Comparison

Met vs Dex

These two get compared a lot, and they probably should not be, because they solve different halves of the problem. Dex is a personal CRM for tending the network you already have. Met is for capturing the person you just met, before they become a card in your bag and then nothing at all.

The short answer

Pick Dex if you want a cross-platform personal CRM to keep up with contacts you already have, and you mostly add people from LinkedIn and email at your desk. Pick Met if your problem starts at the event, where you meet someone, need to capture them and the context in a second, and follow up before the week buries it. Dex has no scanner; that is the line between them.

Side by side

	Met	Dex
Built for	Capturing new people at events	Maintaining people you already know
Scans cards / badges	Yes, in about a second	No, import-based capture
Keeps the context	Yes, at capture time	Yes, notes + timeline
Follow-up cadence	Yes (Pro)	Strong, the headline feature
Where contacts live	Your personal iCloud	Dex servers
Data sold / ads	No	Privacy label lists ad/marketing/analytics use
Platforms	iPhone	iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, web, Chrome
Free tier	Free to start	Free, unlimited contacts, basic reminders
Paid price	$6.99/mo or $49.99/yr	~$12/mo billed annually

Prices, platforms, and the privacy-label detail verified from the App Store and Dex's site in June 2026 and can change. Dex is a trademark of its owner and is not affiliated with or endorsing Met.

The gap a CRM cannot close

A personal CRM is built for a network you have already entered. It is excellent at the second half of the relationship: remembering to reach back out, surfacing the people you have not talked to in a while, nudging you on a birthday. Dex does this as well as anything on the market.

But it assumes the contact is already in the system. And the people you actually lose are never in the system. They are the person you had a real conversation with at a conference, whose card went into your bag, whose name you were sure you would remember, and who was gone by the following Tuesday because the moment to type them in passed while you were shaking the next hand. A CRM cannot tend a relationship it never received. That capture, at the moment of meeting, with the context attached, is the half Met owns. And because Met also drafts the follow-up, the captured person does not just sit in a list; they get a message while the conversation is still warm.

A CRM tends the garden. Met catches the seeds you would otherwise drop on the way home.

Feel the capture-to-follow-up loop in 30 seconds.

The free follow-up generator turns a name, a place, and one detail into a ready-to-send message. No account, nothing stored. It is the half a personal CRM leaves to your willpower.

Open the free follow-up generator

Where Dex is the better choice

Plainly: if your problem is staying in touch with people you already know, and you live across a Mac, a PC, and the web, Dex is probably the better tool and Met is not. Its cross-platform reach is real, its free tier gives you unlimited contacts, and its keep-in-touch engine is the most refined in this group. The browser extension that pulls people in from LinkedIn and Gmail is genuinely good.

Met is narrower on purpose. It is an iPhone app for the moment of meeting and the days right after. If you rarely get handed a card and mostly cultivate an existing list from a desk, Dex earns the pick. If your contacts arrive in person and disappear before you log them, that is Met.

Questions

Is Met a Dex alternative?

Partly, and it depends on the job. Dex is a personal CRM for staying in touch with people already in your network, imported from LinkedIn and email. Met is for capturing new people at events, where Dex has no scanner. Many people end up using a capture tool at the event and a CRM at the desk; Met is built to be the capture half, and it also handles the follow-up.

Does Dex scan business cards?

No. Dex builds your network by importing from LinkedIn, email, and its browser extension, not by scanning a card at the moment you meet someone. That is the gap Met fills: the person whose card is still in your bag because you never got around to typing them in is exactly the contact a CRM never captures.

Is Dex private?

Dex is a paid tool, but its App Store privacy label lists contact data used for advertising, marketing, and analytics, which is worth knowing. Met stores your contacts in your own iCloud, runs no enrichment, and sells nothing, so the trade is different.

Keep comparing: the full buyer's guide scores Met, Dex, Covve, CamCard, and ABBYY on one rubric, or see all comparisons.