Sophisticated On-Demand Customer Tracking or Database Apps–For Free
October 9th, 2007 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 15 Comments
CRM (customer relationship management) software has exploded in popularity in recent years, and there are probably many web workers who have already used popular applications such as Salesforce.com. However, Salesforce.com and other on-demand (Web-based) CRM applications cost money, even though there are some perfectly good applications available for free. In this post, I’ll discuss my personal favorite on-demand CRM application, Splendid CRM, which is an open-source application that is completely free.
Splendid CRM is hosted on the Web, so it’s available on demand no matter where you are, as is true of Salesforce.com and other CRM applications. It comes in a free trial version that you can use on a no-cost basis for as long as you want, but do note that with the free trial version, Splendid CRM will not guarantee the protection of your data. A separate Splendid CRM Professional Edition is $2,000 for 10 users. The open-source, free trial version is fine in my experience.
You can sign up for Splendid CRM in under two minutes and start building out data on your contacts, upcoming meetings, sales leads, sales campaign targets, and much more. The application is very good at reminding you about everything from meetings to follow-up phone calls, to project reminders. There are numerous tabs atop the application, so you can switch from viewing contacts, to looking through leads, to working with your calendar, etc. Also, it is essentially an open-ended database application, so you don’t have to use it for just sales or managing customer data. Any workgroup can customize their own type of database application in Splendid CRM.
Splendid CRM can also produce very spiffy, useful graphics. This one shows an aerial view of a whole sales pipeline for a project, sorted by what stage various parts of the project are in:
The current release of Splendid CRM integrates with numerous databases, including SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, Oracle 9i, Oracle 10g, IBM DB2 Express-C 8, IBM DB2 Express-C 9 and MySQL 5. The latest version also allows system integrators to add user-customizable features to the application, using technologies such as AJAX. You can also view demos of the product online.
Users of the free version of Splendid CRM should definitely be meticulous about doing regular data backups. However, rarely do you find a really sophisticated, database-driven application online for free, and Splendid CRM is the product of lots of muscular effort from the open source community. If you’re web work involves anything to do with customers, give it a try. Even if you just use it for one, targeted database application, such as maintaining a shared employee directory with phone numbers, contact info, and job descriptions, it will do the job cleanly and nicely.
Do you have any tips on CRM or other on-demand applications?
15 Comments Post your own comment
Bob says: October 9th, 2007 7:10pm
I would put more faith in Zoho CRM. Seems to be pretty similar feature set to Splendid, they offer free service for up to 3 accounts, and they don’t warn you like Splendid’s clause: “understand that this service is provided for evaluation purposes and that the data will not be guaranteed in any way.
Samuel Dean says: October 9th, 2007 8:02pm
Good point about Zoho CRM, and I like many of their free tools. They put strict caps on how many people can use an app for free, though. Zoho CRM limits you to three users, and if that’s all you need that’s great. In the case of CRM apps, though, I think the utility of them often becomes most clear when larger groups are sharing database-centric information. That’ s where lots of workgroups of larger size can get a lot out of Splendid’s offering.
Jesse Middleton says: October 9th, 2007 8:08pm
I agree with Bob when talking about great online CRM products. One of the biggest benefits of Zoho’s CRM is that they have many other great online tools as well. And to Samuel’s point, Zoho may have strict restrictions on numbers of users, etc but they do provide and outstanding service for what it is. When a user outgrows it, it might be time to look for a commercial CRM product.
rdv says: October 9th, 2007 8:32pm
Another vote for Zoho. To add to what Jesse said, when you do need more than 3 users, you can still use zoho. I find that the tool is extremely flexible and most importantly, the zoho team is very responsive to feedback.
Aaron B. Hockley says: October 9th, 2007 8:53pm
The screenshots of SplendidCRM look exactly like SugarCRM – I wonder what the relationship is…
Olivier says: October 10th, 2007 4:52am
@AARON
AFAIK, SplendidCRM is yet another fork of SugarCRM.
You may want to check vTiger that got nice – and opensourced – tools/add-ons for Thunderbird, Firefox, Office and Outlook.
Business Hacks mobile edition says: October 10th, 2007 12:01pm
[...] leads, bugs, activities, documents, and tasks, and even lets you set up an employee directory. Web Worker Daily has a fairly detailed overview of the service, which it says is essentially an open-ended database, one that can be used for more than just [...]
Wesley Ashworth says: October 11th, 2007 6:00am
I’ve been using Longjump for a couple of weeks and love it.
Freelancer’s Guide to Sales: Measuring your Sales Pipeline in 15 Minutes at The Shane & Peter Inc. Blog says: October 18th, 2007 11:47am
[...] Worker daily has just posted a good article on Open source CRM tools which will help you track the [...]
Computer Consulting Kit says: December 3rd, 2007 2:37pm
System integrators and other technology professionals – particularly those that deal with small businesses – are always on the look-out for comprehensive reviews of affordable software, hardware and other products. The small business market in particular is really lacking in products specifically designed for it (and affordable and to-scale for small business owners!). I think the availability of break-downs of different products is getting more as opportunities within the small business arena for solution providers grow, but still it’s nice to see some analyses coming out – slowly but surely – about different useful programs.
Sam Miller says: December 7th, 2007 9:25am
I tried using Sugar and didn’t like it, think I’l pass on splendid. Just signed up for Zoho and CRM-free. I think both are easier to use so far
Web Worker Daily » Archive Free CRM Apps: Nothing to Shake a Stick At « says: January 9th, 2008 4:00pm
[...] that’s focused more exclusively on CRM and that you can learn to use extremely quickly, see my previous post on Splendid CRM Splendid CRM, like fee-based applications such as Salesforce.com, stays squarely [...]
shankar says: January 10th, 2008 3:15am
Hello!
I am Shankar from Zoho CRM.
Zoho CRM is free for 3 users. It also provides a 15-day free trial for Outlook plugin which provides a two-way sync between Outlook and Zoho CRM.
Zoho CRM is part of the Zoho suite(Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, Zoho Writer, Zoho Chat, Zoho Meeting, etc). We are working on providing Single Sign On to these services. User will benefit by signing up to Zoho as he can get access to a gamut of services most of which are free for 2-3 users. The power of Zoho is in being able to provide all these services seamlessly. So when you login to Zoho CRM, you basically are logging into an entire suite of services. You are free to pick and choose the service that you would like to utilize at any point.
Zoho CRM also provides for handling inventory. Please do note that Zoho CRM does not provide accounting. We plan to provide all the basic features that one may need to get his job done. We are averse to making the product bloated.
Shankar
C. Dinos Papoulias says: January 10th, 2008 3:17pm
Zoho is really just SugarCRM.
WebWorkerDaily » Archive 3 Top Open Source CRM Solutions « says: August 28th, 2008 4:00pm
[...] I’ve written about SplendidCRM before. It’s hosted on the web and based on both SugarCRM and Microsoft’s [...]