BusyContacts App Recensioni

Way better than Apple’s Contacts app, but…

…missing a key feature: custom column heading config in list view. For example, for items tagged as a business, when I select the business tag the list view should display the business name in the first column and not show the first/last name columns. But for my “Friends” tag, it should show their names only and not show a “company” name.

Utterly Indispensible

The BusyMac suite (BusyCal and BusyContacts for macOS and BusyCal for iOS) are utterly indispensible for work and home. I've been a happy customer since a year after they started and the first thing I do with a new Apple device is set up my BusyMac. Do your productivity a favor and get it!

Tags really? How about folder for normal people

Another contacts app that uses tags instead of folder to organize contacts, why? Tags are useful across an operating system when you have files spread out that relate to each other, that ARE IN SEPERATE FOLDERS. No folders is a no go. I dont want to spend my time as a buisness owner figuring out this nonsense. I want to quickly add contacts and drag and drop them into folder. I swear non of these apps are ever are designed for normal users. Theyre made by developers who dont actually use this stuff.

Don't buy this product

I have PURCHASED this product TWICE in the last 5 months... still cannot get it installed and working; it keeps asking me for a license key (which I enter, based on the email received with that key). No one at this company seems to care that I have spent money and have NOT received valid key.

Busy contacts double charging??

I purchased busy contacts for my iMac and have an active subscription. I have enjoyed using Busy Ccontacts (BC) BUT when attempted to open the app. on my MacBook Air they wanted me to pay for another subscription.??? Am I missing something or are they double charging for every iOS platform?

Like This App Very much.

I like this app very much. I only wish it could include two groups in one e-mail. Many times I have to copy and paste the addresses from one group to another to work things out.

Awesome Program

Finally there is a way to keep ALL of your contacts in a organized way synced accross multiple systems. Great program!

UPDATED: I Was Skeptical at First, But . . .

It is very rare that I take the time to write a negative review. I have an extremely busy schedule and just don't have time to complain. But the recent developments with this product just compells me to say something about it. At one time this was what I considered to be awesome program! With a recent update however, changing to a subscription model, the service and operation of the product has become horrible. And this is not just because I hate the subscription services. I am now giving this product 1 star because the program no longer has the features it once had, such as integration with the Mail App and Calendar. But it now will not work with my Exchange contacts. It continually asks me to keep entering my Username and Pasword for by Exchange account. So in effect, they are now charging me as if I had never purchased this product but giving me a stripped down version that's buggy. In fact, it now does nothing more than what the normal Contacts application does. Nothing more!!! To make matter worse, they forced me into accepting the subscription service when I was just trying to restore the program itself. I was hoping that by restoring the program it would start to work like it has for years. To my surprise, I was forced into the subscription service. I was no longer able to open the program that I already own without paying for subscription. How ridiculous that is!!! If you read the reviews, you will probably see that the old reviews were very positive. Look at the recent reviews. Take this as a warning, stay away from this product. It is one thing to to be paid for upgrading the software by adding new features but ripping us off in exchange for doing nothing should be a crime! Actually, they are getting paid for making the product worse than what is was. What a racket! ORIGINAL REVIEW: First, I have to admit that I used the Trial version of this program for a full 30 days before I was forced to purchase it. I was very skeptical at first since it functions very much like Apple Contacts. Like you, I could not figure out why I should pay $50.00 for a program that does what Contacts does for free. The fact is that it does something that I haven’t seen any other program do as well. It keeps tract of all communication between you and each of your contacts and it does it automatically. For example, the minute you install the program, it instantly finds every email communication you’ve had with each contact and stores it in the contact’s record. It does the same for Text messages, appointments and To Do’s. If you need to keep track of your activity with each contact, this is an indispensable tool. In addition, rather than being limited to just a few categories that you can assign your contacts to, BusyContacts uses tags. That means you can categorize your contacts in an unlimited number of different ways. It is also very intuitive in the way it links various contacts together. For example, when you start typing the name of a related contact, it searches your database for the associated person while you’re typing. So, after only a few strokes, you can just press enter to link the two contacts. I really think that the program is over priced. However, I got so used to the ease of use and the functionality that I just could not go back to using Contacts. This program is well designed and easy to use. If you try it for 30 days, you will want to keep it.

Used to be good

Honestly there's no reason to use this anymore. The move to a subscription system, which now causes pop ups to upgrade was a terrible idea.

