Ask HN: What are some good free CRM tools? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some good free CRM tools?

6 pointststegart14 comments

I'm just ramping up my sales for our digital magazine and I'm looking for ways to keep track of potential and actual customers, who I've contacted and then (hopefully), track invoices and sales. Any good free tools out there I should be aware of? Right now I used Xobni for email and an Excel spreadsheet to track names and potential customers.

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Why free ? - there's plenty of low-price SaaS CRM packages out there and the cost should be easily recouped by increased sales. And if it's not going to increase customers, why are you doing it ?

I didn't realize there were a lot of low cost options when I asked. I'm also not sure what I need, so it was a general question about what people on HN find helpful in terms of making sales.

Capsule CRM (http://www.capsulecrm.com) has a free plan with Google Apps, and integrates with other systems for invoicing etc.

SalesForce is probably by far one of the best ones out there. Of course it's not free, but the pricing starts as low as $5/month that should still help serve your needs.

Do you use it? What do you use it most for if you do?

It's good but it's hard to get rid of if you get fed up with it, which you will, rapidly.

Salesforce? Stay. Away.

Fat Free CRM - http://www.fatfreecrm.com/ is an open source Rails based CRM that's pretty flexible.

So I would run this myself? Does anyone on HN use this?

I would recommend Zoho CRM + Invoice. They have a free plan and it does exactly what you are after.

Their site looks interesting and the pricing looks good. Do you use them at the moment?

Yes. We are using a few products from the Zoho Suite. We initially started on the free plan. That was a while ago and right now we have around 15 users.

The great thing about Zoho is that it can scale as your product does. If you get big, you don't need to start shopping for a better crm...you can continue to use zoho and just start purchasing required modules / user licenses.

and stay away from SugarCRM if you ever want to do any customisation. The code base is horrific (at least, to be fair it was around version 5.x. I haven't looked since, because those versions burnt so much

Given the amount of customization SugarCRM has out in the wild (including some really nice add-ons from partners) I'd be curious to talk about what you experienced, and to see if where we've gone since (we're near the release of 6.6 btw) addresses your issues.

I think we have a great product with a lot of flexibility.

Yes, I work for SugarCRM (I'm in product management), and yes I am actually interested in knowing about what you experienced. jarruda@sugarcrm.com

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