EspoCRM
CRMA self-hosted CRM for managing leads, contacts, sales opportunities, marketing campaigns and support cases, with a PHP REST backend and a single-page web frontend.
Open-source alternative to:
HubSpot
What the free edition leaves out
The free edition is genuinely usable, but some team or enterprise features need a paid plan. “Not confirmed” means the official pages we read did not say, so we do not guess.
| Feature | Free edition | Details | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| SSO / SAML | Not confirmed | OIDC login is documented in the core admin docs (since v7.3) and the pricing page lists LDAP and OpenID Connect. SAML was not mentioned on any page read, and it is not stated whether OIDC/LDAP need a paid extension. | Source ↗ |
| Role-based access control | Free | The pricing page lists roles with scope-level and field-level access control, plus portal roles. The page does not split these by edition; roles are part of the core application, but this was not confirmed in a separate docs page. | Source ↗ |
| Audit logs | Not confirmed | No audit log is described. The Activity Stream shows record updates, but the pricing page does not call it an audit log. | Source ↗ |
| Multi-user / teams | Not confirmed | Cloud plans have minimum user counts (3, 5, 10) and no stated maximum. No user limit for the free self-hosted edition was found on the pages read. | Source ↗ |
| Backups and restore | Not confirmed | Cloud plans include daily backups kept for 7 days. No built-in backup tool for self-hosting was found on the pages read. | Source ↗ |
| API access | Free | An external access API is listed on all cloud plans. It uses API key and HMAC authentication; the pricing page also mentions a REST API with OpenAPI support. Core repo README describes a PHP REST API backend. | Source ↗ |
| Support SLA | Paid | Cloud plans list 12x5 support, with no response-time SLA stated. A paid support SLA for self-hosted installs was not found. | Source ↗ |
Best for
Small and mid-size teams that want a conventional sales and customer-tracking CRM they can host themselves on a standard PHP and MySQL or MariaDB stack.
Why choose it over Salesforce
The core CRM is AGPL-3.0 and free to download and self-host, so there is no per-seat fee from the project. It covers leads, contacts, opportunities, campaigns and cases, offers role-based access control down to the field level, and has an API. OIDC login is documented in the core admin docs.
Where it falls short
Several official extensions (Advanced Pack, Sales Pack, Project Management, Google and Outlook integrations and others) are listed separately from the open-source repo, and only the MCP Extension and Real Estate are marked as distributed for free. The extensions page shows no prices, so the cost of self-hosting with them is unclear. Cloud plans require a minimum of 3 users. Audit logging and SAML were not found. You run and update the database, daemon and websocket processes yourself. Contributions require a CLA.
Open-source alternative to
- Salesforce — EspoCRM is an open-source CRM you can run on your own server, so it can replace a per-seat hosted CRM such as Salesforce for small and mid-size teams.
- HubSpot — EspoCRM covers leads, contacts, opportunities, campaigns and cases and is free to self-host, unlike HubSpot's per-seat platform.
Category
CRMTopics
Tech stack
PHP
JavaScript
TypeScriptLanguages as reported by GitHub for the repository.
