Top 7 open source CRM Tools in 2021

It can be difficult to build and maintain relationships with customers. It’s an important task for businesses’ survival and growth. A CRM system is essential to manage those relationships. Open source is a bright spot in CRM systems.

We were impressed by the number of promising open-source CRM systems when we first looked at them in 2014. Let’s now take a look at six of today’s top open-source CRM systems. This is not a complete list. However, each of the CRM systems in this article was chosen based on its unique or rich feature set.

CRM: What does it mean?

CRM stands for customer relationship management. A CRM system, a web application, is used by businesses to manage information about customers, leads, and other contacts. A CRM system is not just a collection of contacts. It includes customer details, history of transactions with the organization, and information about customers’ status or place in the sales process.

Many CRM systems are able to connect with financial and accounting systems, which can help companies track earnings and expenses. They can provide analytics that allows a business’s future planning to be better understood.

Open source CRMs require only a browser, database and webserver to work. Let’s take a look at Seven open-source tools that make managing customer relationships much easier.

CRM or customer relationship management is an important feature of any ERP. CRM enables the user to get a clear picture of the customer and the opportunities. This software solution helps the business to manage different operations including pipeline management, sales team management, and sales team performance monitoring.

Odoo CRM is one of the most important modules of Odoo. It helps the users to link the sales with other operations and coordinate all customer-related operations.

CRM tool helps the users to generate leads. It can also help you to manage leads. The conversion of leads to opportunities also becomes simpler with CRM.

The activities and partnerships can also be managed with the help of Odoo CRM. This also supports the business to manage scoring rules, team assignments, and lead assignments.

You will be able to configure Sales teams and manage different activity types with the support of Odoo CRM. It also enables you to manage lost reasons.

EspoCRM

People often associate CRM with a complex and large system that has many features they may never use. EspoCRM is lighter, faster, and easier to customize than that.

EspoCRM has all the features that small and medium-sized businesses need. These features include the ability to automate leads, opportunities, and contacts, create individual and bulk mailings, schedule meetings, calls, and tasks, and track customer records changes. EspoCRM combines all that with a modern, clean interface.

Extension packs can be purchased that add the ability to create quotes or invoices, sync with Google Calendar, integrate VoIP telephony servers, and much more.

Developers offer fully functional demos of the tool. Opensource.com also has Yuri Kuznetsov’s introduction to EspoCRM. For more information, you can visit this link.

SuiteCRM

SugarCRM was once a popular open-source CRM system. Sugar, the company behind SugarCRM, announced in 2014 that it would not be releasing any new versions of SugarCRM. Many users were disappointed. This created an opportunity to fork the code and create SuiteCRM.

SuiteCRM is based on SugarCRM’s Community Edition, but it’s more than a clone. The system is enhanced with a variety of powerful and useful features. These features include the ability to generate invoices, quotes, manage leads and contacts, and produce reports. You can also keep notes and documents. SuiteCRM can be set up to allow customers to log and track their issues.

SuiteCRM can be downloaded or used as a hosted service. SuiteCRM can be tested before you decide to download it.

Oro CRM

Oro CRM has enough features to make it useful for larger businesses, but it is easy enough for small and medium-sized businesses without IT departments.

Oro CRM is available in two editions: Enterprise and Community. Both editions are very similar. Back-end integrations are available only for Enterprise editions. These include integration with Microsoft Outlook or Elasticsearch. Both editions share the same features. These features include the ability to capture data from all points of sale, integration of third-party email marketing service, the ability to maintain contacts and leads, as well as reporting and analytics tools.

You can sign up to access an online demo.

CiviCRM

CiviCRM is different from other CRM tools in two ways. It’s not aimed at charities and can be integrated with Drupal, Joomla! or WordPress.

CiviCRM’s non-profit focus is the core of everything. It can help you track donors and contacts, as well as keep tabs on donations, plan and monitor campaigns, and do fundraising.

The entire tool can be downloaded and a demo is available. CiviCRM is also available hosted by a number of third-party companies.

Fat-Free CRM

Fat-Free CRM, as its name suggests, is a functional but minimal system. According to its developers, Fat-Free CRM features “out of the box” group collaboration, campaign lead management, contact lists, and opportunity tracking. Although it is not as powerful as Vtiger or SugarCRM, it will be sufficient for small businesses and other organizations.

Fat-Free CRM has one of the easiest and most appealing interfaces of any CRM. A number of plug-ins for Fat-Free CRM are also available. Developers who already work with Ruby on Rails may create their own.

Fat-Free CRM is not available as a hosted service. Organizations will need to install Fat-Free CRM on their servers. However, organizations can try Fat-Free CRM online before doing so.

Zurmo

What happens when CRM is combined with gamification. You get Zurmo. It not only has the features organizations need in a CRM system, such as deal tracking and contact management, but it also rewards users for using it.

Zurmo’s developers claim that the game mechanics used by Zurmo are designed to reward users for using the system and encourage best practices behavior. This encourages users to explore Zurmo. The more they use the system, the more rewards they receive (such as badges or coins that can be used to buy rewards).

Zurmo offers a free online demo and a trial of its hosted version. You can also access the source code.