Comparison

Dex review: how Umfeld compares as a personal CRM

Dex is the best-known commercial personal CRM, built around LinkedIn. Here is what Dex does well, and where Umfeld takes a different approach.

What Dex does well

Dex earned its reputation as a tool for professional networking, and it earned it fairly. The browser extension captures LinkedIn profiles into your contact list in a couple of clicks, including job and company changes, which Dex tracks and updates on its own. For anyone who collects a lot of new professional contacts and wants to keep track of career moves, this is one of the cleaner implementations on the market.

The reminder system, which nudges you when it has been a while since you last talked to someone, is well built too. If you want a cloud tool with no hosting of your own and a clear focus on professional networking, Dex is a mature, polished product.

Where Dex and Umfeld part ways

The difference starts with the target. Dex is built around LinkedIn and professional networking. Umfeld is built for your entire personal circle: family, friends, ex-partners, coworkers, all in one graph instead of a contact list with a professional slant.

The second difference is where your data lives. Dex runs as a US cloud service. Umfeld runs as a hosted service with servers in the EU, operated by a German company, see EU hosting. If it matters to you where your data is stored, or you would rather not store your relationship data with a US provider at all, that point carries more weight than it first appears to.

At a glance

Dex: LinkedIn focused, US cloud, no access for AI clients.

Umfeld: people focused, hosted in the EU, readable and writable by Claude, ChatGPT, and other clients through MCP.

Dex versus Umfeld, feature by feature

	Umfeld	Dex
Hosting	EU cloud	US cloud
LinkedIn integration
Browser extension
Relationship graph between contacts
Built for personal relationships (family, friends)
AI connection via MCP
Open source

Common questions about Dex and Umfeld

Is Dex better than Umfeld for professional networking?

If your focus is LinkedIn contacts and career networking, yes. That is exactly what Dex is built for. Umfeld covers that ground too, but it is not specialized for LinkedIn.

Can I use Dex and Umfeld at the same time?

Technically yes, practically it rarely makes sense. Both want to be the source of truth for your network. For Google Contacts sync and a real relationship graph, you end up needing Umfeld regardless.

Does Dex offer an AI connection like MCP?

Not as far as is publicly known. Umfeld connects through an MCP server directly to AI clients such as Claude, which can then read contacts and add notes. More on that on the connect AI clients page.

Short answer

Dex is a solid choice if LinkedIn is your main channel for new contacts and US cloud hosting is not a concern. For anything beyond professional networking, for family, friendships, and relationships that connect through several people, Umfeld is the more thorough tool. The pricing and the 7 day free trial are easy enough to check for yourself. For anyone who also knows Monica, the Umfeld versus Monica comparison covers the other side of that trade: open source against actively maintained closed source software.

Your network deserves more than a contact list

Try Umfeld free for 7 days. A card is required to start, and you are only charged after the trial.

Start free trial