Cardhop is a contacts app for Mac, iPhone and iPad. You type something like a name and a phone number in plain words, and it files it into your address book. It's free to use, with a Flexibits Premium plan at $56.99 a year for extras like smart groups and business card scanning. But a lot of contact work isn't about your address book at all. It's a .vcf someone sent you, a CSV out of Google or Outlook, or a club list that needs fixing. And Cardhop doesn't run on Windows.
ContactCafe is built for that job. It's a document editor for contact files: open a .vcf or .csv, edit it, press Save, and the file goes back where it was, in the format it was. There's no library to import into and nothing to keep in sync.
Light, quick, and on Mac and Windows
- Small download. ContactCafe for Mac is 6.7 MB, against 15.2 MB for Cardhop on the Mac App Store. On Windows, ContactCafe is 4.4 MB, and 4.1 MB on Windows on ARM.
- Double-click and you're in. Contact files get their own icon and open straight into ContactCafe, whether it's running or not.
- Same app on both systems. ContactCafe has builds for Mac, Windows and Windows on ARM, and it works entirely offline, with no account.
What you can do in it
- Edit without losing anything. Photos, unique IDs, custom labels and fields from other apps survive an edit. Change one number and one line of the file changes.
- Open the files you actually have. vCard 2.1, 3.0 and 4.0, plus the CSV and TSV layouts Google Contacts and Outlook export.
- Convert on purpose. Save As with the other extension turns vCards into a spreadsheet or back. You're told what won't carry over first, and the original stays untouched.
- Search every field. Type "ada london" and it finds the Ada whose address is in London.
- Keep groups in the file. Groups are written into the file itself, so they travel with it.
- Save safely. Each save is written beside your file and swapped in, so a crash can't leave you with half a file.
Who it's for
Anyone cleaning up a phone or webmail export before moving it somewhere else. People switching between Google and Outlook who don't want a website holding everyone's numbers in the middle. Whoever keeps the club roster, the client list or the team directory as one file. And people on a Windows PC, where Cardhop isn't an option.
When to stick with Cardhop
If you want to manage your everyday address book, keep Cardhop. It works with your iCloud, Google and Exchange contacts, stays in sync across Mac, iPhone and iPad, and lets you call, message or FaceTime someone right from a card. It also has birthday reminders, widgets and Shortcuts support. ContactCafe does none of that: it edits files, not accounts. And Cardhop's basic version costs nothing.
What it costs
ContactCafe isn't sold on its own. It comes with a getapps.cafe membership, from $1.99 a month on the annual plan, and that includes every other app on the menu too. A Solo plan covers one device, Family covers five. There's a 7-day free trial, so you can fix a real contact file in it before paying anything.
