The bottom line up front: We really like BatchBook, from BatchBlue Software. It’s an excellent tool that needs just a few tweaks to vault to the top of our list. There are four key differentiators:

Custom fields can be established for a single contact record or for all your records. Simple data-entry fields, yes/no, multiple choice, formatted phone numbers, email addresses, or dates. Very important feature for anyone who likes to customize. In our opinion, this feature will soon become a must for any serious online contact manager.

Contact and company records can be “affiliated”. Beyond simply tying a contact to a company, you can affiliate two contacts to each other, and the affiliation can be peer-to-peer, or supervisor-to-employee. There’s a hierarchy you can apply.

Create contacts and companies on the fly by starting a new communication record. Once you’ve created that phone call/chat/note entry, you can then go back in and edit the contact, adding any relevant info.

Good old-fashioned mailing labels. BatchBook is the only system we’ve found where you can filter your contacts then create an email mailing list, or even print mailing labels for them.