Best CRM for Enterprise Without a Subscription
By reviewers' reckoning, the most complete CRM an enterprise can run without a licence bill is SuiteCRM, self-hosted under AGPLv3 with no per-user fees; its maker sells support separately, at £960 a year on top of £600 for managed hosting, only to those who want it. If your finance team would rather pay once than never, 1CRM sells on-premise licences outright at $405 per user for Professional, with source code in every edition.
Past those two, the eleven options split along two lines: the stack your team already runs, and how far the free edition goes before a paid tier takes over. Five are PHP applications. Odoo Community and Frappe CRM are Python, Axelor Open Suite is Java, Corteza is Go, and SplendidCRM is .NET on SQL Server. Some free editions are the whole product, as with SuiteCRM, CiviCRM and Frappe CRM; others stop at core records, at three users, or at a set of apps kept back for a paid edition.
Our picks
- A Salesforce-shaped CRM for nothing: SuiteCRM. Accounts, opportunities, quotes, campaigns, cases and a customer portal in one self-hosted PHP application, with no per-seat licence.
- Pay once and keep the licence: 1CRM. $405 per user one-time for Professional, source code included, with support and updates optional at $100 per user per year after the first year.
- A Windows and SQL Server shop: SplendidCRM. C# and ASP.NET with Outlook and Word plug-ins, and paid editions sold at $300, $480 or $960 per user one-time.
- Legal wants a permissive licence: Corteza. Apache 2.0, the least restrictive licence in the table, on a Go backend that ships as Docker containers.
- Members, donors and events: CiviCRM. Memberships, donations, pledges, events and mass mail are core objects, and nothing is held back for a paid tier.
At a glance
| Option | How you avoid a subscription | Licence | Built on | What it is | What the free version gives you | Paid edition or support |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free and open sourcesource | AGPLv3source | PHPsource | Standalone CRMsource | The complete CRM, self-hosted, with no per-user licence feessource | £960/yr Standard Support, on top of £600/yr managed hostingsource | |
| Free and open sourcesource | AGPLv3source | PHPsource | Standalone CRMsource | The whole self-hosted CRM, with no per-user feessource | $15 per user/month for EspoCRM Cloud Basic (minimum 3 users); self-hosting stays freesource | |
| Free and open sourcesource | LGPLv3source | Pythonsource | CRM inside a business suitesource | The Community edition; Enterprise adds proprietary apps and vendor supportsource | Odoo Enterprise, sold as a single per-user subscriptionsource | |
| Free, vendor licencesource | Vendor licence (source available)source | PHPsource | Standalone CRMsource | The full on-premise edition, which is a different product from Vtiger's free cloud tiersource | Vtiger's cloud editions, from $12 per user/monthsource | |
| Free and open sourcesource | OSL 3.0source | PHPsource | Standalone CRMsource | The full CRM application, installed as a Composer packagesource | ||
| Free and open sourcesource | AGPLv3source | PHPsource | Nonprofit & membership CRMsource | The complete CRM, hosted wherever you likesource | No licence fee; hosting and support are bought from CiviCRM partnerssource | |
| Free and open sourcesource | Apache 2.0source | Gosource | Low-code CRM platformsource | The whole platform, including the CRM and case-management appssource | No published price; Planet Crust sells support and development servicessource | |
| Free and open sourcesource | AGPLv3source | Javasource | CRM inside a business suitesource | Community: the open-source platform with the essential modules and community supportsource | Pro at €35 per user/month from ten users; Enterprise at €55source | |
| Free core, paid perpetual licencesource | AGPLv3source | .NETsource | Microsoft-stack CRMsource | Core CRM only: accounts, contacts and leads, without reporting or order managementsource | $300 per user one-time for on-premise Professional; $480 Enterprise, $960 Ultimatesource | |
| Free core, paid perpetual licencesource | Commercial licencesource | CRM inside a business suitesource | Startup: free on-premise for up to 3 users, branded and never updatedsource | $405 per user one-time for Professional, $585 for Enterprise; support and updates $100/user/yearsource | ||
| Free and open sourcesource | AGPLv3source | Pythonsource | Standalone CRMsource | The whole CRM, self-hosted, with no per-user feesource | Frappe Cloud hosting from $5 a month, priced per site rather than per usersource |
Free forever or a one-time licence
Eight of the eleven are free and open source. Vtiger CRM Open Source is free under Vtiger's own licence, which is based on the Mozilla Public License but is not OSI-approved. SplendidCRM and 1CRM are the only two that sell a perpetual licence, and both give away a limited free core first: SplendidCRM's covers accounts, contacts and leads without reporting or order management, and 1CRM's Startup edition caps you at three users, carries its branding, and never gets updates.
