Alternatives › Starlings
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Ciao! vs Starlings
Starlings: Friendship Tracker, by Hamza Atique
A private iPhone app for remembering the people you love: their details and dates, the calls you logged and how they felt, and a journal tagged with people.
No ratings in the App Store yet, October 2026. iPhone only. Released in May 2026 and updated on 1 October 2026.
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Ciao!
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Starlings
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| What it costs | One payment $9.99 |
$1.99 once for Pro |
| Free tier | 3 friends | 5 contacts |
| Account needed | None | None |
| Where it runs | iPhone | iPhone |
| Where your notes live | Your phone and your own iCloud | Your phone, with iCloud sync if you turn it on |
| A creature for each friend | 15 animals, 6 moods | No |
| A weekly swipe deck | Yes | No |
Every row comes from Starlings’s own App Store listing or website, read on 2 October 2026. Nothing here is taken from another app’s reviews.
Sources: Starlings on the App Store
Where Starlings wins
- •Five people free, and Pro is $1.99 once. Ciao! is $9.99 after three friends.
- •It holds much more about each person: likes and dislikes, social handles, how people are linked to each other, even money you lent or borrowed.
- •A journal where each entry is tagged with the people in it, and you can export everything as an archive.
Where Ciao! wins
- •Starlings has a dashboard of who you have not reached out to. Ciao! brings those friends to you once a week, in one deck you swipe through.
- •An animal for each friend that looks livelier when you are in touch and fades as time goes by.
- •Ciao! is in English, Italian and Spanish. Starlings is in English only.
Which one should you actually get?
Starlings is cheaper and holds more detail, so pick it if you want a full private record of the people in your life. Pick Ciao! if you mostly want a gentle nudge each week about who is due, with the note from last time ready when you get in touch.