Interface with iCloud

It's difficult to interface with iCloud Server; should be much simplar!

not free, freezes your screen when you refuse to pay

Title says it all, took me several minutes to get it to let go of my computer, 14 days free is all and when you try to get out of the program and just close it, it refuses to close and refuses to allow your computer to do anything else. Cannot get it rmoved from my desktop bar or from the app store, this is the absolute worst program ever, apple should remove this from the app store and it should be investigated as to whether they are compromising our computers with their stuff, I cannot get it to remove, I cannot get it to close, this is horrible, remove your crap from my computer!

Tech Support non existant

software has lots of problems and Tech support is terrible

Appstore update forces subscription

I'm not a fan of the subscription model, but I get it from a developer perspective. However, it is bad form for an app on the app store that was not subscription to make the switch without doing it as a new app. This update completely breaks the app. Unless you are willing to start paying a subscription for it right away, DO NOT UPGRADE.

No Social Networks

I bought this specifically because it says it will link to your social network accounts. Apparently this function no longer works due to changes in OS Mojave and up. Totally useless for what I need, and cost me $49 to find that out!

Enough

You get a one-star review because of the endless requests for reviews. Enough.

Gmail Does Not Work

Their is a known bug that causes the email sync feature to not work on macOS Catalina 10.15 . I understand that this is due to a change made to the OS by Apple, however, this issue is over a year old and this app still advertises the email sync as a feature. This is rather deceptive. It should be clearly stated on the description section that this feature no longer works, at least for the time being. I want my $50 back.

Fake Feature or Bug?

Busy Contacts appears to allow manual attachment of files associated with a contact, but within 1 minute of attaching one or more files, Busy Contact dialog box pops up that Server removed attachments for that contact. I gave it a one star because I am a new "Paying" user and that is the first feature I attempted to check out. Hope this is a temp thing. Hope to raise evaluation as I continue to work with the app.

turns your address book into a powerful CRM

So far this is the first contact manager app that allows advanced searching features of your contacts - boolean searches, even cross filtered with your smart filters. There's a ton of other feaures (like the amazing twitter panel display) but just getting a handle on who to call, based on what tag and a specific opportunity, for instance, is really great. I've tried all the other contact app - in fact every one of them. They are just so limiiting

Doesnt show up as purchased on my other devices

Doesnt show up as purchased on my other devices

busycontacts

This application is not nearly as functional as it was with before recent IOS upgrades.

BusyContacts Is Rock Solid!

BusyContacts is what Apple should have made as a contact manager. BusyContacts integrates very, very well with the MACOS and IOS ecosystems. I also use Busycal and love the synergy of these two apps to keep me organized. Keep up the great work!

Love how it tracks emails

I like how it connects to emails sent to those in my address book. App works great. Better than Apple’s Address Book.

Do not purchase

This is no better than contacts and you pay 50.00 for nothing. Then no one responds to your emails.

Finally a CRM that integrates perfectly with Exchange

I host all my contacts on an Exchange server. I have around 2,000 contacts and the program that came with the Mac would crash all the time. It also wasn’t very robust in that I couldn’t categorize my clients other than putting them in groups, without any color coding. With Busy contacts, I have all my contacts tagged with color codes, the program pulls in all the emails and messages I have sent them ever, and I can easily create new meetings and events. I love this program. And no crashing - yet.

Excellent contact management app

Looked for a long time for full-featured contact management app. As a journalist/publisher, contacts are critical to my work, and Busy Contacts fills the bill. I switched to iCloud contact syncing in order to remove some friction in my contact management, and this app fits right in. The fact that it also pulls data for the people I follow on Twitter, FB, and LinkedIn (to a point), and allows me to merge all of those along with the iCloud contacts, is the key feature I was looking for. I haven’t used the Activity feature, but may try to incorporate that as well. The ability to send email, including CC and BCC, to a tagged group is a great time-saver. I wish it was better integrated with the Airmail app I use for email. (Airmail keeps its own contacts as well as using what’s on the machine, and sometimes they are not in sync.) To this point, I have not fully explored all the features of Busy Contacts; if I do, I may need to give it six stars. <g>

The personal information manager I had been looking for

BusyContacts and BusyCal form an impressive duo in how they work together (and share data with Apple’s built-in applications). I just switched from a PC, where I had been managing contacts using Outlook 2010. I had been reluctant to switch over to a Mac, despite my wife’s cajoling me that “it just works,” because the Mac version of Outlook does not even let you see all the e-mail associated with a contact. BusyContacts does. Through its integration with BusyCal, you can see past and future activities instantly and elegantly on one screen. Spending just a few minutes with this software put my concerns to rest, and convinced me that real contact management is possible without subscribing to some overloaded CRM service.

