Description
LaraContact is a production-ready CRM that turns a contact list into a real communication hub. Built with a modern UI, it ships with two-way SMS and WhatsApp via Twilio, an in-browser dialer for voice, a queued bulk-email composer with open tracking, and a Sanctum-powered REST API.
Powered by Anthropic Claude, AI features paste-extract contact details from email signatures, auto-suggest tags from a contact’s notes, fix spelling on messages, and translate replies into nine languages — and every AI feature has a fake-mode fallback so the app works without API keys for demos.
Teams get shared workspaces with role-based invitations, a full audit log, real-time inbound message notifications and a built-in installer for one-click deployment.
What’s Included ?
Contacts & Organization
- Rich contact records with custom fields, lifecycle stages, social handles
- Free-form tags and one-of-many groups with color coding
- Duplicate detection by email or phone with one-click merge
- CSV import with auto-column detection and bulk operations
Communication, unified
- Two-way SMS & WhatsApp via Twilio (with signature-validated inbound webhook)
- Click-to-call browser dialer
- Queued email composer with open-tracking pixel
- Bulk send to any selection of contacts — Email, SMS, or WhatsApp — with mail-merge tokens (
{{first_name}},{{company}}, …), rate-limited job queue, and a live progress page - Reusable bulk-send templates — save the message you keep typing and click to reload it
- Every conversation, call, email, and bulk send lives on the contact’s timeline
Security & data ownership
- Two-factor authentication
- One-click workspace export — every contact, message, email, reminder, group, and tag as CSVs in a ZIP.
- Full audit log of contact changes with field-level diffs
AI assistance everywhere
- Paste an email signature → extract name, email, phone, company, job title, website, LinkedIn
- “Fix” button on the message composer rewrites spelling and grammar (preserves voice)
- “Translate” button for nine languages including Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic
- “Suggest from context” picks the best-fitting tags for a contact from your tag library
- All features include a fake-mode fallback so the app works without API keys
Reminders & follow-ups
- Schedule per-contact reminders with email + SMS notifications
- Switch between grouped list view (Overdue / Today / This week) and a monthly calendar grid
- Scheduled background command fires notifications every 5 minutes
- Click any day on the calendar to inline-schedule a new follow-up
Multi-user teams
- Workspace-scoped data isolation via
team_idon every record - Email-based team invitations with 7-day expiring tokens, accept flow, role badges
- Workspace switcher in the sidebar — a user can belong to multiple teams
- Public registration can be toggled off for invite-only deployments
Admin & visibility
- Workspace-wide audit log with diffs (who changed what, when)
- Per-user API token management with copy-once display
- Built-in installer wizard (5 steps) for one-click deployment
Premium UI
- ⌘K command palette for global search and quick navigation
- Live-applied primary color from settings (drives the whole app)
- Dark mode with system preference detection
- Logo upload, custom favicon, configurable email signature
- Premium landing page + modernized auth pages
Technical specs
- Backend: Laravel 13.9, PHP 8.3+
- Frontend: Tailwind CSS 3, Alpine.js 3, Vite 8
- Database: SQLite (dev), MySQL 8 / PostgreSQL 15 (production)
- Queue: Database (default) or Redis
- Realtime: Laravel Reverb (self-hosted WebSocket server)
- Integrations: Twilio SDK 8, Anthropic Claude API (Opus 4.7 / Sonnet 4.6 / Haiku 4.5), Resend / Mailgun / Postmark / SES / SMTP
- Tests: 72 Pest feature tests, 188 assertions, runs in under 3 seconds
Live demo
- URL: https://jinove.com/demo/
- Email: demo@laracontact.test
- Password: password
Feature highlights
- ✅ Two-way SMS & WhatsApp via Twilio
- ✅ Click-to-call in-browser dialer
- ✅ Queued email + open tracking
- ✅ Bulk send to selected contacts (Email / SMS / WhatsApp) with mail-merge tokens
- ✅ Reusable bulk-send templates — save and one-click reload past compositions
- ✅ Two-factor authentication (TOTP + recovery codes)
- ✅ One-click workspace export (ZIP of every CSV)
- ✅ AI contact enrichment (Claude Opus 4.7)
- ✅ AI spell-check & translation (9 languages)
- ✅ AI tag suggestions
- ✅ Multi-user team workspaces with invitations
- ✅ Real-time inbound notifications (Reverb)
- ✅ Audit log with field-level diffs
- ✅ Sanctum-protected JSON API
- ✅ CSV import with auto-column mapping
- ✅ Duplicate detection & merge
- ✅ Reminders with list + calendar views
- ✅ Custom fields, tags, groups
- ✅ Command palette (⌘K)
- ✅ Dark mode + live-applied primary color
- ✅ Premium 5-step web installer (gradient hero, animated stepper, card-style driver picker)
- ✅ 100 Pest feature tests passing (282 assertions)
- ✅ Premium landing page + modernized auth
- ✅ Comprehensive HTML documentation included
Change Log
# [2.2.0] - 2026-08-20
### Added
- **Bring your own SMS gateway.** Twilio is now one option rather than the only one. Any provider with a REST API can be configured from Settings → SMS: method, URL, authentication (bearer, basic, API-key header, API-key query param), JSON/form/query body, and a request template with `{to}`, `{to_digits}`, `{message}`, `{from}` and `{channel}` placeholders.
