Open source
Monica HQ alternatives in 2026
Monica HQ is an open-source personal relationship manager you can self-host for free: a deliberately manual, structured journal of the people in your life.
The short answer
If running it on your own server is the first requirement, Monica is the right answer. Check two things first: the project has been nearly dormant for a year, and no assistant can read it yet.
Best for
People whose first requirement is owning the server, and who want no AI near their relationship data.
Wend's difference
A private graph your assistant can read, with sources under facts and approval before writes.
Check next
Pricing, data location, and the dated comparison rows below.
Wend, measured
92
people from one WhatsApp read, before you grant a single permission.
0.63s
to read 69,000 messages and find the people in them. No model call.
2.4s
for one extraction on the Mac itself, at no cost.
Measured on a real Mac running macOS 26.4.1. On-device extraction needs Apple silicon with Apple Intelligence turned on.
Why people look for Monica HQ alternatives
Everything is typed in by hand. It is a journal, not an assistant, and that is a design choice rather than a gap.
The repository has been close to dormant: nine commits in the last fifty-two weeks, stable branch untouched since May 2024 (checked 2026-08-06).
We found no shipped MCP server as of August 2026, so your assistant cannot read it yet.
Self-hosting is real setup and real maintenance.
Side by side
| Dimension | Monica HQ | Wend |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | People whose first requirement is owning the server, and who want no AI near their relationship data. | People who already live in an AI assistant and want it to know their network |
| Pricing | $0 self-hosted, about $90/year hosted (as of August 2026) | Free forever, or $29/mo ($290/yr) for Wendy, flat at any network size |
| Free tier | Yes, if you run it yourself | Yes. Free forever, no card, unlimited people. Per-person detail covers the last year; Wendy opens all of it |
| Where your data lives | Your server, or theirs if hosted | Your Mac, with a cloud copy your agents can reach. The receipts stay on the Mac |
| Who controls it | You, completely. Your server, your database, AGPL source | A managed service, on an open engine. wend-core is AGPLv3, so the write path and the schema are readable; the hosted product around them is not |
| How facts arrive | You type them | Your agent proposes from mail, calendar, files and conversations, and you approve |
| Assistant access | Discussed for v3, none shipped that we could find (checked 2026-08-06) | MCP across Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Gemini |
| AI | None, by design, which for many people is the point | AI proposes, a person approves, and every inference is written to an audit log you can export |
| Your day | Reminders and activities you enter yourself | Tasks, and a day laid out around the meetings in your Google Calendar, with the reason on every block |
| Upkeep | Your time, plus server operations | Near zero, and manual entry is always available and never gated |
Competitor facts and pricing last checked August 2026, from published vendor material. Verify on their site.
Where Wend fits in
Not another app to open. Wend is the memory underneath the assistant you already use: it builds itself out of what your Mac already holds, and every fact it keeps records where it came from. Once the people are in one place, Wend plans the day around them, which is the part a planner without the graph cannot do.
Demand was never the missing piece. Monica holds 25,000 GitHub stars for a tool where you type every fact in by hand.
Friction was. Every product in the category asked you to open one more app and feed it, and a decade of better design never removed that habit.
The agent is the first interface that removes it. You open your assistant several times a day already, so capture and recall happen inside a conversation you were having anyway.
Monica answers the same problem with control: your server, your database, AGPL source, no AI anywhere near it. Wend answers it with a different mechanism, where the remembering happens without you typing and every fact records where it came from. Both are real positions.
Monica HQ vs Wend: FAQ
Is Wend open source like Monica?
Partly. The engine is AGPLv3 as wend-core: the graph schema, the propose-and-confirm write path, provenance and recall, so the mechanism we ask you to trust is readable. The product around it is not open and there is no self-host build. If that is a hard requirement, Monica is the honest recommendation.
Can I self-host Wend?
Wend already runs on your own machine. The graph is a file on your Mac; a cloud copy keeps your agents answered while the Mac is shut, and the raw content Wend captures stays on the Mac. Nothing is sold and nothing trains a model.
Is Monica still actively developed?
Judge it from the repository rather than from us. As of 2026-08-06: nine commits in the previous fifty-two weeks, stable branch untouched since May 2024. It has 25,000 stars and a real community, so this may change. Check before you build a decade of history on it.
Other alternatives you might compare
A digital brain for the people in your life.
It installs on your Mac, builds the graph out of what is already there, and answers from the AI you already use. Every fact keeps its source. $29 a month, flat at any network size.
Access is invite only right now.