Here is a short list of the top 5 CRM customer relationship management solutions on the market today.  Although the list is not comprehensive, it does list the top 5 solutions based on user base with a short summary product description.

Open source software has opened up the door for a new surge of ERP, enterprise resource planning, solutions particularly in the CRM, customer relationship management, space.  Recently dominated by a few large software vendors like Oracle and SAP, open source solutions have gained a lot of popularity due to the low cost of entry, a big switch from enterprise implementations in the 90's.

Open source solutions at present don’t tie in all company systems and departments, however, when dealing with everything directly connected to sales and customer service opensource CRM products on the market today are powerful tools for companies.

SugarCRM is the largest opensource CRM solution on the market.  Founded in the early 2000s it already has a few million downloads. The company has over 100 employees with a user base of 10,000 companies most of them large Fortune 100 companies including Starbucks.

SplendidCRM is targeted towards system integrators and enables companies to easily add custom features. Splendid CRM shares many of the same features of Sugar CRM.

CentricCRM is one of the oldest CRM comapnies and has longevity and robust and highly customizable features. Recently renamed Concursive, it has a new round of funding from Intel. The product is targeted to small business but is increasing functionality to cater to Fortune 100 companies.

Hipergate is pretty close to an enterprise wide open source CRM solution. Migrating to an ERP solution it has a wide offering of functional modules such as collaboration software, contact management, projects, support tracking, accounting and billing, data warehousing and a slew of others.

Compiere also offers a full range of solution catering to the "enterprise" and not just one particular department. Its open source modules such as sales, human resources, marketing, inventory and a long list of others offer extremely robust features.

A dozen more open source companies could easily have been added to this list.  But readers and practitioners in the ERP and CRM space should start with these five leaders to benchmark features, support, cost, and implementation requirements.  By comparing these 5 open source solutions, you will be in good shape to guage other offerings.

Written by :

rich