- **WhatsApp Cloud API (Meta)** as a first-class provider — phone number ID plus a permanent access token sends straight through the Graph API, with webhook verification and inbound delivery handled.
- SMS and WhatsApp resolve their providers independently, so a local gateway can serve SMS while Meta serves WhatsApp.
- **Configurable inbound webhooks** for non-Twilio gateways: map whichever field names the gateway posts (dot notation for nested JSON), authenticated by a shared key accepted as a query parameter, header or body field, with duplicate-delivery protection.
- **Response rules** for custom gateways — match success on a field and value, extract the message ID, and surface the gateway's own error text, so a gateway that answers `200 OK` with a failure in the body is no longer reported as delivered.
- **Right-to-left layouts.** Arabic mirrors the entire interface — sidebar, tables, drawers, icons and arrows — not just text direction. Hebrew, Persian, Urdu and other RTL languages work if added.
- **Settings → Language.** Translate every interface string with one click via Claude, review and edit the results in the browser, and preview a locale for yourself before switching the workspace.
- Two-factor authentication, bulk sends and workspace export are now documented in both the Markdown and HTML user guides.
### Fixed
- The saved primary color never reached the profile and password screens, dark mode painted violet text on top of custom colors, and hex values drifted by a shade through the HSL conversion.
- The workspace locale setting was stored and validated but never applied — nothing called `setLocale()`, so every page rendered as English regardless of the setting.
- The audit log crashed with "Array to string conversion" as soon as a contact's custom fields were edited. Values with an array cast were rendered with a plain string cast, and PHP promotes that warning to an exception — so the page returned 500 for the whole workspace and stayed broken, because the offending activity row is permanent.
- The audit log appended its own "d" to an event name that was already past tense, showing "updatedd" on every row.
- Query parameters on a custom gateway URL (e.g. `/api/send?action=sendsms`) were stripped before the request was sent, so gateways that route on a query parameter rejected every message.
- HTML entities in interface copy rendered literally (`—`) once the strings were made translatable.
## v2.0 — 2026-05-19
- Bulk sends* — Email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns to selected contacts with mail-merge tokens, throttled job queue, and live progress tracking
- Bulk-send templates** — save any composition and reload it with one click
- Two-factor authentication** —
- Workspace data export** — one-click ZIP of every contact, message, email, reminder, group, and tag as CSV
- Premium web installer** — Redesigned 5-step wizard with gradient hero, animated stepper, card-style driver picker, optional demo-data seeding
- Demo data on install** — 12 sample contacts, groups, tags, and reminders so buyers can click around immediately
- AI tag suggestions from contact context
- Reminders calendar grid view
- Custom fields per contact (key/value)
- CSV template download
- Onboarding checklist on dashboard
- Mail / Branding / AI settings sections
- Public registration toggle
- Twilio send failures now show a human-readable error inline instead of crashing as a 500
- Echo/Reverb init now gated so dropdowns and command palette work without broadcasting configured
- Primary color now applies in dark mode
- Logout button now actually logs out
## v1.0 — Breaking change release
- Built on Laravel 13 + Tailwind + Alpine
- Multi-user team workspaces
- Two-way SMS, WhatsApp, calls, email
- AI contact enrichment, spell-check, translation
- Reminders, audit log, Sanctum API, command palette
- 72 Pest feature tests
## [ 2020.3.1] - 01 Dec 2020
- Add Browser to Phone Call Module
- Add SMS Notification Module
- Add Email Notification Module
- Improve UI
- Improve Documentation
## [2020.3] - 07 July 2020
- Minor bug fix
- Upgrade to laravel 7
- User Management with Roles Feature
- Add Localization features
- Add Global System Configuration Section Feature
- Improve Documentation
## [2017.2] - 18 December 2017
- Minor bug fix
- Add Tags features
- Add Custom Fields features
- Add Export / Import Contacts features
## [2017.1] - 20 April 2017
- Fix styling issues
LaraContact is a contact-management and customer relationship management (CRM) application for businesses that communicate with customers through WhatsApp, SMS, email, and phone. It stores contact details, conversation history, tags, groups, reminders, and follow-up activities in one place. Teams can import contacts, find and merge duplicates, send individual or bulk messages, and track communication on each contact’s timeline. Its AI tools can extract details from email signatures, suggest tags, help edit messages, and translate replies. It is intended for small teams and organizations that need a self-hosted way to manage customer contacts and communications.
