Contrack vs Huly

Contrack vs Huly

Compared in October 2026: Contrack 2.0.0 and Huly 0.7.426.

Huly is an ambitious open-source all-in-one workspace built to replace Linear, Jira, Slack, Notion and applicant or contact tracking inside a single company platform.

Contrack is a focused, self-hosted personal and professional relationship manager. Instead of running a multi-container enterprise workspace for issue tracking and team chat, Contrack runs as a single Node.js process over one SQLite file and focuses entirely on helping you remember and stay in touch with the people in your life and work.

At a glance

Area	Contrack 2.0.0	Huly 0.7.426
Primary job	Personal and professional relationship manager (CRM)	All-in-one company workspace (issues, chat, docs, virtual office, ATS)
Stack and deployment	1 Node container and 1 SQLite file (curator.db)	10+ microservices, CockroachDB/MongoDB, Elasticsearch, MinIO/S3, Nginx
Memory and CPU footprint	Runs comfortably on a small VPS, Raspberry Pi or home NAS	Multi-gigabyte RAM footprint across database, search and service cluster
Backup	One SQLite snapshot (VACUUM INTO), automatic daily backups, or one click in Settings → Backups	Coordinated dumps across relational/document DB, object storage & index
Personal context	Friends, family, birthdays, anniversaries, custom dates, gift ideas in notes, tags, lists, @mentions	Workspace contacts and leads; not designed for personal life milestones
Professional context	Role, company, experience, education, cadence, relationship score, web research and pre-meeting briefs	Leads, customer funnels, recruiting candidates and organization records
Getting data in	Google Contacts, Gmail, Google Calendar, IMAP, ICS, vCard/CSV/JSON import, and Add from text	GitHub, Gmail/Google Calendar workspace integrations and manual entry
Keeping up	Opt-in tracking per person, custom cadence, Pulse morning page, overdue and upcoming milestones	Issue assignments, tasks and calendar events
Search	Built-in local hybrid search (SQLite FTS5 + sqlite-vec + local cross-encoder reranker)	External Elasticsearch / OpenSearch cluster
Map	Built-in MapLibre world map with clustering, box/lasso selection, saved views and custom pin placement	None
AI and web enrichment	Optional provider-backed or SearXNG web research with cited sources, plus Ask Contrack	Workspace AI assistant for docs, chat and transcription
MCP server	Built in at /api/mcp (18 tools, personal tokens and OAuth 2.1)	None built in

One SQLite file vs a 10-container microservice cluster

For a self-hoster, operational simplicity determines whether a tool stays running for years or breaks on the next server upgrade.

• Huly (huly-selfhost) is an enterprise distributed system. Running it yourself requires orchestrating front-end, account, transactor, collaborator, rekoni and fulltext services alongside CockroachDB (or MongoDB), Elasticsearch, MinIO object storage and a reverse proxy.
• Contrack is one Node.js process and one SQLite file (curator.db) in WAL mode. Full-text search (FTS5) and vector search (sqlite-vec) live inside that same SQLite file, and the embedding and reranker models run in-process on CPU. One docker compose up -d starts everything, and a complete backup is a single portable .db file (see Self-hosting).

Purpose-built for relationships vs an issue-tracker workspace

• Huly treats contacts primarily as participants in company workflows: recruiting candidates, sales leads, or organization members linked to issues and documents.
• Contrack is built from the ground up around people and memory:
  • Personal and professional in one timeline. Keep friends and family right alongside founders, collaborators and mentors. Add from text (Smart Paste) turns "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" into a structured contact with tags, custom facts and dated past interactions.
  • Proactive cadences on Pulse. Opt in to tracking specific people on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or custom schedule. Contrack computes a live relationship health score from 0 to 100, highlights who is overdue, and shows upcoming birthdays, anniversaries and custom dates 7 to 14 days ahead.
  • Web enrichment with citations. Enrich a contact from the web (Standard or Deep) to fill in work history, education, location and social links, with every source URL cited and a one-click Not this person revert (see AI and research).
  • Geographic view. See where your network lives on an interactive MapLibre Map with clustering, metro-area resolution, and box or lasso selection for planning trips.

Built-in hybrid search and MCP without external infrastructure

Because Contrack embeds bge-small-en-v1.5 and ms-marco-MiniLM-L-6-v2 locally, you get semantic and keyword search across every person and note immediately after starting the container, without provisioning or tuning an Elasticsearch cluster (see Search and Ask Contrack). And with the built-in MCP server at /api/mcp, external AI tools like Claude Desktop, ChatGPT and Cursor can query your network or log notes directly.

When Huly might still fit better

Huly solves a very different problem if you are running a software company or engineering team:

• You want an issue tracker, sprint planner, team chat, virtual voice office, collaborative wiki and recruiting ATS in one shared workspace.
• You need two-way GitHub issue and pull request synchronization for a development team.

Moving contacts from Huly to Contrack

1. Export your contacts from Huly (or from your connected Google Contacts / CSV source).
2. In Contrack, open Settings → Import (or press ⌘K and type Import), upload your CSV, vCard (.vcf) or JSON file, and let the duplicate check merge any overlapping entries.
3. Connect Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, IMAP or ICS in Settings → Connectors, then pick the people you want to track on Pulse.