Main features
- Campaigns with targets and budgets, linked to leads
- Leads with status, source, rating and assignee
- Accounts, contacts and tasks
- Opportunities with configurable stages, amount and probability
- Private, shared or group-restricted records
- Custom field groups applied globally or by tag
- Email Dropbox that files forwarded or BCC'd mail on records
- Plugins as Rails engines, including webhooks and record merging
What Fat Free CRM does
Fat Free CRM is one of the oldest open source CRMs on GitHub; its repository was created in 2008. It keeps to the classic sales objects: campaigns, leads, accounts, contacts, opportunities and tasks. A lead records status, source, rating, assignee, campaign and web presence. Opportunities move through stages that you define for your own sales process, with a closing date, amount, discount and probability. Campaigns record date ranges, target numbers, budget and expected revenue, and leads can be tied back to them to see how a campaign performs.
Collaboration is handled per record. Each account, contact, campaign, lead or opportunity can be kept private, shared with everyone, or shared with chosen users or groups. Administrators can add custom field groups for any entity, applied either to all records or only to records with a particular tag, which is a simple way to add industry-specific data without code.
Email and extensions
Fat Free CRM does not sync a mailbox. Instead it has an “Email Dropbox”: you BCC or forward emails to a dedicated IMAP account, and the CRM attaches them as notes to the matching account, contact or lead. If the address is unknown it creates a contact and, based on the email domain, links it to an existing account or creates a new one. A first line naming an opportunity or campaign files the email there instead.
The project is built to be extended as Rails code. Plugins are Rails engines; the wiki lists ones for sending webhooks, merging duplicate records and Atlassian Crowd authentication. The 0.28 release added social media fields for accounts and enrichment from Wikidata.
Self-hosting Fat Free CRM
The application needs Ruby 3.1 or newer and runs on Rails 8. It works with PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQLite, and ImageMagick is optional for avatars. The repository includes a Dockerfile and a Docker Compose file that pairs the app with PostgreSQL 16, and the guides also cover Linux, macOS and Heroku. For anyone planning customizations, the README recommends running Fat Free CRM as a gem-based Rails engine inside a separate Rails application, so local changes stay apart from the upstream code.
Hosted version
There is no official hosted service. The website offers a public demo and points to GitHub for the code; support comes from the issue tracker, discussion groups and a Discord server.
Limitations
Fat Free CRM is deliberately minimal. It has no visual pipeline board, workflow automation, reporting dashboard, built-in email sending or calendar sync, so it does not cover what Pipedrive, Salesforce or HubSpot offer out of the box. Much of the user documentation is an older community wiki. Recent activity is mostly dependency and maintenance updates, with feature releases arriving occasionally.
Who it suits
Fat Free CRM suits small teams that want a plain contact and opportunity tracker under the MIT license, and above all Ruby on Rails developers who want a CRM foundation to embed and extend in their own application. Teams that want automation and email integration out of the box should look at the other tools in the CRM guide, such as Twenty or EspoCRM.
Technical details
Self-hosting needs
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL or SQLite
Built with
- Ruby
- Ruby on Rails
Reviewed by the OpenSourcePicks editors from the project's repository and documentation. Something out of date? Tell us.
