Open Source CRMs – people like them?

I had a good look at NTEN’s CRM Satisfaction Survey (yippee for data!), and although the sample sizes were small, and not representative of the nonprofit sector as a whole, the people surveyed seemed to like the open source tools available. There were 6 open source (or sort of open source) tools that showed up on this survey. They included CiviCRM, SugarCRM, and vTiger (which is actually a modification of SugarCRM), all with vibrant developer and user ecosystems. The three others are Democracy in Action, which is a SaaS that is open source, CitySoft says it’s open source, but I don’t know whether it is through an OSI approved license (since they don’t say. Taken at face value, CitySoft certainly doesn’t violate the letter of the law, since you can get the source code if you buy their product, but their source code is unavailable otherwise, it sort of violates the spirit of open source.) Finally, Organizer’s Database is open source, but written on top of a proprietary platform (Microsoft Access).

201 out of 665 users used these 6 open source tools. I don’t think that’s possibly representative of the sector (especially since in the survey, the most popular CRM was CiviCRM.) That said, for the most part, except for CitySoft and vTiger, people seemed very satisfied with these tools. CiviCRM was first in satisfaction, SugarCRM, Organizer’s Database, and Democracy in Action were 3rd, 4th, and 5th, respectively. That’s pretty impressive. Among those surveyed, 4 of the top 5 tools in terms of satisfaction were open source (or sort of open source) tools. The only other tool in the top 5 was Salesforce. Satisfaction with Convio, Kintera and Blackbaud all trailed these top 4 tools.

We really can’t draw any conclusions from this – the sample size was small, and, as I mentioned, not representative of the sector. But it’s a very good sign that people seem satisfied with the open source tools available for one of the core functions of nonprofit organizations.