Dhaga vs Covve: A Context Graph vs a Contact Scanner
Covve vs Dhaga compared — a world-class business-card scanner now built for trade-show teams, versus an AI-native personal CRM that turns your own notes into a private graph.
The short version
Covve captures contacts. Dhaga captures context. Covve's scanner is genuinely world-class — 60+ languages, a claimed 96% accuracy, and it runs on-device, so it keeps working when the conference-hall wifi doesn't. That last property is the single most important one on a trade-show floor, and Dhaga has no offline capture at all. In March 2026 Covve rebranded away from the solo personal CRM toward team lead capture at events, so the two products are now drifting apart on purpose. The most interesting thing in this whole comparison is a piece of history: Covve shipped a private relationship graph in 2015, holds a patent on the intro-resolution idea behind it, and then retired it — and why it died is the clearest argument for how Dhaga builds one instead.
If you have ever searched for a business card scanner app, you have met Covve. Founded in Cyprus in 2013, it is one of the longest-running names in the category, with over a million Google Play installs and an OCR engine good enough that the company licenses it to other developers as an API. It has also, quietly, become a different product than the one most personal-CRM shortlists still have it filed under.
Full disclosure up front: I build Dhaga, so treat this as an interested party's account and check the claims yourself. I have tried to write the version of this comparison I would want to read if I were shopping — which means saying plainly where Covve is better, because on a couple of axes it is not close.
The core difference
Covve's centre of gravity is the moment of capture: a card, a badge, a signature, turned into a clean contact record faster and more accurately than almost anyone else does it. Dhaga's centre of gravity is everything after that — the note you dictate walking out of the meeting, the fact that this person used to work with someone else already in your list, the reason you should call them in March.
That difference got sharper on 10 March 2026, when Covve announced it was repositioning. In their own words, their "use cases expanded from solo professionals to large teams," with the product now "used at busy trade shows, field events... by teams." The scanner is the business now. The personal CRM is the thing the business grew out of.
Which brings us to the part of this comparison I find genuinely fascinating, and want to handle with respect rather than glee.
Covve got here first. In February 2015 they shipped a feature called the Private Graph. Their own copy from the time: "Covve will pinpoint which of your friends is best equipped to make a meaningful introduction" and "explore your Private Graph through the Covve maps and Search." They went on to be granted US patent US10628798B2, covering private contact sharing with referrer-based introduction resolution. In 2015 that was a decade ahead of the market. It was the right idea.
Then it died. The reason is sitting in the launch copy too: "Connecting with any contact from your address book adds them to your personal, private network — and vice versa." The Private Graph needed both people to be running Covve. That is a textbook cold-start problem: the feature is worth nothing to user number one, and stays worth nothing until a critical mass of their actual contacts installs the same app. No amount of engineering quality survives that.
Dhaga's graph has no such dependency. It is derived from your own notes — the ones you were going to write anyway — and it needs nobody else's permission, adoption, or address book. Write "met Priya at the fintech dinner, she used to run growth at the same company as Arjun," and Dhaga extracts that into typed relationships automatically, stamping each one with the id of the note it came from. That works on day one, for exactly one user, with no network effect required. Same idea Covve had in 2015; a foundation that does not need anyone else to show up.
Today Covve ships no graph feature. I checked their feature pages, all 47 help-centre articles, both Play Store descriptions and 28 app-store screenshots before writing that sentence.
Where Covve wins
Several of these are not close, and one of them is a hole in Dhaga you should weigh seriously.
Offline, on-device capture. Covve's scanner works with no signal at all. In a basement exhibition hall with four thousand people fighting over one access point, that is not a nice-to-have — it is the difference between capturing sixty leads and capturing none. Dhaga's card scan needs a connection. If your capture happens at events, this row alone may decide it.
OCR quality, as a product rather than a feature. Covve claims roughly 96% accuracy across 60+ languages, and licenses the engine to third parties at about $0.03 per scan. When a company sells its OCR to other companies, that engine lives under a kind of pressure a bundled feature never faces. Ours is a feature; theirs is the product.
Scale and distribution. More than a million Play Store installs, thirteen years of operating history, and a content library of 554 posts feeding the top of the funnel.
- 1M+
- Google Play installs
- 60+
- Languages the scanner reads
- $0.03
- Per scan, licensed OCR API
- 554
- Published articles
Event and team plumbing. Badge scanning, seat-based team plans, and native integrations that push captured leads into Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho or Dynamics. Dhaga has none of those integrations; its export is a file you move yourself.
Digital business cards with physical NFC hardware. A real product line, and one we do not have.
