Frappe CRM

What Frappe CRM does

Frappe CRM is a sales CRM from Frappe Technologies, the company behind ERPNext. It follows a simple model: a lead is someone who might buy, and once the lead is qualified it becomes a deal that moves through stages until it is won or lost. Contacts, organizations, notes, tasks and call logs hang off those records, and each lead or deal page shows the full activity history, emails and comments in one place.

Work happens in list views or kanban boards. Filters, sorting and columns can be saved as personal views, shared as public views or pinned to the sidebar, and a dashboard shows pipeline figures and a revenue forecast. Leads arrive by hand, by CSV import, through web forms that can be embedded on a website, or from Facebook and Instagram lead forms, a sync the documentation still marks as beta.

Automation and integrations

Recent versions add visual workflow automations. A flow starts from an event such as a new lead, a changed field, a prospect’s reply, a date or a schedule; it can then wait, branch with If/Else conditions, send emails, update fields, create other records or call a webhook. Automations can be test-run against a real record with all changes rolled back. Alongside them, assignment rules route new leads to the right reps and service level agreements set response-time targets for leads and deals.

Calling is built in through Twilio or Exotel, with call recording, and WhatsApp messaging works through a companion Frappe app. The tightest integration is with ERPNext: when both run on the same site, a deal can produce an ERPNext quotation and customer, and products stay in sync with ERPNext items. That makes Frappe CRM a natural front end for companies that already keep their accounting or inventory in ERPNext.

Self-hosting Frappe CRM

Frappe CRM is a Frappe app, so a self-hosted instance runs the Frappe Framework with MariaDB and Redis. For production the project provides an install script that deploys its Docker image and sets up a site for your domain; the README says this takes about five minutes. A Docker Compose file and the Frappe bench tool are documented for development. The stable branch works with Frappe and ERPNext versions 15 and 16, so it can share a server and a site with an existing ERPNext installation.

Email is handled by Frappe’s email accounts, which you configure for incoming and outgoing mail. The README and documentation do not describe a separate paid edition of the CRM.

Hosted version

Frappe Cloud, the company’s hosting platform, installs Frappe CRM from its marketplace. It charges per site or server rather than per user, and the documentation recommends trying it before self-hosting.

Limitations

Frappe CRM concentrates on sales. It has no marketing email, campaigns or newsletters, so it does not cover what HubSpot’s marketing tools do. Its own introduction says teams that need a complex enterprise CRM may find it lightweight. Self-hosting means learning the Frappe stack (bench, MariaDB, Redis and the framework’s admin “desk”), which is more involved than running a single container, though it pays off if you use other Frappe apps.

Who it suits

Frappe CRM suits small and mid-sized sales teams that want pipelines, follow-up automation and calling without per-seat licensing, and especially companies already using ERPNext or other Frappe apps. Teams that need marketing automation in the same system should compare it with suites in the CRM guide such as Odoo.