Contrack vs Folk

Contrack vs Folk

Compared in October 2026: Contrack 2.0.0 and Folk 3.0 (hosted SaaS).

Folk is a commercial, Notion-style CRM designed for agencies, venture teams, founders and sales or recruiting pipelines. It centers around customizable spreadsheet tables, Kanban boards, browser-extension capture and bulk email sequences.

Contrack is an open-source, self-hosted relationship manager built for people rather than deal tables. It runs on a single SQLite file, combines personal and professional relationships in one calm workspace, and includes local semantic search, automatic email and calendar timelines, a world map and a built-in MCP server with no per-seat subscription.

At a glance

Area	Contrack 2.0.0	Folk 3.0 (hosted SaaS)
Hosting and license	Self-hosted, open-source (AGPL-3.0), free with no seat or enrichment limits	Proprietary cloud SaaS with per-member monthly pricing and quotas
Primary model	People, relationship timelines, stay-in-touch cadences and a daily Pulse brief	Spreadsheet tables, custom object views, Kanban pipelines and sequences
Stack and storage	1 Node container and 1 SQLite file (curator.db) on your own server	Cloud-hosted SaaS infrastructure
Personal context	Friends, family, birthdays, anniversaries, custom dates, gift ideas in notes, tags, lists, @mentions	Can be added as custom table columns, but designed around B2B workflows
Professional context	Role, company, experience, education, cadence, relationship score, web research and pre-meeting briefs	Companies, deals, custom pipeline stages, sequences and shared tables
Getting data in	Google Contacts, Gmail, Google Calendar, IMAP, ICS, vCard/CSV/JSON import, and Add from text	Browser extension (LinkedIn/X), Google/Microsoft sync, CSV import
Keeping up	Opt-in tracking per person, custom cadence, Pulse morning page, overdue and upcoming milestones	Manual reminders and pipeline stage movement
Search	Local hybrid search (FTS5 + sqlite-vec embeddings + local cross-encoder reranker) and Notes mode	Keyword filtering and cloud AI assistants across tables
Map	Built-in MapLibre world map with clustering, box/lasso selection, saved views and custom pin placement	None built in
AI and web enrichment	Optional BYO-key or local Ollama + SearXNG web research with cited sources and Not this person	Cloud magic fields and credit-metered contact enrichment
MCP server	Built in at /api/mcp (18 tools, personal tokens and OAuth 2.1)	Cloud API and webhook/Zapier integrations
Multi-user	Multiple isolated accounts on one server (ideal for households or private individual networks)	Shared workspaces with per-seat billing

A relationship timeline vs a spreadsheet of rows

Spreadsheet-style CRMs work well when every contact is a row in a sales or recruiting funnel, but they often feel like work when you want to remember the context around a person over years.

• Folk organizes people into groups and spreadsheet views where you configure custom columns, pipeline stages and bulk outreach campaigns.
• Contrack gives every person a dedicated dossier and chronological timeline (see Contacts):
  • Notes, calls, meetings, emails, attachments and @mentions live in one place instead of tiny spreadsheet cells.
  • Add from text (Smart Paste) accepts any free-form note, such as "Met at Sarah's wedding, loves natural wine, kids are Leo and Maya, catch up every quarter" or "Partner at Sequoia, follow up next Tuesday on seed round", and creates the contact, extracts work and personal facts, sets a follow-up and logs past dated interactions automatically.
  • Pulse opens each morning with the people you are overdue to reach out to, upcoming follow-ups, and birthdays, anniversaries or custom milestones over the next 7 to 14 days.

Self-hosted ownership with no seat or enrichment quotas

• Folk charges per member per month and meters contact enrichment credits, email messages and AI usage by plan tier. Your contacts, notes and synced emails reside in Folk's cloud.
• Contrack is free and self-hosted on your own machine or VPS in a single Docker container backed by one SQLite file (curator.db). Every user account on your server is isolated at the database layer, daily SQLite backups run automatically, and web enrichment uses your own search and model keys (or a local Ollama model + self-hosted SearXNG) with no platform markups or credit caps (see Self-hosting and AI and research).

Local hybrid search, world map and MCP

• Local semantic search across notes. Contrack embeds every contact, note, interaction and custom fact locally using bge-small-en-v1.5 in sqlite-vec alongside SQLite FTS5, then reranks matches with a local ms-marco-MiniLM-L-6-v2 cross-encoder. Switching to Notes mode finds the exact paragraph where a topic was discussed months ago, without sending your notes to an external API (see Search and Ask Contrack).
• Interactive world map. Contrack's Map plots your contacts across a MapLibre world map with clustering, metro-area resolution, rectangle and lasso selection for building trip lists, and saved geographic views.
• Built-in MCP server. Connect Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, Cursor or custom agents directly to /api/mcp on your own server to search contacts, read timelines, prepare for meetings or log notes (see MCP server).

When Folk might still fit better

Folk is built for collaborative commercial workflows that Contrack intentionally leaves out:

• Shared multi-user deal pipelines where several teammates edit the same contact rows and Kanban boards together in real time (in Contrack, each user account on a server has a private, isolated network).
• Bulk outbound email sequences and mail-merge campaigns sent directly from the CRM.
• Browser extension capture (Folk X) for one-click scraping from LinkedIn or X/Twitter pages while browsing.

Moving from Folk to Contrack

1. In Folk, open the group or view you want to move, click Export CSV, and download the file.
2. In Contrack, open Settings → Import (or press ⌘K and type Import), upload the CSV file, and let the duplicate detector merge any overlapping contacts.
3. Use Pulse or Network to turn on Track and set cadences for the relationships you want to keep warm.