Customer relationships management tools come in 3 main categories –

Free / low monthly cost set ups for small businesses Expensive monthly / per user enterprise set ups Open sourced CRMs for all business sizes

There are a number of benefits to running open sourced software

Potential cost savings *

Ability to edit the code directly and add new features

Can run on a wide variety of platforms

Total control of what it runs on

* the cost savings need to be looked at big picture though. If you’re paying IT to support the server and CRM databases on an inhouse server and paying for all the bandwidth to connect to it is that really cheaper than $5 pcm for each user to connect to a SAAS (software as a service) CRM hosted in the cloud who have millions of dollars worth of budgets to ensure uptime and timely support responses.

That said, for some companies IT departments it comes down to the simple fact that they don’t want all their priceless customer and prospect data in the cloud under someone else’s control. It’s pretty 1980s thinking, but I guess they have responsibility for it.

So here are the 3 top open source CRM tools available at the moment in my opinion. Each have a couple of advantages and disadvantages listed below –

SugarCRM – Founded in 2004 by John Roberts, Clint Oram and Jacob Taylor, the Sugar open-source code has been downloaded more than 3 million times. The company has received $26 million in venture financing and employs more than 100 people. That is some open source company!

They’re great on the support front and as they actually employ people they are willed to help you out in a timely fashion. The only downside to this is that you’re inadvertently paying a bunch of wages if you’re using the product and those costs have to be recouped somewhere.

SplendidCRM – The company was created in November 2005 and the application is built on the Microsoft platform (Windows, ISS, SQL Server, C# and ASP). SplendidCRM allows administrators to add user-customizable features such as .NET 2.0’s Themes, Web Parts and AJAX. SplendidCRM is positioned as a competitor to SugarCRM, as the two applications share many of the same features.

It is 100% free to use the open source ‘community’ version of the software, however you will miss out on a few features.

Opencrx – A totally open sourced CRM system, you won’t find any $$$ signs anywhere on their website. OpenCRX’s account management provides a true 360° view of customers across contracts, activities, products, and status. Account management enables your employees to build tighter, more profitable relationships by understanding the status of each account. It allows your team to focus on profitable deals and close them faster by sharing consistent sales information, tracking deal progress, and recording all deal-related interactions. From my experience with Opencrx, it’s certainlly built with the salesperson in mind which is really important.

Conclusions

Although there are many advantages to using an open sourced CRM vs one ran privately in the cloud it’s important to look at a slightly bigger picture perspective than just what your IT manager is telling you (ie they have minimal budget). The overall lifetime costs when taking into account employees time for upkeep of an in house server and constant support requests from users can very quickly negate the initial purchase price costs of using an externally ran CRM system. That said, if you need your CRM to do things that you can’t find in commercial options, then open source is the way to go.