Best open source CRM for freelancers

EspoCRM

EspoCRM is the most conventional sales CRM on this list: contacts, accounts, deals, support cases with a built-in customer portal, and email campaigns, all in one app rather than a suite. Its admin tools let you add your own entities, fields and workflows without writing code, and the project publishes an official Docker image that sets up the app, NGINX and MySQL together, which makes the self-hosted route unusually painless. The awkward part for a freelancer is the hosted plan: EspoCRM's cloud is billed with a three-user minimum on its cheapest tier, so running it yourself is the cheaper route until you have a team.

SuiteCRM

SuiteCRM is the heavyweight here: a full sales, marketing and service CRM that includes quotations, aimed at people who want something close to a Salesforce-scale feature set without the licence. It runs on standard Apache, PHP and MySQL, so ordinary web hosting can take it, and the makers sell managed hosting and support rather than per-user licences, which means you get the whole platform whichever route you choose. The trade-off for one person is that breadth: a freelancer will use a fraction of its modules and still carry the setup and upkeep of all of them.

Odoo CRM

Odoo's CRM is one app inside a much larger open source business suite, and it is the only tool here whose hosted version is genuinely free with no time limit: one app, unlimited users, on Odoo's own servers. The pipeline is a drag-and-drop kanban and incoming email lands on the record automatically, and if you later want invoicing, accounting or a website they are separate apps in the same system rather than another tool. Two catches: adding a second app moves you onto the paid per-user tier, and the Community edition you self-host is the open source half, with the Enterprise-only modules held back.

Twenty

Twenty is the most modern-feeling CRM here, built for technical people who would rather shape the data model than accept someone else's: custom objects, fields and views from settings, no-code workflows, and code extensions on top for anything further. It self-hosts with Docker Compose and the hosted version is per seat. It is also the option most clearly aimed at teams: a freelancer gets a fast, well-designed CRM, but pays per seat for hosting and takes on a young, fast-moving project if they run it themselves. Note the licence is AGPLv3 for most of the code, with some files under a separate commercial licence.

Frappe CRM

Frappe CRM is a clean, opinionated sales CRM from the team behind ERPNext, and it has the friendliest hosted price on this list: the plan is billed per site rather than per seat, so adding people costs nothing. Custom fields and tables are point-and-click and automation is written as small Python scripts, and it connects to ERPNext if you later want invoicing and accounting. It is a younger product than SuiteCRM or Odoo, so there is less third-party material around it, and self-hosting means running the Frappe stack with Docker rather than dropping files on a web host.

Monica

Monica is a personal CRM rather than a sales one: it is built to remember the people in your life, what they told you and what you meant to follow up on. For a freelancer whose pipeline is really a network of past clients, referrers and contacts, that framing fits better than it first sounds, and the pricing follows it: one flat hosted subscription with no per-contact or per-seat charge, or self-host with Docker or ordinary PHP hosting. What it deliberately does not have is the sales machinery: the project states outright that it is built for relationships, not pipelines, so there are no deals, quotes or invoices.

Dolibarr

Dolibarr is an ERP and CRM in one package, and it names freelancers as an intended audience on its own front page. For a solo business that matters: the same install that tracks leads and contacts also issues quotes and invoices, handles recurring billing, generates the PDFs and records payments, which is usually the second tool a freelancer ends up buying. Modules are switched on and off as you need them, and it runs on ordinary PHP hosting. The interface shows its age next to Twenty or Frappe CRM, and enabling too many modules is the quickest way to make it feel heavy.

Krayin

Krayin is a Laravel CRM from Webkul and the only option here under the permissive MIT licence, which matters if you want to build something on top of it and keep your changes to yourself. It covers the everyday ground of leads, contacts, quotes and activities, and installs with a single Composer command onto the kind of PHP hosting a freelancer is likely to already have. One thing to know before you rely on the licence: Webkul's own cloud hosting page calls the project AGPL, while the repository's LICENSE file and composer.json both say MIT. Their managed hosting is priced per server rather than per user, but the plans are quoted through sales rather than published.

Corteza

Corteza is not really a CRM out of the box: it is a low-code platform written in Go that ships a CRM among the applications you can build and reshape on it. Pick it when the standard CRM shape is wrong for the work you do and you would rather define your own objects, forms and automation, and when you want a licence permissive enough to sell what you build without publishing your changes. The cost is real: everything else on this list gives you a working CRM on day one, and Corteza gives you the toolkit to make one. I could not find a hosted Corteza plan sold by the maintainers today, so plan on running it yourself in Docker.