EspoCRM
Overview
EspoCRM is a clean-looking customer relationship manager (CRM) that is perfect for most basic use cases.
Three great things
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Mature product. EspoCRM has been around for over a decade, and has included many, many requests from the community. The current product is very extensive and battle-tested.
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Configurable views and entities. The UI is clean, albeit a bit dated. However, it is very flexible and configurable.
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Live updates. There is no need to refresh the application to see the latest changes from your team.
Three annoying things
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Paywalls. Useful features (e.g. automated workflows, reports, integrations) require additional licenses of approximately $400/year. For example, the free version does not automate any emails when users are created, cases are updated, etc.
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Limited views. Each entity can have a customised view. However, you can not save multiple views/filters of a list. This is a small nitpick.
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Burned-out developers. Yurri Kuznietsov and other developers have updated the EspoCRM project over 19,000 times, and currently living through a war. They deserve a break, and I do not expect future updates to maintain the velocity the team has achieved over the past 10 years.
Scoring
Functionality ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
All the basic features are available out-of-the-box, including lead tracking, emails, meeting/call tracking, and case management. All entities are flexible, so you can customise the application structure and layout to your needs.
There are some features that are only available with yearly licenses. The most frustrating is that automated workflows and reports are kept behind these paywalls.
However, there are workarounds. EspoCRM does include a well-documented API and provides webhooks, so technically-savvy administrators can set up integrations using automation platforms like n8n.
UI/UX ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
The application has a 2012ish look-and-feel with clean design. The search functionality works well and the mobile view is decent. There are no official native mobile applications.
Project maturity ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
EspoCRM is backed by Letrium LTD, which was founded in 2011. The project is consistently updated on GitHub and has an active disucssion forum.
Performance ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
The app requires around 500MB of memory, and feels snappy.
Business model ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
The EspoCRM project follows the open core model. Letrium LTD earns revenue through cloud hosting, extension licenses, and support.
Overall ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
EspoCRM is the most mature, feature-complete, open-source CRM we have tested. We love it, apart from the fact that some arguably basic features are not available in the free version.
CRM Open Source Free