Building a perfect CRM with open source

Customer relationship management, or CRM, is an essential aspect of almost all types of businesses, whether major or minor. With proper attention, it can be the driving force of a business. The good news is that, even though it sounds like a mammoth task, CRM can be executed with ease and is very inexpensive — most entry-level open-source CRM software is free. This guide will help you in building the perfect CRM for your industry using open source. The open-source CRM market is vast, with several outstanding contenders.

The main open-source CRM contenders

SuiteCRM — An alternative to SugarCRM and based on the SugarCRM Community Edition, SuiteCRM gives you the best of all worlds. After SugarCRM discontinued support for its community edition, SalesAgility forked it and enhanced both the user interface and the functionality to make it a more powerful CRM system. Redian's hands-on experience withSuiteCRM now extends to seven published extensions on the SuiteCRM Store and dozens of enterprise rollouts across India, Kenya, the UAE and the UK.

vTiger — vTiger is another open-source CRM also originally derived from SugarCRM. It has been downloaded more than three million times and offers a very neat and clean user interface with many built-in features, particularly appealing to small and mid-sized businesses that want something installable in an afternoon.

SugarCRM — One of the most powerful open-source CRMs in its time. Previously SugarCRM supported a community edition but now backs only its enterprise and professional editions. Both editions have a lot of built-in capability, including Elasticsearch for faster data delivery.

How to choose, and what's changed since 2018

The broader landscape has shifted.Zoho has become the default cloud choice for thousands of SMBs that want a managed experience, and Odoo has emerged as a credible open-source contender that bundles CRM with ERP, inventory and accounting in one suite. For organizations that need full control of their data and customization budget, SuiteCRM remains the strongest pure-CRM open-source pick.

For a structured conversation about which platform actually fits your business, Redian's CRM and ERP implementation team runs short discovery engagements that pair a domain consultant with an architect. The contact page is the fastest way to start one.