Open-source alternatives to HubSpot

HubSpot's trick is that it starts cheap. There's a free plan for up to two users, and Sales Hub Starter begins at $7 per seat a month, which is a discount for new customers. It's a great way to get your whole sales process into one place.

The bill arrives when you outgrow it. Sales Hub Professional starts at $90 per seat a month, plus a one-off $1,500 onboarding fee. For a sales team of five, that's $5,400 a year, or $6,900 in year one. Enterprise starts at $150 a seat, with a $3,500 fee. By then, moving is a big job, and HubSpot knows that.

A CRM holds your customer list, and your customer list is arguably the most valuable data your business has. So owning it outright, with no per-seat fees, is an appealing idea. Here are the three options I'd look at.

Twenty

Twenty is the newcomer, and it's the one that gets people excited. It looks like a modern app rather than a 2010s business system, and it's very actively developed.

• A clean, modern interface that doesn't feel like a chore to open.
• Custom objects and fields, without code, so it can fit how you work.
• Pipeline boards, where you drag deals between stages.
• Email and calendar sync with Google and Microsoft accounts, linked to your records.
• No-code workflows, triggered by things like new records, which can send emails or update data.
• An API, plus a framework for developers building apps on top.

Self-hosting is reasonably simple. The official Docker Compose setup runs a server, a worker, PostgreSQL and Redis, there's a one-line install script, and the docs say you need at least 2 GB of memory.

The licence has a few wrinkles. Most of it is AGPL-3.0, but files marked as Enterprise are under a commercial licence, and some packages are MIT. The hosted plans put single sign-on, row-level permissions and audit logs on the $39 Organization tier. I couldn't confirm from Twenty's own material exactly which of those you get when self-hosting for free, so check before you rely on them.

It's also young, and that's the main risk. Releases come thick and fast. I'd want to read release notes and take a backup before each upgrade.

EspoCRM

EspoCRM is the sensible one. It's been around for years, it's light, and it does the everyday job of a small business CRM without any fuss.

• Leads, contacts, accounts and opportunities, the core of any sales process.
• Email sync, sending from the CRM, and reusable templates.
• Calendar, with meetings, calls and tasks.
• Mass email for simple campaigns.
• A customer portal for self-service.
• Entity Manager, for adding your own record types, fields and relationships without code.
• An API for connecting other systems.

It's a PHP application, so it's easy to host. It needs PHP 8.3 to 8.5, and MySQL 8, MariaDB 10.6 or later, or PostgreSQL 15. There's no Elasticsearch or similar to look after, and the docs suggest a modest PHP memory limit of 256 MB.

The catch is the Advanced Pack. Reports, workflows and business process management are in that paid add-on, not the free core, and if you self-host you buy the extensions you want. I couldn't find a published price without going through the checkout, so get one before you commit. If you want proper reporting, you'll want it.

There's also a hosted version, from £11 per user a month with a minimum of three users, and that includes all the extensions.

SuiteCRM

SuiteCRM is the big one. It grew out of SugarCRM, and it covers sales, marketing and customer service in one system.

• Sales automation, with leads, opportunities and quotes.
• Marketing, with target lists and campaigns.
• Case management for customer service, with a self-service portal.
• Workflows and reports in the core, with nothing extra to buy. That's its big advantage over EspoCRM.

It's a much bigger application. SuiteCRM 8.10 needs PHP 8.2 to 8.4, Apache 2.4 and MariaDB or MySQL. There's more to configure and more to go wrong during an upgrade. For a five-person team, it's probably more than you need. For a team of thirty with complicated processes, it could be a good fit.

The UK angle

HubSpot is fine for most small firms. It's a well-run company with proper data processing terms, and being US-owned isn't a reason to leave on its own.

That said, a CRM is packed with personal data: names, emails, phone numbers, notes about conversations. Under UK GDPR, you're responsible for that wherever it's stored, including answering requests from people who ask to see or delete their data. A self-hosted CRM on a UK server gives you a simple answer on where it lives, and you have the database itself, which makes those requests easier to handle.

If you send marketing email from the CRM, the UK's rules on consent apply whichever tool you use. The main benefit here is really ownership. If you leave, your data leaves with you, in full, with no export limits to worry about.

Honest drawbacks

• No all-in-one marketing suite. HubSpot joins up forms, landing pages, email marketing and sales. None of these replaces all of that, and Twenty's own product pages don't describe marketing email at all.
• Fewer integrations. HubSpot has a huge marketplace. Here, you're looking at APIs and some custom work.
• Migration takes real effort. Contacts are easy. Deal history, emails and automations are not.
• EspoCRM's best bits are paid, and Twenty's fast pace means more upgrades to watch.
• Adoption is the real risk. The best CRM is the one your sales team will use, and HubSpot is very easy to like.
• Someone has to run it, including backups, because this is your most valuable data.

Which one?

My pick is EspoCRM. It's mature, light to run and covers what most small businesses need from a CRM. The main drawback is that reports and workflows sit in the paid Advanced Pack, so budget for it.

• Most small businesses: EspoCRM.
• Want something modern, comfortable with a young project: Twenty.
• Bigger team needing workflows and reports without add-ons: SuiteCRM.

If none of these quite fits the way you sell, the team at Dev Partners can build a custom CRM around your own process, or extend one of these.

Sources

• Twenty on GitHub
• Twenty licence
• Twenty product overview
• Twenty Docker Compose guide
• Twenty pricing
• EspoCRM on GitHub
• EspoCRM features
• EspoCRM server configuration
• EspoCRM Advanced Pack
• EspoCRM pricing
• SuiteCRM-Core on GitHub
• SuiteCRM features
• SuiteCRM compatibility matrix
• HubSpot Sales Hub pricing