The paid column is not a price comparison, so don't sort it. SuiteCRM's figure is a support contract (£960 a year) on top of managed hosting (£600 a year). EspoCRM's is a hosted plan at $15 per user per month with a three-user minimum, while self-hosting stays free. Frappe CRM's cloud option starts at $5 a month and is priced per site, not per seat.
Where the free edition runs out
Some of these are free up to a point and then charge for the rest. Odoo Community is self-hostable with no licence fee and no user cap, but Odoo keeps some apps and its official support in Enterprise, a per-user subscription, so a feature you read about may not be in the free build. Axelor Open Suite's Community edition is a real product, and its Pro tier costs €35 per user per month from ten users, with Enterprise at €55.
EspoCRM's gap is narrower: the CRM itself is complete, but its reporting and advanced-pack features are paid extensions. For an enterprise that lives in reports, price those extensions before you count EspoCRM as free.
Copyleft, permissive or proprietary
Six rows are AGPLv3, including SuiteCRM, EspoCRM, CiviCRM and Frappe CRM, and OroCRM's OSL 3.0 is strong copyleft too. If your legal team resists that, Corteza's Apache 2.0 and Odoo Community's LGPLv3 are the more permissive choices. 1CRM is proprietary even though the source ships with it: you get the code with the licence, not an open-source grant.
The options in detail
SuiteCRM
SuiteCRM is the long-running open-source fork of SugarCRM, and the most Salesforce-shaped option on this list: accounts, opportunities, quotes, campaigns, cases and a customer portal, all in one self-hosted PHP application with no per-seat licence. It is run by SuiteCRM Ltd in the UK, which makes its money on hosting, implementation and the SuiteASSURED programme rather than on the software. Reviewers consistently call it the most feature-complete free CRM, and its scale (millions of downloads) means most integration questions have already been answered somewhere. The trade-off is that the classic SuiteCRM 7 interface looks its age, and the version 8 rewrite is still catching up feature by feature.
EspoCRM
EspoCRM is a lighter, faster-feeling alternative to the SugarCRM-descended CRMs, written from scratch in PHP with a clean single-page interface and a strong no-code layer: you add entities, fields, layouts, workflows and BPMN 2.0 processes from the admin UI rather than in code. The self-hosted edition is AGPLv3 and complete enough to run a sales team on, and the company sells a hosted plan and paid extension packs on top. It is the option most often picked by teams who found SuiteCRM heavy but still want full control of their data. The catch for larger deployments is that several enterprise-flavoured pieces, notably the reporting and advanced-pack features, are paid extensions rather than part of the free download.
Odoo Community
Odoo Community is the free, LGPLv3 half of the Odoo suite, and the CRM app is one module inside a much larger business system that also covers sales, inventory, accounting, manufacturing and a website builder. For an enterprise that wants CRM and operations on one database, nothing else here comes close to its breadth, and the Python codebase plus a huge third-party app store make it very extensible. The important caveat is the Community/Enterprise split: Odoo keeps a set of applications and the official support proprietary, so features you read about in a review may turn out to be Enterprise-only. Community is still fully self-hostable with no licence fee and no user cap.
Vtiger CRM Open Source
Vtiger's open-source edition is the on-premise descendant of the original vtiger project, and it remains one of the most downloaded CRMs ever published on SourceForge. You get sales, marketing, inventory and help-desk modules in a PHP application you install on your own server, with an extension marketplace built by Vtiger developers. Two things matter before committing: the code is under the Vtiger Public License, which is based on the Mozilla Public License rather than being an OSI-approved licence, and Vtiger is explicit that this on-premise build is not the same product as its cloud editions, so newer cloud features do not necessarily appear here.
OroCRM
OroCRM is the CRM half of the Oro platform, built in PHP on Symfony by the team that also makes OroCommerce, and it was designed from the start for B2B: multi-channel account hierarchies, sales territories and tight integration with an e-commerce catalogue. That makes it the strongest fit here for a distributor or manufacturer whose CRM has to sit next to an order system. It is genuinely open source under OSL 3.0 and the repository is actively maintained. Be aware that Oro's marketing has moved almost entirely to OroCommerce, so the CRM's own documentation and community are thinner than SuiteCRM's, and Oro does not publish a price for its commercial editions.
