10 Best CRM Hosting (2024) - Free, Self Hosted & Open Source

Customer support queues can be undoubtedly infuriating, but leveraging the best CRM hosting technologies can vastly improve the relationships between your customers and your business.

After all, a pleasant support experience can make all the difference to your brand’s success. According to Forbes, one in four customers will pay as much as 10% more for products from companies with top-notch customer service.

CRM software gives brands a centralized system to aggregate and sift through customer data — tracking sales leads, overseeing customer interactions, and managing contacts for marketing campaigns. The flexible programs can help businesses of every size work more efficiently and provide better service. For small or medium-sized businesses looking for an affordable online solution, we’ve ranked the top hosts that will provide the high-powered infrastructure needed to gain more insight into your business operations.

Best Overall | Self Hosted | vTiger | Free & Open Source

Customer development and retention are vital to business success, and the information gathered by CRM programs can be a gold mine. In addition to identifying potential new customers, business owners may discover opportunities to upsell or cross-sell new products and features. With so much at stake for entrepreneurs, the global CRM software market is expected to reach $35 billion by 2023, according to Market Research Future.

Instead of relying on bulky spreadsheets or lengthy email threads to illustrate sales data or customer loyalty, the best CRM software keeps the information right at your fingertips and in a highly organized, comprehensive manner. The programs optimize sales, support, and marketing processes by automating particular emails, alerting employees when follow-up action is required, and monitoring account activities.

While enterprise-grade platforms, like Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce, require a hefty investment and complex hosted infrastructures, a number of free, low-cost, or open-source platforms are available to smaller organizations through their web hosting account. For instance, SiteGround, our top choice for CRM hosting, automates CRM software installation with one-click scripts and boasts perhaps the best one-two punch of performance-minded infrastructure and friendly customer support.

SiteGround is known in the web hosting industry for taking a hands-on approach to solving customers problems. Among the first hosts to pioneer secure account isolation and Linux containers, the company has also built in-house solutions for caching, server monitoring, backups, brute-force attack protection, issue tracking, and support load balancing. Learn more about the company’s shared hosting plans by reading our review below:

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CRM software comes in a wide variety of packages. As we mentioned before, premium services are often hosted in a cloud network, either from the software provider or a larger network such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Hosted options can be very convenient, albeit expensive, options for entrepreneurs who don’t want the headache of installing, configuring, and maintaining their CRM program.

Self-hosted programs, or software that resides in your own hosting environment, offers greater affordability, flexibility, and control over your data. Instead of paying a monthly subscription fee, you either simply download an open-source program or pay a one-time licensing fee. You have more leverage to fine-tune your dashboards, features, and extensions and create the most efficient and useful platform for your specific business. You already have web hosting for your brand’s website — why not add the CRM software to the same space?

As providers of superior customer service, SiteGround overstaffs all its shifts so support agents can respond instantly to chat messages and phone calls. Customers will also receive a response to their email ticket within 10 minutes, and support requests are routed through the company’s proprietary load balancing system to ensure your question finds the available agent with the right expertise.

In addition to SiteGround, a number of other hosting providers give users ample computing space and power to house their CRM software application. A2 Hosting is known for ridiculously fast servers powered by solid-state drives that deliver speeds of up to 20 times faster than more traditional storage hardware. In addition to SSDs and the usual slate of web hosting features, GreenGeeks offsets its energy consumption by returning three times the power it consumes back into the grid in the form of renewable energy. Learn more about these hosts below:

When it comes to self-hosted CRM software programs, vTiger is one of the most popular options on the market today. The platform serves the full range of Fortune 500 companies and mom-and-pop shops with open-source, cloud-based, and mobile CRM products for sales, marketing, and customer support.

Launched in 2004, the vTiger team got its start in the open-source realm and continues to foster an active community of hundreds of thousands of businesses, users, developers, and other partners. The company’s program has been downloaded more than 4.5 million times on SourceForge, making it the most popular free, open-source CRM platform on the site.

By promoting collaboration and addressing the full customer journey, vTiger enables organizations to support automation, role-based access controls, project management tools, mobile applications, and various plugins and extensions.

