Best Open Source CRM Software

Every CRM vendor bills per user per month, and the bill climbs fast. A twenty seat sales team at $25 a seat is over $6,000 a year before add-ons. That is why open source CRM keeps getting evaluated, and it is also why most evaluations stop at the download. The software is free. The operating cost is not.

Odoo Community

Odoo is an ERP with a CRM module, which is its biggest strength and its biggest trap. The CRM itself is fine, but the reason people pick Odoo is that a lead can flow into a quote, an order, invoicing, and inventory without any middleware. If you run a product business, that pipeline is genuinely useful.

The Community edition is LGPL and free. The catch is that you will be fighting the framework. Odoo models, records, and views follow their own conventions, and the moment you need behaviour the studio does not expose, you are writing Odoo code, not the Python you already know. Most small teams get better value paying Odoo or a partner for hosted support than self-hosting and learning the framework alone.

ERPNext

ERPNext is the other full ERP on this list, built on the Frappe framework and driven by Frappe Technologies, an Indian company. If your business touches GST, Indian accounting, HR, or manufacturing, ERPNext has those modules and they are localised properly, which is rare in open source. It is GPLv3 licensed.

Who it suits: SMBs that will adopt the whole system, not just the CRM. Who it does not suit: anyone who wants a thin sales tracker. ERPNext is opinionated. Everything lives in one Frappe app and deviating from its model takes real effort. For a Mumbai services firm that wants one system for leads, invoices, and payroll, ERPNext is the most complete answer on this list.

EspoCRM

EspoCRM is a lightweight PHP CRM that does sales, marketing, and customer service without pretending to be an ERP. It is AGPLv3 licensed. Setup is genuinely easy, MySQL plus PHP, and it stays fast on modest hardware. The tradeoff is a small ecosystem: fewer extensions, fewer integrations, and a community small enough that you sometimes answer your own questions. If your need is tracking leads and emails for a ten person team, it is hard to beat on effort versus payoff.

SuiteCRM

SuiteCRM is the community fork of SugarCRM and carries that history with it. It is AGPLv3. It covers sales, marketing, and service, and it has the integrations and add-on market that more than a decade of development brings. It also has the UI to show for it. The interface feels dated, and the codebase is heavy enough that a sloppy self-host becomes a security chore. SuiteCRM suits organisations that need its breadth and have someone willing to keep it patched.

Twenty

Twenty is the youngest project here, AGPLv3, a modern TypeScript CRM that looks and behaves a lot like a self-hosted Salesforce or HubSpot. It is API-first, with custom objects and a workflow editor. It is the most pleasant CRM to use on this list and the least proven: fewer integrations, less battle testing, and a roadmap that can still shift. For a startup that wants a modern CRM from day one and can tolerate early-adopter roughness, it is worth a serious look.

Mautic

Mautic is not a CRM. It is marketing automation, GPLv2 licensed: email campaigns, lead scoring, and nurturing sequences that plug into a CRM. Teams that expect Mautic to replace Salesforce get confused, because it answers a different question. The practical pairing is Mautic for campaigns plus one of the CRMs above for pipeline, and that pairing is a real integration project, not a weekend.

Self-host or pay

Do the math on who does the work. Self-hosting a CRM on a small Indian VPS costs a few hundred rupees a month in compute. The real cost is upgrades, backups, SSL, and patching. If you have an engineer who can own that, self-hosting is cheaper per user than any SaaS. If you do not, the subscription you avoided comes back as your own salary in troubleshooting time. ERPNext has a first-party hosting option for exactly this reason, and Odoo does too. Neither is "free", but both are cheaper than hiring someone to run the stack.

Where open source CRM falls short

Open source CRM is perfectly good at pipeline management. It is weak where Salesforce and HubSpot are strong: the app marketplaces, the Gmail and LinkedIn integrations, the AI scoring, and the guarantee that a change works tomorrow. Those come from thousands of paying customers and a roadmap you can hold someone to. With open source, the roadmap is a GitHub repo and the support team is often just you.

Read how open source licensing works before you build on an AGPL license, since running it as a service has obligations that permissive licenses do not have.