Open Source CRM Software: "Tricky," Impossible, or Troublesome?

At Inc. Magazine, Bryce McDonnell offers a testimonial of how he uses free, open source CRM software to track leads from Twitter, Facebook, and online advertising. His promotions have been successful enough to generate more than 1,000 leads, requiring a strong CRM software solution for filtering and follow-up.

Open source solutions, like the Fat Free CRM package McDonnell uses, often attract attention for their price tags: "free." However, McDonnell offers a caveat for company leaders hoping to score a big win with free CRM software:

One word of caution: Installing Fat Free is a bit tricky, especially if you're not comfortable with software code. But once the application is installed, you don't have to be a Web developer to use it.

For small office/home office CRM users, this warning can lead to a big money drain. If you're not a professional web developer, free CRM software may require hours of tedious installation on the front end of a launch. A consultant who charges $100 per hour could lose thousands of dollars in opportunity cost on an installation that requires server provisioning and custom installation, especially on low-cost, shared server accounts designed to save money.

At larger organizations, free CRM software that gets tagged on to the responsibilities of web teams can often sour a whole enterprise on the idea. Although the work that open source teams do can be impressive, the challenge of keeping servers secured and code updated against threats often falls to the end user. Marketing teams won't like hearing that a critical website push is being delayed by the maintenance of an internal application. Likewise, users will get frustrated if a CRM system crashes during a time when no dedicated technicians are available to help.

SugarCRM has already shown the market potential for a hosted CRM model based on free software. Understanding that "free" doesn't mean "instant" or "maintenance-free" is the first step toward successfully integrating open source CRM tools into the enterprise.