Best Open Source CRM 2024 – Forbes Advisor

An open source program can benefit your business in a variety of ways. More flexibility allows for more avenues to explore via customer relations, but much of the benefit of open source CRM is in the customization. Whatever you’re looking for, you can build it yourself and add it in.

Customizable and Adaptable

Public source code offers a software design accessible to everyone. It’s a developed product ready for use but also adaptable to individual needs. By nature, public-accessible code is much easier to upgrade and adapt. You can rethink the layout of the program entirely as a company grows and evolves.

Community of Users

Open source CRMs tend to have large communities of users and developers sharing ideas and tips with each other via web forums, video tutorials and more. While they may not have a dedicated customer support team like the big traditional vendors, you almost always have a wide network of users just like yourself that you can reach out to if you ever need help or ideas on how to improve your CRM app.

Cost-effective

Because the basic philosophy of open source is to offer a public source code for users to adapt and use to customize CRM solutions, the software is usually either free or at a much lower cost than big, for-profit CRM providers. For small businesses with a little more technical savviness and available time for development, this could decrease expenses that would otherwise go toward customer relations staff or an on-demand CRM software subscription.

Note that open source CRM solutions require development to fit specific needs, so while the base software is free, unless you have experience with building CRM software, hiring developers or dedicating in-house development resources to customization can be costly. Larger companies with the resources to put towards more advanced system development can also benefit from developing CRM platforms in-house.