Companion vs Dex: which one fits you?

Companion and Dex get grouped into the same category, personal CRM, and they sit at its opposite ends. Dex is a networking tool built around LinkedIn. Companion is a friends-and-family tool that lives in Telegram. Picking between them is less about features and more about which relationships you're trying not to drop.

Full disclosure: I built Companion. I'll be fair to Dex, I'll tell you exactly when it's the better choice, and you should weigh everything here knowing who wrote it. Prices were checked by hand on both vendors' pricing pages on September 2, 2026.

The core difference

Dex organizes your professional network. It syncs your LinkedIn connections, tracks job changes, and layers notes and keep-in-touch reminders on top. The Premium plan at $12/month covers LinkedIn sync for 2,500 connections; Professional at $20/month raises that to 9,000 and adds mail merge and API access. It runs on the web, mobile, desktop, and a browser extension.

Companion keeps you close to a small circle. It lives in Telegram and only knows what you tell it, usually by voice note. "It's Dana's birthday on the 14th and she just started the new job." It remembers, then nudges you at a moment you can act, with enough context that the message is easy to send. It never messages anyone for you.

Dex makes a network manageable. Companion makes sure the people you love hear from you.

Side by side

	Companion	Dex
Price	7-day free trial; then 500 Telegram Stars/month (about US$10)	7-day free trial; Premium $12/month, with quarterly and annual discounts
Where it lives	Telegram	Web, mobile, desktop, LinkedIn extension
How it learns	Only what you tell it	LinkedIn sync, plus what you add
Built for	Friends and family	Professional networking
Thinks in	Reasons to reach out to someone you love	Contacts, cadences, and follow-ups
Messages anyone for you	Never	No

Where Dex is better

Your relationships live on LinkedIn. This is the whole question for a lot of people. If the connections you can't afford to drop are professional, Dex's LinkedIn engine, job-change tracking, and extension make it the strongest tool available. Companion has no LinkedIn integration and never will.

Staying in touch is part of your job. Recruiters, founders, salespeople, and investors need cadences, volume, and a browsable record. Dex is built exactly for that. Companion caps out, by design, at the scale of one person's actual life.

You want a database you can open and search. Dex gives you a proper workspace. Companion deliberately doesn't. It surfaces what matters when it matters, but there's no dashboard to browse.

Where Companion is better

The people you're dropping aren't on your LinkedIn. Your mum, your oldest friend, the mate who just moved abroad. If those are the relationships this search is really about, a networking tool will always feel slightly wrong, because it is. Companion was built for exactly these people.

You won't maintain a system. Dex rewards regular gardening: reviewing contacts, setting cadences, updating notes. Companion asks for five-second voice notes and handles the remembering itself. If every system you've tried has died of neglect, that difference is the one that matters.

You don't want staying in touch to feel like work. Cadences and pipelines are the right frame for a network and a cold one for a friendship. Companion's frame is a nudge with context: her birthday is Thursday, the surgery was this week, you said you'd call when the baby arrived.

You're paying for what you'll use. Both tools cost about the same. With Dex, most of that buys a LinkedIn engine. If you'd never use it, you're better served by a tool that spends its effort on the twenty people you actually message.

Can you use both?

Yes, and some people should. They solve different problems, so they don't overlap: Dex for the professional network, Companion for the people you love. If your work depends on your network and your life keeps drifting from your friends, running both is coherent, not redundant.

The question that decides it

Look at the last five people you felt bad about not contacting. If they're professional contacts, get Dex. If they're friends and family, that's what Companion is for.