Dex vs Linkt: Which Stay in Touch App Fits You?

Linkt started with a trip. Its developer, Conor, spent six months traveling around Southeast Asia and found himself losing touch with friends and family back home without meaning to. He was always on the move, the time zones were a mess, and weeks slid by. Linkt is the app he wished he'd had.

That origin shows. Linkt puts each contact's local time on screen, along with the weather where they live and news from their city. You give each person a check-in goal and it hands you a daily list of who is due. It's small and cheap, and it takes privacy more seriously than almost anything else in the category.

Dex does the same core job for a different crowd: the network you have built up through work, meaning former colleagues, clients, and the people you met once at a conference and want to keep. The two apps overlap more than you might expect. Where they split is in how they find out that you and someone actually talked, and that is what should decide which one you buy.

Fast facts:

• Linkt is free to download on iPhone, iPad, Mac (Apple silicon), and Vision Pro. Full access is $2.29/week, $35.99/year, or $69.99 once in the US App Store.

• The annual plan has a 7-day free trial and the weekly plan a 3-day trial. The lifetime plan can be shared with up to 5 people through Apple Family Sharing.

• Linkt encrypts contacts and interaction logs on your device before they sync, using AES-256-GCM, and Linkt's privacy policy says only you can decrypt them.

• There is no Android app yet. The App Store listing covers Apple devices only, and Linkt's privacy policy mentions a platform waitlist.

• Dex is $12/month for Premium and $20/month for Professional on annual billing, with a 7-day free trial that needs a card but does not charge until it ends.

What both apps get right

A lot of our comparisons come down to the other product having been built for something else: Pipedrive for deals, Salesforce for sales forecasts. That argument doesn't work on Linkt. It was built for the same thing Dex is for, which is keeping people in your life on purpose.

The mechanic is the same in both. You pick a person, choose how often you want to be in touch, and the app counts the time since you last spoke. When someone goes overdue, they come back up. Linkt calls this a check-in goal and rolls the results into a Social Score and a Today's Focus list. Dex calls it a keep-in-touch reminder and sorts your contacts by who is most overdue.

Both remember birthdays and keep notes and a conversation history for each person. Linkt will also turn a note into a reminder if you write it the way you'd say it, so "ask Sarah about her interview next month" comes back as a prompt a month later. It's a small thing, and it's the sort of detail that makes Linkt nice to open every day.

Linkt is a real stay in touch app, then. What separates the two is how each one learns that you stayed in touch.

How each app knows you talked

Linkt knows what you tell it. When you want to reach someone, Quick-Connect opens their preferred app: iMessage, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, FaceTime, and others. Linkt's pricing page lists this as "Quick Connect with auto-logged chats," so a chat you open through Linkt is logged against that person without extra work. You can also log a catch-up by hand and add a note about how it went.

Linkt does not read your messages. It can't see that your college roommate texted you on Tuesday and you replied from the Messages app, or that a former manager sent you something on LinkedIn. Those conversations happened, but Linkt only learns about them if you go back and log them.

This follows directly from Linkt's privacy model, which is zero-knowledge: contacts and interaction logs are encrypted on your phone before they reach its servers, and Linkt's privacy policy says the company cannot decrypt them. An app built that way was never going to read your WhatsApp history in the background. You get the privacy and the manual logging from the same decision.

Dex, on the other hand, connects to the places you already talk and updates each contact's last-interaction date whenever a message goes in either direction. Per Dex's documentation:

• LinkedIn sync pulls your connections, updates last interaction from your latest LinkedIn conversation, and flags job changes.

• WhatsApp sync runs daily, covers 1:1 chats and groups under five people, and refreshes keep-in-touch reminders with each interaction.

• Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo email count too.

• iMessage and SMS sync runs hourly, but only through the Dex desktop app on a Mac, and the feature is still labeled beta.

So if you live on your iPhone and don't own a Mac, Dex won't see your iMessages either. For an iPhone-only person whose friendships mostly run through Messages, the two apps are closer than their feature lists make them look.

The difference shows up with contact you didn't start from the app: a friend who messages you first, a reply you send from whichever app buzzed, a LinkedIn thread you pick back up a month later. In Linkt, each of those needs a manual log or the person drifts toward overdue. Dex counts them on its own.

If you have ever kept a habit tracker, you know how manual logging goes. It works for a few weeks, then you miss a few entries, the list starts telling you that you neglected someone you spoke to yesterday, and you stop trusting it. Quick-Connect cuts down on the logging, which is a smart design choice, but it can't get rid of it.

Linkt pricing, and the plan to skip

Linkt is cheap. The annual plan costs about a quarter of Dex Premium, and the lifetime plan costs less than six months of Dex. These are the US App Store prices.

The weekly row is the one to watch. At $2.29 a week, a year of Linkt costs $119, more than three times the annual plan and not far off a year of Dex. Weekly billing is common in the App Store and fine for a three-day test, but if you keep the app, switch to annual or lifetime.

The lifetime plan is the best deal anywhere in this comparison. You pay $69.99 once, get every feature, and can share it with up to five people through Apple Family Sharing. If Linkt covers what you need, nothing here beats it on price.

Some of Dex's higher price goes to sync that runs in the background, refreshing your LinkedIn connections every few days and reading WhatsApp and email as messages come in. Whether that is worth $108 a year more than Linkt's annual plan depends on how much of your contact happens in places you would otherwise have to log by hand.

