SuiteCRM

SuiteCRM is an open-source CRM for sales and marketing teams, free to self-host with no per-user fees or run on paid managed hosting.

SuiteCRM gives a business one place for its leads, accounts, contacts and opportunities, on infrastructure it chooses and with code it can change. The application is open source and free to download, so no licence fee is charged for each user. It is maintained by SuiteCRM Ltd, a company registered in Scotland, which has looked after the project since 2013. It answers a common complaint about proprietary CRM: costs that grow with every seat, and customer data held on another company's terms. Accounts and Contacts hold every organisation and person, with sub-panels for activity history and linked opportunities. Opportunities move through Sales Stages, and each stage sets the probability behind weighted pipeline figures. Tasks, Calls and Meetings carry due dates and reminders, while the Campaigns wizard builds web forms that create Leads, Contacts or Targets. Quotes take product line items from an opportunity and go to the customer as a PDF. The Workflow module acts when a record is saved or on a schedule, and Reports can be pinned as dashlets on home dashboards. Administrators add fields in Studio, create modules in Module Builder and set access through Roles and Security Groups. SuiteCRM suits organisations with in-house IT that want to host, inspect and customise their CRM rather than rent it. Teams without that capacity can have the company run it through Fully Managed Hosting, which is sold together with a support contract. Spending follows services rather than seats: the software is free, and money goes on hosting, prepaid support hours and implementation. A fixed-scope Quick Start sets up the data structure, layouts, reports and workflows with a day of training, and Enterprise implementation is quoted for bespoke code. SuiteASSURED adds warranties, legal indemnities and priority support for organisations with audit and compliance requirements. Sales teams use it to carry an opportunity from first enquiry to a sent quote, while managers read forecasts from stage probabilities. Marketing teams run campaigns and drop web-form enquiries straight into Leads for sales to follow up. Organisations leaving Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics move their customer records across to stop paying a licence for each additional user. Developers extend it with their own modules because the full source is open. It fits a business that wants to own its CRM outright and pay SuiteCRM Ltd only for the hosting and support it chooses.