CiviCRM
CiviCRM is the constituent relationship manager that large non-profits, unions, associations and advocacy groups run instead of a sales CRM: memberships, donations, pledges, events, cases and mass mail are core objects rather than add-ons. It is AGPL 3 and installs either standalone or inside WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or Backdrop, which is why so many organisations already running one of those CMSes end up here. Nothing is held back for a paid tier, and there is a large ecosystem of partners who host and extend it. It is the wrong tool for a straight B2B pipeline, and its interface reflects its long history rather than a recent redesign.
Corteza
Corteza is a low-code platform with a CRM built on top of it, positioned deliberately as the Salesforce-shaped option for organisations that cannot use Salesforce: it mirrors many Salesforce standard objects and admin concepts, so the skills transfer. The backend is Go and it ships as Docker containers, which makes it the easiest of these to run on modern container infrastructure and the least like a traditional LAMP install. Apache 2.0 is also the most permissive licence in this table, with none of the AGPL copyleft questions that legal teams tend to raise. It is maintained by Planet Crust, and the community around it is much smaller than SuiteCRM's or Odoo's, so expect to lean on the vendor for serious work.
Axelor Open Suite
Axelor Open Suite is a French open-source ERP whose CRM is one module beside sales, finance, HR, projects, stock and production, all built on a Java framework with a drag-and-drop studio for customising screens and business rules. For a European enterprise this is often the shortlist entry that also answers the e-invoicing and data-sovereignty questions, and the AGPLv3 Community edition is a real product rather than a demo. The paid Pro and Enterprise offers add a commercial licence, maintained updates and support, starting at ten users. Java plus Gradle also means the operations profile is closer to an internal enterprise application than to a PHP web app.
SplendidCRM
SplendidCRM is the option for a Microsoft shop: C# and ASP.NET on Windows Server with SQL Server behind it, Outlook and Word plug-ins, and an Azure deployment path. The Community edition is AGPLv3 and free but deliberately limited to core CRM (accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities), so anything involving reporting, order management, workflow or the offline client means buying an edition. What makes it unusual here is that those editions are sold as a one-time per-user price with optional maintenance after the first year, rather than a subscription, which is exactly what a buyer avoiding recurring licences is looking for. It is a small vendor, so weigh the support relationship accordingly.
1CRM
1CRM is a Canadian all-in-one system that bundles CRM with quotes, invoices, orders, inventory, projects and a customer portal, and it is the clearest perpetual-licence answer in this table: you buy on-premise user licences outright and keep them, with support and updates optional after the first year. Every edition ships with source code, so it can be modified in house. There is also a free on-premise Startup edition, but it caps you at three users, carries 1CRM branding on outgoing documents and cannot be updated, so it is a trial rather than a deployment. Note that this is proprietary software: the source comes with the licence, not an open-source grant.
Frappe CRM
Frappe CRM is the newest option here: a fast, modern sales CRM built on the Frappe framework (Python and Vue) by the team behind ERPNext, and released under AGPLv3 with nothing held back. It is deliberately narrow, deals, calls, tasks and email rather than a full suite, which is why it feels quicker to use than the older PHP CRMs, and it can sit next to ERPNext if you later want the ERP side. Self-hosting is a Docker or bench install on your own server. Frappe Cloud is the paid alternative and is priced per site and per compute rather than per user, so it does not reintroduce a per-seat subscription. The main risk is maturity: it is a young product with a smaller feature surface than SuiteCRM or Odoo.
How we researched this
We read "without a subscription" as no recurring per-seat licence: self-hosted open source, a free vendor-licensed download, or a licence bought outright once. That rules out every CRM whose only way in is a monthly seat price, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, Pipedrive and Dynamics 365 online, and it rules out the free rung of a subscription product. YetiForce didn't make it: its licence requires registering with the producer and limits commercial deployment. Dolibarr, ERPNext and Krayin are free but built for smaller businesses first, and Odoo and Axelor already cover the suite route. OroCRM and Corteza were both checked for recent code activity before they went in.
Oro publishes no price for a commercial OroCRM edition, and no 1CRM page we could reach states its stack, so those two cells stay empty. Odoo's paid cell names the Enterprise subscription without a figure, because the figure on its pricing page shifts with a monthly or yearly toggle. Edition lines shift between releases, so before you plan a rollout, compare the feature list of the exact edition you'd deploy against the modules your teams need.