Where Linkt is the better choice

Plenty of people should pick Linkt, and for ordinary reasons.

If you mostly want to keep up with friends and family, Linkt is designed around you. Its site and its features assume you are trying to call your sister more often, and nothing in it expects you to manage 2,000 LinkedIn connections.

If the people you care about live in other countries, the context features earn their place. Seeing that it's 11pm where your friend lives, or that a storm just hit their city, is the kind of nudge that leads to a better message. Dex has nothing like it.

If privacy decides it for you, Linkt's architecture is stronger than Dex's by design. Your contact list and interaction history are encrypted before they leave your phone, and the data is processed in the EU. Dex has to read your message metadata to do its job. That's a real trade, and some people will reasonably say no to it.

Want to pay once and be done? Linkt's $69.99 lifetime plan has no Dex equivalent.

And if bigger productivity apps overwhelm you, Linkt may just suit you better. One App Store reviewer who describes themselves as AuDHD says it helps them keep up with friends they would otherwise lose. Sometimes a small app with one daily list is the right tool.

Where Dex is the better choice

For a mostly professional network, Dex is the stronger tool. Most work relationships live on LinkedIn, and Linkt can't see LinkedIn at all. Dex syncs your connections, updates each person's last interaction from LinkedIn messages, and tells you when someone changes jobs. A new job is one of the best reasons to get in touch, and you rarely hear about it otherwise. Our piece on the strength of weak ties explains why those looser professional contacts are the ones most worth keeping warm.

Scale matters too. Logging thirty relationships by hand is doable. Past a few hundred, you need the app to notice conversations for you.

Dex also runs on Android, Windows, and in a browser at work, and Linkt doesn't.

If people tend to reach out to you, rather than the other way around, Dex counts those conversations without any effort on your part. Linkt only knows about them if you tell it.

And if you want your relationship data in other tools, Dex Professional adds an API and Zapier. Linkt is closed by design, which is part of why it's private.

Who this isn't for

• If you use Android, Linkt is not an option yet. Dex has an Android app, and our roundup of personal CRMs with mobile apps covers others.

• If you need a sales pipeline or deal tracking, neither app will do it. Our Dex vs Pipedrive comparison explains where a sales CRM belongs.

• If you don't want to pay anything, both charge after the trial. The free personal CRM roundup is a better first stop.

• If you keep in touch with fewer than twenty people, a recurring reminder in the Reminders app will get you most of the way. These tools earn their place once memory stops being enough.

• If your employer requires business contacts to live in a shared company CRM, a personal tool on top becomes a second list to keep in sync.

The honest summary

Linkt and Dex agree on the idea: pick the people who matter, set how often you want to talk, and let the app tell you who is due. They disagree on how the app should learn what happened.

Linkt keeps your data so private that it can't see your conversations, so it relies on the chats you start through it and the catch-ups you log. It runs only on Apple devices and costs $35.99 a year or $69.99 once. For friends and family spread across time zones, it's a well-made stay in touch app at a price that's hard to argue with.

Dex watches LinkedIn, WhatsApp, email, and (on a Mac) iMessage, so replies and inbound messages count on their own. It costs more and asks for more access. What you get back is an overdue list that stays accurate without upkeep, and for a professional network of a few hundred people, that is most of what you're paying for. If Nimble is also on your shortlist, see our Dex vs Nimble comparison.

If most of your relationships run through LinkedIn and WhatsApp and you would rather not log them by hand, start your 7-day Dex trial. You won't be charged until it ends, and your connections sync in a few minutes.

FAQ

What is Linkt?

Linkt is a personal CRM and stay in touch app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, made by Command B Limited. It lets you set check-in goals for friends, family, and professional contacts, shows each person's local time, weather, and news, and reminds you of birthdays and milestones. It encrypts your contact data on your device before syncing.

How much does Linkt cost?

Linkt is free to download. Full access in the US App Store costs $2.29 per week, $35.99 per year, or $69.99 as a one-time lifetime purchase. The annual plan has a 7-day free trial and the weekly plan a 3-day trial. The lifetime plan works with Apple Family Sharing for up to five people.

Does Linkt sync with WhatsApp or iMessage?

Not in the background. Linkt's Quick-Connect opens WhatsApp, iMessage, Instagram, Snapchat, or FaceTime for a contact and logs chats you start that way. It does not read your message history, so replies and messages started outside Linkt need to be logged by hand.

Is Linkt available on Android?

No. Linkt runs on iPhone, iPad, Apple silicon Macs, and Vision Pro. Its privacy policy mentions a waitlist for other platforms. Dex has apps for iOS and Android, plus web and desktop versions.

Is Dex or Linkt better for networking?

Dex is the stronger choice for professional networking because it syncs LinkedIn connections and messages and alerts you to job changes. Linkt has no LinkedIn integration and is designed mainly around friends and family.

Which is more private, Dex or Linkt?

Linkt. It uses end-to-end encryption with AES-256-GCM, encrypts contacts and interaction logs on your device, and says only you can decrypt them. Dex needs to read message metadata from LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and email to update your reminders automatically, which is the trade-off for not logging conversations by hand.

Related guides

• Dex vs Nimble

• Dex vs Pipedrive

• Top 10 personal CRM apps for networking (2026)

• 6 top personal CRMs with mobile apps

• The strength of weak ties

• Best free personal CRM

• Finding the right personal CRM