one to watch
CiviCRM is once again the One to Watch. Boosting the company’s position this year is its generally low cost; it scored 4.0 for this criterion. Low cost could be considered critical, given that CiviCRM specializes in CRM for nonprofits, according to Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group. Some of the big-name organizations using its products are Amnesty International, Creative Commons, and the Free Software Foundation. The company is also benefiting from new Drupal 8 integration and a voice broadcast feature. —L.K.
The Market
Open-source CRM software is certainly not for everyone. Businesses looking for out-of-the-box, complete applications should steer clear of this market segment, but it makes sense for companies that want to tailor every aspect of the CRM experience from the ground up.
CRM buyers would have far fewer choices were it not for open-source applications. Open-source application vendors provide a number of alternatives to bigger, more mainstream application vendors such as Oracle, Salesforce.com, Microsoft, and SAP, often at a much lower cost of entry. For that reason alone, they have become increasingly competitive and are being used by thousands of companies worldwide.
The market in the past few years has become densely populated with several very viable software products and very active user and developer communities to support them, but it is still quite limited. Though open-source software is becoming more attractive to a growing number of businesses, its use is still confined mostly to small and midsized firms with restricted budgets.
By its nature, this is a very fast-changing market, so it becomes very important to pick the right vendor for your particular needs, and then plan to spend a lot of time and effort on customizations.
The Leaders
Agile CRM, a newcomer to the leaderboard this year, was elevated by a 4.3 score on cost, a key selling point in the open-source CRM category. “For the price, Agile has put together a solid offering that covers a lot of ground while providing nice value,” says Brent Leary, cofounder of CRM Essentials. “The visual designer for building campaigns makes it easier to automate important processes. I especially like the focus on connecting and optimizing e-commerce use cases back to traditional CRM.”
SplendidCRM appears for the first time in the top five this year, impressing analysts with its depth of functionality (3.9) and cost (3.8), but that isn’t all the company has in its favor. For one, its business model is certainly unique: SplendidCRM is based on SugarCRM technology and targets the Microsoft-centric small business sector, where Microsoft Dynamics CRM is often considered too expensive and complex to implement.
With its rankings this year, vTiger has now made the leaderboard seven of the past eight years. As in years past, its strength lies in the area of cost, where it scored a 4.0. Because of its capabilities around sales and marketing automation, customer support and service, inventory management, analysis and reporting, email and calendaring integration, and a host of other features, the company garnered a respectable score of 3.9 in depth of functionality.
XTuple, a fixture on the leaderboard, did not disappoint this year. Analysts gave the company a rating of 4.3 in cost, due largely to its flexible licensing and pricing options. The company offers a free version and a fee-based enterprise version of its software. The company also put up strong numbers in depth of functionality, customer satisfaction, and company direction, with a 4.0 in all three. Part of the company’s appeal, according to analysts, is the breadth of its offerings, which include not only CRM but also enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, and accounting software all integrated into one modular system that can support Windows, Mac, Linux, and mobile platforms.
The Winner
SugarCRM has been the industry leader every year that the open-source category has been included in CRM’s Market Leader Awards, and this year is no exception. “Even though they have moved beyond being viewed solely as open-source CRM to being a leader in the industry in general, they are still the measuring stick if you want an open-source solution,” Leary says. “In fact, SugarCRM has led the way in thinking of open-source CRM [as] being more about CRM functionality and less about how it’s created.” It also helped that the company scored an industry-leading 4.5 in depth of functionality and a 3.9 in customer satisfaction. —Leonard Klie