Has to continually log into Gmail every 2 minutes

Love the possibility, but execution is lacking. Having to continuously log into Gmail to REauthorize access to my Gmail contacts is very disappointing. Also, the existing smart filters (like duplicates) are not accessible.

So close….

The good: - does a decent job of supporting and merging iCloud-synced AddressBook Contacts and third-party contact databases like Google and LinkedIn (AddressBook does the same, though, with the exception that AddressBook merely “links” the contacts.) - Tagging feature - maps to Groups in AddressBook. - Actions per contact of tags - this seems to merely be at parity with AddressBook. - shows activity streams from many (but not all - see below) sources (Mail.app, Messages, Twitter) - Easy date/time stamping for notes. - List view - easy at-a-glance contact info for groups, great if you’re working off of a phone tree. One star subtracted for: - Calendar activity stream only supports BusyCal calendars, not Apple Calendars. This one must be fixed (and my review will be updated accordingly). - In a contact app, ideally you’d like to track incoming and outgoing calls in the Activity Streams. This would be a tantalizing and powerful update to this program that would significantly set it apart from Apple’s built-in AddressBook. Might as well throw date-stamped notes in the activity stream as well. Given that communicating with your contacts via actions are supported in BusyMac, this seems like an odd omission. - Resolution of these two issues would easily justify the price. Minor niggles: - Coloration is a little inconsistent. By default, you can color each of the source address books, so that a contact originating from that address book is styled in that color. However, Tags can also have color, and it seems that the first tag alphabetically for a contact will override the color style of that contact. I’m not sure what the right solution for that is - is it more important to see the color of the source, or of the tag? And which tag is more important? - Flag feature seems a little weak - it’s intended to be just that, a simple “check mark” for a contact that represents - whatever you want it to mean. A bit more work on the flagging feature to support multiple types of flags might be useful. - I strangely seem to have some contacts from LinkedIn with photos - and others without (even though they clearly have a photo attached to their LinkedIn profile). I’m not sure if this is a permissions issue on LinkedIn profile privacy side, or a BusyMac issue.

Doesn’t work well

I like the sister program BusyCal. It works as intended. BusyContacts on the other hand… I can’t think of any aspect that works. My contacts disappear. I can’t move them from book to book. It just really annoys the heck out of me.

Well worth it

Blows Apple Contacts right out of the water. I love the fact that all I have to do to find an email or a text message is click on the contact in the window and they appear on the right. I don’t know of any other contact manager that does this, at this price. Well worth the money.

I like it!

This program is replacing another very powerful calendar and contact program I was using that became too expensive for me to continue to use. So far (I am a new user) it has been great, and does most of what I need it to do. I am mostly retired at this point, but can still find a lots of use from it for my personal projects, meetings, events, etc. Thank you for such a good product for a very reasonable price.

Great addressbook integration

I’ve been using BusyContacts for a few months now. So far I’m really pleased with it! Great addressbook integration between Mac/iOS contacts, Google, and social network addressbooks such as Facebook all in one place! You can also merge the data from all social network sources to your iCloud and Google addressbook entries. Love that feature! And if you have duplicate iCloud addressbook entries for the same person, you can merge those into one card as well. No more duplicates! Some of the linked entries BusyContacts will recognize and link by itself, but you can manually link or unlink any entry that you want. Only writeable contacts are iCloud and Google can be modified. None of the social network addressbook entries are editable, but you can merge their data into the writeable entries. It also has the benefit of showing you recent email corospondance and social network/twitter activity with each contact. It’s very asthetically pleasing as well and keeps each addressbook separate through color-coding which I think is nice! The only thing that put me off initially was the price, but since I was already a BusyCal user, I splurged and got BusyContacts. I really like this program and hope you will as well.

Solved Contact Problems

Before BusyContacts I had several lists and they never synced with my Admin. It has solved all our problems.

Fantastic product now with potential be GREAT

Busy Contacts has allowed to organize my 1000+ contacts in a management manner. I like the way you can color organize and the abiltiy to merge contacts from differenct sources. I also love how it shows you past interactions you’ve had with each contant.

Great, but needs more automation/Applescript options

This application makes managing my contacts and integrating them with my calendar (also by BusyMac) super easy. The tagging tools as well as support for a range of categories and discoverable relationships between entries made it possible for me to make my address book into something more useful than a list of e-mail addresses, snail mail addresses and phone numbers. The only thing I wish were stronger here were the support for AppleScript. They claim sandboxing is the problem, but surely there’s a way to do something more powerful while staying within those limitations. Creating new lists (or groups) manually can be a pain, and being able to automate the process without resorting to their (for programmers only) URL handler scheme would be great. Barring more scripting support, making the URL handler more robust would be welcome.

