host the platform themselves.

Why Open Source?

Why is Monica open source? Is it risky? Could someone steal my code and use it to start a for-profit business that could hurt my own? Why reveal our strategy to the world? We’ve already received these kinds of questions in our emails.

The answer is simple: yes, you can fork Monica and create a competing project, make money from it (even if the license is not ideal for that) and we won’t be aware. But that’s okay, we don’t mind.

We wanted to open source Monica for several reasons:

We believe that this tool can really change people’s lives. We aim to make money from this project, but also want everyone to benefit. Open sourcing it will help Monica become much bigger than we imagine. We believe the software should follow our vision, but we must be humble enough to recognize that ideas come from everywhere and people may have better ideas than us.
You can’t make something great alone. While Monica could become a company and hire a bunch of super smart people to work on it, you can’t beat the manpower of an entire community. Open sourcing the product means bugs will be fixed faster, features will be developed faster, and more importantly, developers will be able to contribute to a tool that positively changes their own lives and the lives of other people.
Doing things in a transparent way leads to formidable things. People respect the project more when they can see how it’s being worked on. You can’t hide nasty things in the code. You can’t do things behind the backs of your users. Doing everything in the open is a major driving force that motivates you to keep doing what’s right.
Once you’ve created a community of passionate developers around your project, you’ve won. Developers are powerful influencers: they create apps, discuss your product on forums, and share it with their networks. Nurture your relationship with developers – users will follow.

Patreon

You can support the development of Monica on Patreon. Thanks for your help.

Contact

Team

Our team is made of two core members:

Regis (djaiss)
Alexis Saettler (asbiin)

We are also fortunate to have an amazing community of developers who help us greatly.

Thank you, open source

Monica makes use of numerous open-source projects and we are deeply grateful. We hope that by offering Monica as a free, open-source project, we can help others in the same way these programs have helped us.