Customers are the lifeblood of your company. After all, without customers, your business wouldn't have anyone to purchase your products, use your services, or spread the word of how amazing your business is.

You need customers. And you need to be able to manage those customers. That's where the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool comes in. What is CRM? A Customer Relationship Management tool empowers your business to interact with current and potential customers. By using data analysis about customer history, these tools allow you to improve your relationships with those customers and drive sales growth.

In other words, CRM makes it easy for you to build brand loyalty and expand your customer base. And it doesn't matter what your business is-be it retail, manufacturing, or if you're a software QA company, you will benefit from a CRM.

You might be thinking such a tool would eat up the majority of your software budget. Fortunately, that's not so. Why? Because there are open-source CRM solutions available.

What is open-source?

Before we dive into some of the available solutions, you might be wondering what open-source is. The answer to that question is actually quite simple.

Open-source software is any application released under a license that ensures the code for the software is available for anyone to modify and redistribute with their modifications. So if you find an open-source tool you like, but feel you can improve upon it, an open-source license makes it possible to download the code for the application, change it, and redistribute our own version of that application.

Open-source software is often free of charge, so your software budget won't take a hit from you deploying one of these solutions.

With that said, let's take a look at the available options.

Odoo

Odoo might have an odd name, but it's one of the more powerful CRM tools you'll find (open-source or proprietary). Odoo is a one-stop-shop for sales, service, operations, finance, marketing, developing, manufacturing, human resource, and communications. In fact, there are over 10,000 apps that can be plugged into Odoo (directly or indirectly). The only caveat to some of the add-ons is that they have an associated cost.

For many, Odoo could be considered as much a complete workflow solution as just a CRM tool. But don't let that fool you, as Odoo has plenty of powerful tools to help raise your customer relations to the next level. In fact, Odoo could be considered a single solution to meet a number of your business needs-from HR and POS to eCommerce and everything in between. All of this comes together in a user-friendly, web-based interface.

The one disadvantage of using Odoo is that there is a bit of a learning curve for both getting the solution up and running and knowing where to start customizing it to perfectly fit your company needs. But the time you spend deploying and learning this solution will be well worth the effort.

OroCRM

OroCRM is part of the OroPlatform, which is an open-source platform for rapid application development. The OroPlatform is built with PHP and gives businesses a jump-start for building responsive web applications.

For its part, OroCRM is a complete CRM solution that can be used by sales teams, managers, marketing groups, and customer support departments. With this solution, you can monitor and analyze every step of the customer's journey through your business. From leads, opportunities, and wins, you'll enjoy accurate forecasting for your company's sales pipeline. 

And for those that need help building targeted marketing campaigns, OroCRM has you covered. With the built-in marketing tools, you can build campaigns around things like geo-locations, customer types, and industries.

Finally, OroCRM allows you to make use of powerful support tools, such as support tickets, orders, and logged customer interactions.

The only real downside to OroCRM is that you might require the help of software QA outsourcing companies to get the helpdesk/customer support functions properly integrated.

Vtiger

To many, Vtiger is the open source CRM solution. Vtiger is a complete, on-premise CRM tool that can cover everything related to your customers. Both the sales cycle and daily workflows are covered in this "one-stop" solution. 

With Vtiger your business will enjoy powerful sales automation, email marketing functionality, project management, inventory management, reporting and analytics tools, Gmail integration, security management, SLAs, opportunity management, inventory management, tasks and activities, collaboration, documents and files, performance reporting, case management, and thousands of addons found in the Vtiger Marketplace. 

Do note that many of the add-ons have an associated cost. For example, the Time Tracker extension (which is designed to help employees automatically record time spent on projects, tasks, tickets, and opportunities) costs $99.00 USD, whereas the Drag and Drop Docs extension (which enables drag and drop document support from the desktop to the server) is free.

If you're looking for a tool that can help you automate entire workflows, Vtiger might be the ideal solution for your CRM needs. 

Vtiger does have a bit of a learning curve, so you'll want to make sure to give your teams plenty of time to get up to speed on the tool's usage. Other than that learning curve, you might find the reporting tools somewhat lacking and the fact that Vtiger might include more features than your company could ever use might be a bit daunting. However, don't let the extensive functionality keep you from giving Vtiger a try.

Conclusion

This list is far from extensive, but these three open source CRM solutions give you a good idea of what's available. If you have the need (and the skills to install software on a server), you'll find any of these solutions more than enough to cover your Customer Relations Management needs.