Open source CRM software

Pipeline CRMs, suites and ERPs

The tools in this category share a core of contacts, companies, activities and deals, but they are built for different jobs.

• Sales-pipeline CRMs put deals on a board where they move from stage to stage, with email, tasks and a timeline of activity on each record. This is the Pipedrive model. Twenty, Frappe CRM, Krayin CRM, Relaticle, BottleCRM and Atomic CRM belong here, and Fat Free CRM is an older, simpler take on the same idea.
• CRM suites add marketing campaigns, support cases, quotes, reports and workflow rules to the sales core, much like Salesforce or HubSpot. SuiteCRM and EspoCRM are the main open source options.
• ERP suites with a CRM keep customers, opportunities and quotes in the same database as invoicing, stock and accounting. Odoo and Dolibarr take this approach, which saves re-entering data once a deal is won but brings a much larger system to learn.
• Nonprofit CRMs such as CiviCRM track donors, members and event participants rather than a sales pipeline.

A five-person sales team rarely needs a suite, and a company that quotes, invoices and ships from one system will soon outgrow a pipeline board.

Open core and paid extensions

Most CRMs here have a company behind them that earns money from hosting, support or extra features, so check what the open source edition really includes. EspoCRM sells reports, workflows, quotes and Google or Outlook sync as proprietary extensions. Odoo’s Community edition is LGPL, while many of its apps sit in the proprietary Enterprise edition. Twenty marks some files with an enterprise license, and SSO, row-level permissions and audit logs need its paid plan even when you self-host. Krayin sells VoIP, WhatsApp and Google integration as extensions, and Dolibarr’s marketplace offers paid add-ons. SuiteCRM, Frappe CRM, Relaticle, BottleCRM, Atomic CRM and Fat Free CRM publish their whole application under an open source license. Each app page explains its own split.

What to check before you choose

1. The job. Pipeline only, a suite with marketing and support, or a CRM inside your ERP.
2. Email and calendar. Some tools work only over IMAP and SMTP, others sync with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, and in some that sync is paid.
3. Automation. Workflow rules, assignment rules and approvals, and whether they are in the free edition.
4. Self-hosting effort. EspoCRM, SuiteCRM, Dolibarr and Krayin run on a standard PHP and database server. Twenty, Frappe CRM and BottleCRM need several services such as Redis and background workers, and Atomic CRM is built on Supabase.
5. Migration. Expect to export CSV files from Salesforce, HubSpot or Pipedrive and load them with the new tool’s importer; look for field mapping and duplicate detection, and plan to rebuild automations and reports.
6. Standards. vCard (RFC 6350) for contacts, iCalendar (RFC 5545) for events and IMAP (RFC 9051) for mailboxes make it easier to connect a CRM to other software and to leave it later.

Personal data and email marketing

A CRM is mostly a database of people, so data protection law applies to it directly. Under the GDPR, customers and prospects can ask to see, correct, delete or take away their data, and the European Data Protection Board’s guide for small businesses says requests should be answered within one month. Portability means handing data over in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format. Before choosing, check that the CRM lets you find everything held about one person, export it and delete it.

Campaign features raise a second question. In the UK, the ICO’s guidance on PECR says marketing emails to individuals need specific consent, with a limited “soft opt-in” for previous customers about your own similar products when they were offered an opt-out. The ICO notes that this guidance is under review after the Data (Use and Access) Act. Rules differ by country, so take legal advice for your own case.

Projects not listed here

erxes adds terms to its AGPL license, including a ban on hosting it as a competing SaaS and a separate license for enterprise plugins, which makes it source-available rather than open source. Vtiger’s open source CRM is developed on Vtiger’s own GitLab server, outside GitHub, so it is not listed for now. Some active GitHub projects were left out because they are personal contact managers, general low-code platforms, unmaintained, or too small to stand out.