At 37%, vTiger is the most popular CRM program installed on SiteGround servers. The software especially thrives on the company’s optimized servers, integrated Cloudflare content delivery network, and the latest secure versions of PHP and MySQL.

Beyond SiteGround, vTiger is available through several other web hosting providers that offer their customers access to the Softaculous library of software installation scripts. A2 Hosting again makes the cut as one of the top vTiger hosts for its superb infrastructure; InterServer rounds out the top three for its emphasis on affordability. Be sure to read through our reviews of these three providers to see how vTiger will pair with each host’s shared hosting platform:

With premium Software-as-a-Service programs easily costing upward of $50 per user per month, CRM platforms can really cut into a business budget. And that doesn’t even account for the time spent testing and selecting the software, importing and cleaning data, and training employees. That being said, a study by Nucleus Research organizations tend to see a fairly significant return on their investment of $8.71 for every dollar they spend, an increase of 55% since 2011.

However, you don’t need to spend money to end up with a CRM platform that has a strong positive impact on your bottom line. Plenty of free and open-source options exist, but be aware that those terms can’t be used interchangeably. Open-source platforms are also free and provide an unrestricted, fully functional tool to users right out of the box. To use an open-source program, though, you’ll need to install, configure, and likely support the CRM software on your own.

Otherwise, free CRM software is typically lightened-up versions of more established and expensive commercial programs — known as freemium services. Free CRM tools usually either set limits on the number of users, amount of storage, or remove certain features in hopes you’ll upgrade to a paid plan. Those who don’t want to deal with self-hosted programs will appreciate that freemium software runs on the company’s infrastructure.

With the 2018 announcement that ultra-popular SugarCRM was discontinuing its open-source edition to focus on its cloud-based services, numerous free and open-source CRM programs are looking to fill the void.

In addition to vTiger, SuiteCRM and YetiForce are more modern forks of the open-source SugarCRM. Developer communities have taken the core functionalities and gone in different directions; vTiger continues to become increasingly commercialized, but SuiteCRM and YetiForce seem to remain proudly driven by open-source groups.

The Softaculous application library features more than a dozen CRM programs, along with tools for accounting, human resource management, enterprise resource planning, and even leave management. Most hosts that provide these helpful installation scripts will support CRM software, but you’ll still want to select a trustworthy hosting partner.

The three hosts we’ve gathered here enjoy top-notch reputations in the industry for having the hands-on technical experience to optimize customers’ hosting experiences for a variety of purposes. Whichever open-source CRM software you choose, we have confidence that these providers are up to the task.

As the CRM market continues to grow and expand, the software programs have become more sophisticated in an effort to give businesses an edge in an increasingly competitive landscape.

Collecting and organizing data from multiple sources into actionable insights is a demanding job that requires precision, accuracy, and stamina — why not find a reputable, scalable CRM system provider to remove the chance for human error and enable your business to invest the manpower elsewhere?

Starting with an enhanced ability to identify, understand, and help your clients, businesses that recognize the importance of customer satisfaction and user experience will benefit from the advantages CRM software provides:

• Comprehensive data organization: Having all the pertinent information about your customers, their accounts, and interactions, you won’t miss out on any revenue opportunities.
• Improved communications: Because every customer service representative or sales agent can access a client’s information, they can provide the same, consistently high level of support.
• Increased efficiency and automation: Resolve pain points for both customers and your employees by automating tedious tasks and ensuring no steps are skipped.
• Better sales performance and profitability: Quickly gauge the viability of prospects and improve conversion rates by identifying inefficiencies or weak points in the conversion funnel. Additionally, you can peruse existing customers’ account history to identify new opportunities.

Once you decide to incorporate a CRM solution into your business workflows, be sure to spend the time gauging each platform’s usability, support, and functionality, and how the components support your objectives. Gauge your technical resources to see if a self-hosted, open-source program or a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service system will be easy to afford, implement, configure, and maintain. Once everything is established, be prepared to reap the vast rewards of improved customer interactions!