Dhaga vs Orvo: A Derived Graph vs a Drawn Map

Most tools in this category are variations on the same idea — a contact list with reminders bolted on. Orvo (getorvo.com) is not, and that is what makes it worth comparing properly. It reframes the personal CRM as a career instrument: seven modules — Command Center, People, Opportunities, Actions, Insights, Network Map, and Assistant — pointed at product managers, consultants and cross-functional leaders who need to see where their influence sits inside a large organisation. If you are hunting for an Orvo alternative, or deciding between the two, the honest split is narrower and more interesting than a feature count.

Full disclosure up front: I build Dhaga. So I have an obvious stake in your conclusion, and I have tried to compensate by being specific about what Orvo actually ships rather than gesturing at it. Everything below is from their own product, docs and pricing pages.

The core difference

Orvo's model is that you are the cartographer. You know who reports to whom, who has real influence versus a title, and which stakeholder will decide your promotion — so the tool gives you a canvas and asks you to lay it out. Their own guidance on capture is refreshingly direct: "After every meaningful interaction, you log what was discussed... This takes 30-60 seconds." Thirty to sixty seconds, per interaction, forever. That is a real cost, honestly disclosed.

Dhaga's model is that the map should fall out of the notes. You write or dictate what happened; extraction turns it into structured facts and typed relationships, and each relationship is stamped with the id of the note it came from. You never open a canvas. The graph is a by-product of remembering, not a second artefact you maintain alongside it.

The consequence shows up in maintenance. Orvo's own guide tells users to "scan your map monthly" so it does not go stale — sensible advice for a hand-built diagram, and an admission of what hand-built diagrams cost. A whiteboard is only ever as current as the last time someone stood at it. A derived graph is as current as your last note.

There is a second consequence, less obvious and more important to me: ambiguity. When a note mentions a first name that matches two people already in your graph, Dhaga does not pick one. It raises a pending confirmation and waits. A tool that quietly guesses wrong is worse than one that asks, because you will never know to check.

Where Orvo wins

A sharper ideal customer than ours. This is the thing I most respect about Orvo and would not pretend otherwise. "Personal CRM" is a category that struggles to explain who it is for; "see where your influence sits before your promotion cycle" explains itself in one line. That clarity is a genuine product advantage, and it shapes their whole feature set coherently.

The Network Map is real and it ships. Their words: "Visualise reporting lines, team structures, and relationship connections. See who reports to whom, where your influence sits." It exports as an image you can drop into a deck. For mapping an org chart's informal version — the one HR does not publish — a manual canvas is arguably the right tool, because you are recording judgement, not fact.

A one-page PDF pre-meeting brief. Exportable, shareable, hand-it-to-your-manager. Dhaga has nothing equivalent; our recall lives inside the app.

The Opportunities board. A Kanban that links a career goal to the stakeholders who influence it, so preparation has somewhere to live. Dhaga tracks follow-ups, not campaigns.

AI reports on a refresh cadence. Core insights regenerate every seven days, active ones every thirty, so the analysis has an update rhythm rather than being a one-off.

Per-contact collaboration. Shipped. Dhaga is single-user today.

Localisation into four languages, and roughly 410 indexed pages of search surface. For a young product, both are real investments.

Where Dhaga wins

Relationships you did not draw. The whole argument, restated: Dhaga writes the edges from your notes, and each carries a source. Every fact shows a receipt button that highlights the note it came from; relationships are tied to their source note and deleted with it. You can always answer "why does my CRM think this?"

A delete that cascades all the way down. Removing a note tombstones its facts, its edges, its position records, its tag receipts, its card photos and its embeddings, in one transaction. That is a schema property, not a settings toggle — and it is the only version of "forget this person" worth trusting.

Warm-intro path-finding at zero AI cost. Dhaga walks your graph to find the shortest warm path to someone you want to reach. Pure traversal — no model call, no metered spend, works for a single user with no one else on the platform.

Business-card capture, including front and back. Orvo concedes card scanning as "✗ Not available" on its own comparison pages. Dhaga takes both sides of a card in one go and merges them into a single contact, each image keeping its own receipt.

A free tier that exists. Orvo has a 14-day trial and no free plan. Dhaga's free tier is a working manual CRM with unlimited contacts and 10 AI credits a month. Our AI features are paid — that is Pro at $4.99/month — and I would rather say that plainly than imply the good parts are free.

You can see who processes your notes. Dhaga's privacy policy names Anthropic as the model provider for its AI features. Orvo names Stripe, Render, Cloudflare and Google Analytics as subprocessors, but does not name the AI vendor its users' notes are sent to. That is a gap worth asking them to close, not a scandal — but if you are putting notes about colleagues into a tool, you are entitled to know who else can see the request.

Annual billing, and rupee pricing. Orvo bills monthly only.

Orvo's other honest gaps, stated flatly: there is no mobile app eighteen months after launch, which their own materials list as roadmap; there is no browser extension in the Chrome Web Store despite a product video that shows one; LinkedIn sync is marked "Coming soon" on their own comparison pages; and the API is a pricing bullet with no documentation and no live route behind it. None of that makes Orvo a bad product — it makes it a young one, on a web-first bet.

Feature by feature

Here is the head-to-head. Read it in both directions — the honest way to use a table like this is to find the row that describes your actual week, not to count the checks.

Read the mobile row honestly in both directions: neither of us has a shipped native app, and anyone telling you otherwise about either product is selling. Two other rows deserve a footnote. Dhaga's natural-language recall and card capture sit in the paid tier, so a free-tier comparison against Orvo's trial is not like for like. And the "relationship map" row is a yes on both sides for a reason — Orvo's Network Map is a real, shipped feature that does something we do not do at all, which is let you assert a reporting line that appears in no note anywhere. If the thing you need to record is a judgement about an org chart rather than a fact you observed, a canvas beats extraction and it is not close.

Pricing, read honestly

Orvo is $19/month for Pro and $39/month for Business (up to five users). Two things make that number behave differently than it looks. First, Pro is priced per account, not per seat — unusual and genuinely user-friendly. Second, there is no annual billing and no free tier; you get a 14-day trial with no credit card, then it is monthly forever. Pro includes 40 hours a month of voice transcription, which is a substantial allowance.

Dhaga is free to start — unlimited contacts, 10 AI credits a month — with Pro at $4.99/month, $48/year, or ₹499/month and ₹4,799/year in India. Annual billing exists, and the rupee price is a real local price rather than a converted one. Self-hosting is available for enterprise teams on request rather than as a download.

Over a year, Orvo Pro is $228 with no annual discount available; Dhaga Pro is $48. That gap only matters if the two products do the same job for you — and on internal-stakeholder mapping specifically, they do not.

This comparison is current as of August 2026 — verify current pricing and plans before you commit.

Which should you choose?

For more of the field: Dhaga vs Dex covers the automatic-sync lane, Dhaga vs Monica covers the self-hosted one, and the best personal CRM apps in India roundup lines the prices up.

The takeaway

Orvo made a bet most of this category is too timid to make: that a relationship tool should be about your career, and that the map of your organisation is worth drawing deliberately because drawing it is itself the thinking. If your problem is that you cannot see who decides your next promotion, that bet is correct and Orvo is the better-aimed product. Go use it — and use the map the way they intend, deliberately, monthly.

But if your network is bigger than one employer, and the problem is not that you cannot see it but that you cannot remember it, drawing a diagram is the wrong shape of work. Notes you already write should become the map. That is the bet behind Dhaga — every fact showing the note it came from, every relationship deleted with the note that produced it, and warm paths you can trace without paying a model to think about it.