BusyContacts + BusyCal2 + Apple Sync = Great CRM Platform

After trying the native Apple apps, Outlook for Mac and Salesforce, I have finally found a CRM platform that meets my needs. I maintain several Exchange and iCloud calendars. I need to organize thousands of contacts, build calling plans and record our interactions. This history must be readily available and logically structured. The combination of these two apps is fully meeting my needs. The synchronization with the native Apple apps has thus far been error free. Highly recommend this platform.

Does *exactly* what I need!

Multiple accounts (CARDDAV), color coding, activity tracking, tagging—and it backs itself up and restores seamlessly! My Mac OS X Server has had a couple of contact database issues that resulted in loss of data, but Busy Contacts allowed me to rebuild/restore with far less hassle than previous server rebuilds that involved exporting VCards and re-importing. You’ll find you will migrate away from groups and to Busy Contacts’ tagging approach, but that makes better intuitive sense to me anyway. Their customer support via email is excellent (and not much needed)—I am hugely impressed and grateful for the thought that went into this app.

Wonderful Contact Management

For a small business, BusyContacts is the perfect solution to client management. I’m downsizing from FileMaker Pro, which is too finicky and bloated for my needs. Rather than move up to the new version and price scheme, I went down a rung and couldn’t be happier about it. The transition is not easy, but worth the effort. BusyContacts does everything well and it does it easily. Plus, you can try it before you buy it. Great program and highly recommended.

Brilliant App on multiple levels

after finding the default mac app too cumbersome for even relatively simple contact entry I decided to go with a more “pro” type app. As a regional territory manager for a large multi-national corporation, contact entry MUST be easy for me. There are days when I enter 30 contacts into mys system. That was taking an hour plus of my day at times, which just became unacceptable. I’d been using and loving busycal for a while, so I thought I’d give busycontacts a try. And yeah, it’s everything I wanted plus things I didn’t even know I wanted. First, contact entry is dead simple. Fast, intuitive, as many fields as you need, but not overwhelming unless you need it. The quick contact entry is *brilliant* in its execution and implementation. I was sold just on contact entry right there. In a week this saves me at least an hour, which makes up for the cost right there. As an adherent of GTD, I’ve been using Omnifocus for a while, and one feature I’ve loved is the ability to give actions a person context so that I can look over my notes before meetings. Well, this takes that to a whole new level, and then some, automatically. Now, before any phone conversation or meeting I have with someone I can quickly review what I have going on with that person and have had going on with them recently. People are amazed at how well I “remember” past conversations, meetings, text messages, etc. They just don’t know about my secret weapon. Search is a breeze, tags are great (Though I don’t use them a ton yet, though that’s more me just needing ot make it a habit). If you manage a large number of contacts, this is truly a brilliant app, especially if you have busycal and they can work their magic together.

Functionality missing

This is a nice cross-grade to standard OSX Contacts, but due to missing functionality, its not a replacement. You can’t import from CSV, TAB or TXT file. You can’t globally correct a name, company name etc. You can’t make “sub-lists” (i.e. company, then by department etc.)

marketing consultaant

I have spent more hours and money than I care to admit searching for a decent contact management app. I had thousands of contacts that needed to be organized and in order to launch my new company. I was desperate and tried everythig out there. None of these programs even came close to working. Either they were insanely complicated to set up, or they didn’t sync, export, import, OR, they had a horrible interface making it impossible to work with. When I discovered BC, I was blown away. I have never written a review for an app before but I am writing one now because if you are still reading you must be searching for an app that actually works. BusyContacts is simple to use and reliable. Also, its all about the cloud and so you don’t have to worry about drama between your Contacts app and BusyContacts. If you don’t need CRM but do need someting that can handle large lists, BusyContacts is the one.

Well designed, intuitive and solid - but a bit too expensive.

Having tried and LOVED BusyCal, I decided to try BusyContacts. Very good app. Easy to transition over from Contacts. Very easy to use, solid and unbreakable. Four stars for one reason, $49.99 is a bit high for a contacts app.

Best CRM that I’ve used

I’ve tried a variety of CRM apps, but none did it for me - until BusyContacts (and I’ll say the same for BusyCal). This is the best featured and most versatile CRM that I’ve used - great job!

