With the changing business dynamics that came about with and post COVID-19, the way organizations operate has taken a new, and perhaps a future-securing turn. No one is spared by this change. Businesses already have a lot to deal with, especially with the new ways of working. The last thing you want is to fall short of is employees to manage customer relations.
While humans can manage B2C relationships well, CRM, or customer relationships managers can make this process more efficient and easier. So while we’ll first highlight the benefits of CRMs, the aim of this article is to help you find the best free and open source CRM software for your business.
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What is a CRM software?
CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a modern software-based solution for dealing with different aspects of consumer management. Think of CRM as your virtual employee tracking consumers leads and converts. It is as simple as that.
The idea of open source makes CRM and even more exciting prospects. If it’s open source, the program can be layered and modified to suit individual requirements, while keeping the core consistent for others to tweak it as per their usage. It is factors like this that make experts believe that CRM will be an $80 billion market by 2025, as per a report.
List of six free and open source CRM software
EngageBay
If you visit the official website of EngageBay, you will come across the phrase – All-In-One Marketing Tool and CRM – flaunted right at the top. To set the context, it does more than the usual CRM, and charges a lot less than other tools available.
So, if you are a startup that has both online and offline stores, managing the sales activity in both platforms becomes quite challenging. Now, what if you had a tool that deals with online marketing stuff, like SEO, landing page enhancement, and social media monitoring optimization, so at the end of the day your online load is relieved.
Now, what about the offline store? Customers will come in and you need to be ready with a system to track buying patterns, and follow up leads. More so, engage with the customers on a personal level. EngageBay covers this side of the business as well through its core CRM tools, like lead tracking, consumer data analytics, ticketing option for customer support, and much more.
The bottom line is, Engagebay is the unarguably the most cost-effective tool for handling sales marketing and CRM. It has no onboarding charges, it also does not bind the users with an annual contract. This means small businesses can pay monthly, and terminate the contract if the need be. However, the chances are more that you will stay on.
Pricing
It has a free version, which is quite apt for business at nascent stages. However, businesses can choose from various subscription options ranging from $8.99 to $47.99.
HubSpot
HubSpot is unique as it is a cloud-based CRM tool that works on the marketing side of things, rather than the core CRM. However, this does not discount its effectiveness in the CRM sections.
It has almost all the features that you would find in a CRM suite. It is just that the marketing side of things is more dominant with features, like marketing automation, lead management, marketing analytics, email marketing, SEO, and much more.
On the CRM side of things, HubSpot provides a mix of standards and exciting features. On one hand, it provides ways to manage repetitive tasks, and on the other side, there are features, like storing databases of like a million contacts. It accounts for features like deal tracking, pipeline management, and establishing company insights and reports.
Pricing
HubSpot CRM is free, while the marketing, sales, and service hub add-on packages are charged as per $50 per month.
SuiteCRM
If you are looking for a classic example of an open-source free CRM solution, look no further than SuiteCRM. It’s an ideal solution for all forms of businesses. Be it startups or an established organization, it has something in store to offer both forms of business entity.
The dashboard contains every bit of information that companies can leverage to formulate strong plans to attract new customers and retain the existing ones. Customization of the dashboard with the help of dashlets allows users to integrate different modules and key elements in the dashboard for real-time and quick access.
It takes just a few clicks to access the complete feature-list, such as the design layout of the platform. Also, not much pre-adoption training is required to use this CRM solution at its optimum levels. A basic two-week long training course would suffice.
Pricing
The basic SuiteCRM is free. However, it offers a Starter plan (1-10 users), a Business plan (10-50 users), Premium plan (10-150 users). Check the official website for a complete pricing list.
Bitrix24
Bitrix 24 is an ideal solution for companies looking to extensively feature-laden CRM software. The free open-source version has almost all the features, just the usability factor is toned down to a moderate setting.
It includes the usual CRM features catering to lead management and customer relationship management. It also possesses some of the advanced feature real-time data analysis, workflow automation, and pipeline management. Interestingly, it also encapsulates some of the sales features, like tracking deals, and online payment processing.
Bitrix24 is a vast CRM tool, which is loaded with numerous features, so they have feature-specific tutorial videos to maximize the prowess of the platforms to the optimum level.
Pricing
The startup plan is free, while the prices of other packs range from $55 to $159.
Freshsales
Freshsales is one of its kind CRM software that helps businesses grow lead-by-leads, or conversions-by-conversions. This is the ideal tool that the sales process would be fun working on. The granularity of every lead detail places this open-source tool right at the top with the best.
Under the Freshsales purview, every lead is tracked to their last details. Based on the data gathered about the leads, an auto-generated score is presented to the users for the prioritization. It also allows categorizing the leads into new, contacted, and interested. This helps to keep track of the leads to final sales.
It also provides other options to follow leads, and engage with them, while providing support-based services when converted. One of the interesting features is the built-in phone module with options like call touring, automatics dialing, and recording.
Pricing
The basic startup plan is free while plan based versions price ranges from $12 to $79.
Odoo
Odoo is one of the meticulously designed CRM tools that extend to other forms of business application as well. ERP is bundled with Odoo CRM as extended business application software.
If you have to integrate different forms of business activity, provided you have the business acumen of dealing with technical details, Odoo is the right option for you.
You can collect and assess the real impact of POS (Point Of Sales) data to inventory details, and other sales-related components. Probably, this is why if you have brick and mortar, Odoo is the most trusted CRM solution.
Pricing
Odoo is completely free, but you have to pay for CRM plugins.
Bottomline
After having an extensive look at the list of six open source CRM software, the inclination of business towards open source is more than proprietary software. In fact, it is the nature of CRM tools that promote open-source adoption. It is only about time that we will have many more such CRM tools powered by the latest technologies like AI. All the CRM software mentioned above are quite good, so it totally depends upon your business’ needs.
