The problem: your contacts are scattered and leaking
Think about where your contact data actually lives. Your phone syncs to iCloud or Google. Your email provider knows every name in your inbox. Your CRM subscription logs every note to a SaaS database in a jurisdiction you don't control. And none of these tools answer the most human question: when did you last talk to this person, and about what?
Monica CRM was built to answer exactly that. It is not a sales tool — there are no pipelines, no lead scoring, no revenue forecasting. It is a personal relationship manager: a private journal for the people in your life, deployed on a server you own.
What Monica CRM does — and doesn't do
Monica organises your relationships the way a thoughtful person would. Every contact gets a dedicated page with:
- A full interaction log — every note, call, email and meeting you recorded, in chronological order.
- Smart reminders — birthdays, anniversaries, custom reminder dates, recurring check-in prompts.
- Personal context — relationship type (friend, colleague, mentor), occupation, company, social handles, custom fields you define.
- Life events — engagements, pregnancies, job changes, health events; the milestones that make a relationship feel real.
- Gift ideas — a per-contact list of ideas and what you actually gave them.
What Monica doesn't do: it does not track deals or revenue, it does not score leads, it does not have a shared team calendar. For business CRM needs, Twenty (also in the ServOrbit marketplace) is the better fit. Monica is for the human layer.
Architecture: PHP/Laravel, MariaDB, Redis — three containers, one VPS
The ServOrbit marketplace recipe deploys Monica as three Docker containers:
1. monicahq/monicahq:apache — the PHP/Laravel application with an embedded Apache web server, exposed on port 8080 of the host.
2. mariadb:11 — the relational database storing all contacts, interactions and reminders.
3. redis:7-alpine — the in-memory cache for sessions and queued jobs.
MariaDB is the only officially supported database for Monica v4. The application runs database migrations automatically on first start — there is no separate migration step, and the first user to register becomes the administrator.
Total memory footprint at rest: under 600 MB on a 1 GB VPS, leaving comfortable headroom for the OS and Docker overhead.
Deploy on ServOrbit: 5 steps
1. Order a VPS — a 1 vCPU / 1 GB RAM plan on Ubuntu 24.04 is sufficient. Monica's PHP process uses under 256 MB RAM; MariaDB adds 150–300 MB. If you plan to import a large contact list (10 k+) or run Monica for a small team, choose 2 GB.
2. One-click deploy from the marketplace — open your ServOrbit control panel, navigate to Marketplace → ERP & CRM → Monica CRM, and click Deploy. The provisioning playbook pulls the three images, starts the stack and waits for the health check. The web UI is ready in under 60 seconds.
3. Create your account — open http://<your-vps-ip>:8080 in a browser and register. No SMTP configuration is needed at this stage — Monica works fully without email delivery for the initial setup. The first account automatically receives admin privileges.
4. Import your contacts — go to Settings → Import and upload a vCard (.vcf) file from your phone, Google Contacts, Apple Contacts or Outlook. Monica deduplicates on email address and maps fields automatically. CSV import with custom field mapping is also supported for contacts exported from other tools.
5. Set your first reminders — open any contact, click Add Reminder and choose a date (one-time or recurring: weekly, monthly, yearly). Write a short note — 'Call to catch up' or 'Send anniversary card'. Monica surfaces due reminders on the dashboard each day.
Who benefits from Monica on a VPS
- Freelancers and consultants who track every client interaction and need to remember what was discussed six months ago without paying CRM SaaS fees.
- Founders and networkers managing investors, advisors, partners and candidates — the full orbit of relationships that a startup runs on.
- Professionals in GDPR-sensitive industries (legal, medical, finance) who cannot store client information in a foreign SaaS.
- Anyone who wants to be a better friend — Monica's birthday reminders, life event tracking and gift lists make the difference between the person who remembers and the person who forgets.
Privacy and data ownership
Monica is AGPL-3.0. There is no telemetry, no call home, no analytics service embedded in the self-hosted version. Your contact list, your interaction history and your personal notes stay on the MariaDB instance running on your VPS.
Regular backups are the responsibility of the operator. The ServOrbit marketplace includes Backrest — a web-based restic manager — which can back up Monica's MariaDB volume to Backblaze B2, Wasabi or S3 on a cron schedule with deduplication and encryption.
For a more relaxed stance on SMTP, set MAIL_MAILER=smtp in the environment and point Monica to a transactional relay (AWS SES, Mailgun, Brevo). Monica will then send reminder emails and password-reset links. Without SMTP, both features remain available through the dashboard — just not delivered to your inbox.
Logging in for the first time
Logging in for the first time
Open the URL and create your account through the sign-up form: this first account becomes the administrator of the instance. Do it straight away, as registration stays open.