Handy Address Book

I prefer BusyContacts over other similar apps. For one thing, it’s easy to use, enter new contacts and link contacts with messages/emails etc. I also like that it knows how to format international phone numbers. Does what I want and doesn’t impose a lot of stuff on me that I don’t want. What’s not to like? Would give it a 5 star rating if it would offer better control over prefixes. A lot of my contacts are Dr xxx, and it is not obvious to me how to add the prefix. When it important contacts from Apple’s program they now have a first name “Dr.” minor quibble. Everything else about it works as I wished.

A client managemetn program discuised as an address book

Finally, an effective program that can serve as a hub for information about my clients. I have a law practice, and the most difficult aspect of having the law pracice is trying to keep everyone on the team up to date on everything that is happening, or coming up, in a case, with the least possible effort. If a client calls, I want my assistants to be able to quickly know anything new in the case, even if I have not had a chance to tell them yet at a meeting. This program integrates everything for a client: (1) It will list all of the tasks (to-dos) associated with that client along with the task deadline, so my assistants can tell a client: (a) what is being worked on and when it is scheduled to be completed, and (b) what they still need to do and when they need it completed; (2) It lists all of the upcoming events associated with a client; (c) it can quickly tell eveyone who is involved with the client’s case from judges, experts to opposing counsel; (d) it has a robusst note-taking abiltiy so that I or an assistant can quickly jot down notes about what has been happening, what needs to be discussed the next time the client is on the phone, and what has been discussed already so that I don’t have several people trying to talk to the client about the same topic. All of this in one location, that is easy to use and intuitive. There is more robust (and more expensive) law practice management software out there, but I don’t like the expense and I typically don’t need most of the features (and, realistically, they all have very steep learning curves and rarely have an intuitive interface). This program works, and it works well - within seconds of a cliet calling my assistants (or myself) knows everything that is important and is happening in a case, and can remember to remind clients of what they still need to do for us (because of court deadlines, it is important to take every opportuntity that the client is on the phone to tell the client what still needs to be done; with this program, it ie easy to know that right away). It also integrates well with BusyCal, the companion application. The only feature, that I fully expect to show up in a later update, is that the email integration prgram still requires the use of the default Mac Mail application. It pulls the emails associated with a contact’s email address and displays them, but it is only able to access the library created by Mac Mail; therefore, you need to have Mac Mail open and downloading emails to make use of this feature. I use Airmail, so now I have to keep the default Mail program active in the background for this feature to sync. As I said, it is a simple fix to allow a user to designate the location of the email library that the program uses to display emails, and so I’m sure that (relativiely minor) additoinal feature will show up in the near future. The release of this product made the BusyCal/BusyContacts combindation worth the expense of both. I had not previously considered BusyCal alone to be worth the extra expense, even though it did have some nice additional features.

Powerful and simple

BusyContacts is very intuitive - no learning curve at all. Recent emails or appointments involving the contact show up in a panel on the right. Editing data is way easier than in Apple’s Contacts. The look and feel are actually fun!

Solid Work horse software

I'm particular and exacting in my contact management needs. This is such an unsexy area, yet vital to my functioning work flow system. I was cautious about tweaking or changing away from Contacts (Mac OS X version). But 2 days with BusyContacts (even v1.0) has me converted. BusyContatcs simply a much more robust and powerful engine for tracking contacts than the built in Contacts app provides. And if the development record/schedule for BusyContacts matches BusyCal (which I also use), I can rest assured BusyCal LLC will aggressively refine and improve BusyContacts over the years to come. BusyContacts app utilizes the shared / sync architecture of Mac OS X; I needn’t fear locking myself into one app. Should development cease, I can always revert to Contacts without much friction. That’s a huge plus for me. The software just works; it works well. And I’m excited to watch it grow. Why 4 stars? In a 1.0 release, always room for growth. Minor interface tweaks. And support has been excellent. Response time under 1 hour on my emails.

Brilliant! Finally!

I’ve wanted an address book app like this for a decade or more. This is what Mac’s address book app should be. Perfect app! Worth every penny!

Best Software Ever Downloaded

Busy Contacts takes the MAC contacts and puts it on steriods. The reason I like this so much is it used the same database that Apple uses, so while using this program you have all the extended features but your database is still compatible with Contacts, and my IPhone. So when I make a change it also shows up on my IPhone, and the shipping software I use for both the USPS and UPS. I have been waiting years for a program like this. Other programs all they do is import your contacts and use their own proprietory database making it useless outside of their program. Keep up the good work!!

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