Covve's honest weak spot is the half of the company this comparison is actually about. The personal-CRM app has shipped no named feature in eighteen months — three consecutive releases carrying identical boilerplate notes about "behind-the-scenes improvements" and "performance optimisations" — while the scanner ships monthly. Its Google Play rating sits at 3.9, with roughly a fifth of ratings at one star, against 4.7 for the scanner. There is no web app and no desktop client, so a laptop-first worker has nowhere to sit down. There is no LinkedIn integration. And their own developer, replying in the store, put the duplicate problem plainly: "Duplicate detection isn't there yet."
Where Dhaga wins
Relationships you did not draw. Dhaga reads your notes and writes the edges itself, each stamped with its source note. You are not maintaining a diagram; you are writing notes and getting a graph.
Ambiguity becomes a question, not a wrong edge. If two people in your graph share a name, Dhaga does not guess which one you meant. It raises a pending confirmation and waits for you. A CRM that quietly picks wrong is worse than one that asks.
Provenance, and a delete that actually deletes. Every fact carries a visible receipt button — "highlight the note this fact came from" — so you can always see why Dhaga believes something. Relationships are tied to their source note and deleted with it. Deleting a note cascades transactionally through its facts, edges, positions, tag receipts, card photos and embeddings. "Forget this" means forget this.
Warm-intro path-finding at zero AI cost. Dhaga walks your own graph to find the shortest warm path to someone you want to reach. It is pure traversal — no model call, no per-use cost, and it works for a solo user on day one.
Natural-language recall over your own notes. Ask "who do I know in payments in Bangalore" and get an answer assembled from what you wrote, with receipts attached. Covve's AI assistant works over your email, not over a body of notes. To be clear about our own commercial reality: Dhaga's AI features are the paid tier — the free plan includes 10 AI credits a month, and everything else on it is manual.
A real web app, and no contact cap. Dhaga runs in the browser on any machine you sit down at, and the free tier does not cap your contacts. Covve's free tier stops at 20.
Multi-image card scan. Front and back go in together and come out as one merged contact with a receipt for each image, instead of two records to reconcile later.
Feature by feature
| Dhaga | Covve | |
|---|---|---|
| Offline, on-device card capture | — | |
| Event badge scanning | — | |
| Native CRM integrations (Salesforce, HubSpot) | — | Paid add-on |
| Business-card OCR | ||
| Web app | — | |
| Relationship graph / warm-intro paths | Shipped 2015, retired | |
| Natural-language recall over your own notes | Paid tier | Email assistant only |
| Free tier contact limit | Unlimited | 20 contacts |
Three of those rows go against us, and the first goes against us hard. That is the shape of this comparison: Covve owns the capture moment, Dhaga owns what happens to the capture afterwards.
Pricing, read honestly
Covve's plans are per seat: Essential at $12/seat/month or $119/seat/year, Pro at $20/$199, and Business at $31/$299. CRM integrations are a separate $6/user/month add-on on top of whichever tier you pick. The free tier caps at 20 contacts, and the scanner now requires a subscription just to sign in.
For an Indian reader, Essential lands around ₹10,000 per seat per year before the integrations add-on — and per seat means a three-person booth team pays three times that. Dhaga is priced per account: free to start, with unlimited contacts and 10 AI credits a month, and Pro at ₹499/month or ₹4,799/year (about $4.99/month, or $48 a year) when you want AI capture, recall and drafting. Self-hosting is available for enterprise teams on request, rather than as a download.
This comparison is current as of August 2026 — verify current pricing and plans before you commit.
Which should you choose?
| If you… | Choose |
|---|---|
| Scan badges and cards on a trade-show floor, often with no signal | Covve |
| Need leads pushed straight into Salesforce, HubSpot or Zoho | Covve |
| Are equipping a team with seats and shared lead capture | Covve |
| Want a digital business card with NFC hardware | Covve |
| Want your notes to become a queryable graph, not a card pile | Dhaga |
| Need warm-intro paths through people you already know | Dhaga |
| Work from a laptop and want a real web app | Dhaga |
| Want unlimited contacts on a free tier, priced in rupees | Dhaga |
If you are weighing more of the field, Dhaga vs Dex covers the auto-sync lane, Dhaga vs Monica covers the self-hosted one, and the best personal CRM apps in India roundup puts the prices side by side.
The takeaway
Covve built one of the best card scanners in the category and then, sensibly, followed it toward the customers who needed it most. If your job is to walk a hall and come out with three hundred clean records that land in your company's CRM by Monday, Covve is the correct tool and I would not try to talk you out of it. Go use it.
But a scanner gives you a list, and a list is not a memory. If what you want is for the things you noticed about people to still be there later — findable, connected to each other, and traceable back to the note you wrote — that is a different product with a different bet, and it is Dhaga. Covve saw the idea in 2015 and was right about it. The only thing they got wrong was making it depend on everyone else showing up too.
Discussion
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