I’ll be honest, I’ve always been awful at remembering names. You know that embarrassing moment when someone greets you enthusiastically, clearly remembering your last conversation, and you’re frantically trying to recall what their name is. Or worse, whether you’ve even met them before.
Your local LLM might turn any file into a mind map, but it’s not going to help you remember who’s who in a network that grows daily. Our social networks have exploded, but our brains haven’t evolved to keep up. We’ve got hundreds of contacts scattered across our phones, social media, and email, yet we can barely remember the basics about the people who actually matter. Thankfully, there’s an open-source tool that fixes just that.
Why most contact managers fall apart the moment relationships get real
Your phone already has a contact book, but it’s too basic and contains just names, numbers, and perhaps email if you remember to save it. Social media is great for stalking people’s vacation photos, but terrible for tracking relationships. Regular CRM tools? Those are built for sales teams tracking leads and conversion rates, not for remembering that your friend’s daughter just started college or that you met someone through your yoga instructor. Sure, you can make your iPhone contact list better, but that’s not how real-world contacts work.
What I needed was something that treated my personal relationships like they actually mattered, not like potential revenue streams. And that’s exactly what NameTag does.
NameTag is essentially a CRM for your actual life. It’s an open-source personal relationship manager that helps you keep track of the people in your life and understand how they’re all connected.
The best part? It’s not some corporate tool trying to monetize your data. Its open-source software released under the AGPL-3.0 license, which means you can inspect the code, modify it, and even host it yourself on your own server. For someone like me who values privacy and control over personal data, that’s a huge selling point.
- OS
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Web-based
- Developer
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Matias Godoy
- Price model
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Free, Open-source, paid options available
An open-source personal relationship manager that helps you remember names, context, and people—without turning your life into a CRM.
Lightweight relationship tracking instead of bloated CRM nonsense
The core concept here is quite simple. You create profiles for people in your life with attributes like names, birthdays, contact information, and notes about anything else you want to remember. On top of that, you can map relationships between people.
Say you met someone named Jake at a conference. In NameTag, you don’t just save a contact named Jake. You can record that you met Jake through your colleague Maria, that he’s a photographer, that his birthday is in August, and that you last spoke on January 15. Later, when you meet Jake’s business partner Lisa, you can link her to Jake, and suddenly you’ve got a web of connections that make sense.
This visualization is interactive as well. NameTag uses D3.js to create a force-directed graph that shows your entire social network visually. You can see clusters of friends, family, colleagues, and how they all interconnect. It lays out your life’s social architecture in front of you and removes the guesswork when meeting someone you might not remember.
The features that actually make it useful
Notes, reminders, and context—without treating friends like sales leads
Beyond the basics, NameTag also includes several other features that you generally find in traditional contact managers. You can organize people into custom groups, such as gaming friends, a hobby community, or extended family. The system tracks important dates and can send birthday reminders if you configure email notifications.
There’s also a last contact tracker that helps you remember when you last spoke with someone. If you’ve ever felt guilty because you realize you haven’t checked in with a friend in months, NameTag makes that visible.
The interface is also clean and makes all the features easily accessible. It’s also mobile-responsive, meaning you don’t necessarily have to be at your desk to add new events or people to your network either.
Self-hosting means you stay in control
Your data, your server, and no algorithms “optimizing” your memory
When you start using NameTag, you have two options: use the hosted version at nametag.one or self-host it completely.
The hosted service offers a generous free tier that lets you track up to 50 people and 10 groups. If you need more, paid plans start at just $1 per month for up to 1,000 people. The hosted version also helps fund ongoing development of the project.
That said, if you’d like complete control over your data, you can self-host NameTag using Docker. The entire stack includes Next.js 16 with TypeScript, PostgreSQL with Prisma ORM, Redis for rate limiting, and Tailwind CSS for styling. Setup is also quite straightforward thanks to Docker Compose. All you have to do is clone the GitHub repository and run a single command after configuring your environment variables.
As you’d expect, the self-hosted version has zero limits on contacts, runs entirely offline if you want, and accounts auto-verify without needing an email service. Your relationship data and any connected contact information stays on your infrastructure, completely protected from the outside world.
Stop blanking on names—start remembering people
A personal relationship manager beats raw memory every time
What makes NameTag different from every other contact manager I’ve tried is the fact that it’s designed around how human relationships actually work. They’re not linear lists in a phone book—they’re interconnected webs of people who know each other through various contexts. NameTag visualizes that reality instead of fighting against it.
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If you’re terrible with names like I am, NameTag is more than just helpful. You can actually remember important details about people’s lives, follow up at appropriate times, and maintain relationships that would otherwise fade into the background noise of modern life.
