CiviCRMvs
Salsa CRM
Salsa CRM: Hosted alternative for advocacy and fundraising organisations that do not want to run infrastructure
CiviCRM
Open source constituent relationship management for nonprofits, with no per contact or per donation fee
As of 31 August 2026, CiviCRM is free to use. A self hosted CRM for charities, membership bodies and advocacy groups, integrated with Drupal, WordPress, Joomla and Backdrop. Softwr lists it under Nonprofits. CiviCRM is available on Web, Linux, Self-hosted.
Overview
What CiviCRM does
CiviCRM is an open source CRM released under the AGPL and maintained by the CiviCRM core team with a network of paid implementation partners. It handles contacts, contributions, memberships, events, cases, mail and campaign management, and it runs as an extension of a content management system rather than as a hosted service, which is why so many of its users are organisations that already run a Drupal or WordPress site. The economics are the reason to consider it. Every commercial nonprofit CRM charges either per contact, per user or per donation, and each of those meters compounds against an organisation whose entire purpose is moving money to a cause. CiviCRM charges none of them. A charity holding four hundred thousand contacts pays the same licence fee as one holding four hundred, which is zero, and the cost sits instead in hosting, upgrades and whatever implementation partner you retain. That inverts the normal curve: CiviCRM is expensive to start, because configuration is real work, and cheap at scale, where per contact products become punishing. The buyer is an organisation with either in house technical capacity or a long term relationship with a specialist partner, and with data volumes or requirements that make metered pricing intolerable. The trade off is ownership of the maintenance burden. Nobody applies your security patches, tests your major version upgrades or fixes a broken payment processor extension at midnight unless you are paying them to, and organisations that adopt CiviCRM without budgeting for that support end up on an unpatched version they are afraid to upgrade.
What people use it for
- A membership organisation with a large contact file that refuses to pay a per contact meter
- An advocacy group needing to hold constituent data on infrastructure it controls
- A charity already running Drupal or WordPress that wants CRM inside the same stack
- An organisation with unusual data requirements that no hosted product will build for it
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about CiviCRM.
- Nobody maintains it for you, so security patches and major version upgrades are your operational responsibility and organisations that skip them end up stranded on an old release.
- The interface and configuration model are dated compared with hosted competitors, and staff turnover is expensive when the next fundraiser has to be trained on it from scratch.
- Extension quality is inconsistent, so a payment processor or integration that works on one version can break on the next with no vendor obligation to fix it.
- Total cost of ownership is genuinely low only at scale, and a five person charity often pays more to a partner for setup and support than a hosted product would have charged outright.
- Implementation partners hold the practical knowledge of your configuration, so switching partners can be as disruptive as switching products despite the software being free.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of CiviCRM
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- CiviCRMvsEveryAction
EveryAction: Better for campaigning organisations that need advocacy, digital and fundraising integrated and supported
- CiviCRMvsDonorPerfect
DonorPerfect: Simpler hosted donor database for organisations without technical capacity
Pricing
What CiviCRM costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
CiviCRM
Free
- No licence fee, no per contact charge and no percentage of donations
- Costs are hosting, implementation partner time and upgrade work
- Paid hosting and support available from partners at their own rates
- Full source under the AGPL, so the data and the deployment are yours
Capabilities
Features
Contribution and pledge tracking
Records gifts, recurring contributions and pledges with receipting
Membership management
Renewal cycles, tiered membership types and automated renewal notices
Events and registration
Paid and free event registration with participant records tied to contacts
Case management
Structured cases with activities and timelines for service delivery teams
CMS integration
Runs inside Drupal, WordPress, Joomla or Backdrop with shared user accounts
Extension framework
Community and commercial extensions add processors, reports and integrations
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Is CiviCRM really free?
The software is, with no licence, per contact or per donation charge. Hosting, implementation and support are real costs and are where the budget goes.
Do we need a developer?
You need technical capacity, either in house or a retained partner. Treating it as a hosted product without support is the common failure mode.
Where does it win against commercial CRMs?
At scale. A large contact file or high donation volume that would cost tens of thousands a year in metered fees costs nothing in licence here.
Can it be hosted for us?
Yes, several partners offer managed CiviCRM hosting, which removes the upgrade burden and reintroduces a monthly fee.
Keep looking
Where to go from CiviCRM
- CiviCRM alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- CiviCRM pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- CiviCRM badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Nonprofits softwareThe full category
- Best Nonprofits softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Nonprofits software for
Compare CiviCRM with
- DonorPerfect
- Salsa CRM
- EveryAction
- Tendenci
- CharityEngine
- Keela
- Sumac
- Bloomerang
- NeonCRM
- Virtuous
- Blackbaud Raiser's Edge
- Network for Good
- Fundraise Up
- Get Connected
- Give Lively
- GiveSmart
- Google Nonprofit Tools
- InitLive
Other Nonprofits software
Nonprofit CRM with its own in-house payment processing rather than a third-party gateway
Pricing on request12 researched notesNonprofit CRM and fundraising platform with Canadian tax receipting built in
Pricing on request12 researched notesModular nonprofit CRM that pairs donor management with client case management
Pricing on request12 researched notesDonation checkout layer that replaces the giving form on an existing nonprofit website
12 researched notesFundraising software given free to nonprofits, funded by its founders rather than by fees
Free plan12 researched notesMobile bidding and event fundraising for charity auctions and galas
Pricing on request12 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for CiviCRM, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on CiviCRM
CiviCRM alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
CiviCRM pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare CiviCRM
Put it head to head with anything we hold
CiviCRM badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
Best Nonprofits software alternatives
Offline-first case management and mobile data collection for frontline health and development programmes
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The rolled-up parent of EveryAction, Apricot, CyberGrants and Network for Good, sold as three product lines
quote
Grants management for foundations and corporate givers inside the Blackbaud ecosystem
quoteOpen-source association management system for nonprofits
Open source, with paid hosting available
Nonprofit CRM with its own in-house payment processing rather than a third-party gateway
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Funder and nonprofit data subscriptions from the organisation formed by Foundation Center and GuideStar
Per user per month by tier