SuiteCRMvs
SugarCRM
SugarCRM: The commercial product SuiteCRM forked from, if you want a vendor supported roadmap and will pay per seat
SuiteCRM
Open source fork of SugarCRM with no per user licence fee, sold as hosting and support
As of 31 August 2026, SuiteCRM has a free plan and paid plans start at £50/month. The GPL fork created when SugarCRM withdrew its community edition. Softwr lists it under CRM. SuiteCRM is made by SalesAgility, available on Web, Linux, Self-hosted, iOS.
Overview
What SuiteCRM does
SuiteCRM is a fork of SugarCRM Community Edition, created by SalesAgility after SugarCRM stopped releasing an open source edition. It provides accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, quotes, invoices, contracts, cases, a campaign and email marketing module, workflow automation, reporting and a studio for building custom modules and fields without writing code. The distinction is entirely commercial. There are no per user licensing fees at all, so a two hundred person sales organisation and a five person one pay the same zero for the software. What SalesAgility sells instead is managed hosting from around fifty pounds a month, standard support at roughly one thousand two hundred pounds a year for ten hours, quick start implementation from about two and a half thousand pounds, and SuiteASSURED from about three and a half thousand pounds a year, which adds warranty, indemnification and legal protections that open source normally lacks. For an organisation with many light-touch CRM users, the seat maths against Salesforce or HubSpot is dramatic. Buyers are mid-sized organisations with in-house IT, public sector bodies with data residency constraints, and companies with large user counts of occasional CRM users. The trade-off is dated interface conventions inherited from SugarCRM, a much smaller integration marketplace, and the fact that every hour of configuration is an hour someone has to be paid for.
What people use it for
- An organisation with two hundred occasional CRM users where per seat pricing from Salesforce or HubSpot would dominate the budget
- A public sector body or regulated firm that must host customer data on infrastructure it controls
- A company that needs custom modules modelling its own objects and wants to build them in Studio rather than pay for platform licences
- A business that wants open source economics but whose procurement requires a warranty, which SuiteASSURED supplies
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 SuiteCRM.
- The interface still carries SugarCRM conventions from over a decade ago, and sales teams used to modern CRMs frequently resist adoption, which is the most common reason SuiteCRM projects fail rather than any technical limit.
- Zero licence fee does not mean zero cost: hosting, ten hours of annual support and a quick start implementation together run into thousands of pounds before anyone has configured a pipeline.
- The integration marketplace is small compared with Salesforce or HubSpot, so common connections to marketing, telephony and finance tools are often paid third party add-ons or custom builds.
- Upgrades between major versions can break customisations made outside Studio, so heavily customised instances tend to lag behind current releases and accumulate security debt.
- Native email marketing and campaign functionality is basic next to a dedicated tool, so most deployments end up paying for a separate marketing platform and syncing it, undoing part of the cost saving.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of SuiteCRM
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.
- SuiteCRMvsZoho CRM
Zoho CRM: A cheap hosted CRM with a much larger app ecosystem if self-hosting is not a requirement
- SuiteCRMvsVtiger
Vtiger: Another open source lineage CRM with a stronger hosted offering and a more modern interface
Pricing
What SuiteCRM costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Self-hosted
Free
- GPL licensed with no per user fee at any user count
- All core CRM modules included
- You provide hosting, upgrades and support
- Community forums and knowledge base only
Managed hosting
£50 /mo
- Hosting, security patching, updates and monitoring
- Still no per user licence fee
- Support purchased separately
- Suited to teams with no internal IT
Standard support
£1,200 /yr
- Ten support hours per year
- Discount available when bought with managed hosting
- Does not include implementation work
SuiteASSURED
£3,350 /yr
- Warranty and legal indemnification over the open source code
- Priority support and security assurances
- Aimed at organisations whose procurement rules block unwarranted open source
- Quick Start implementation quoted separately from around 2,520 GBP
Capabilities
Features
Studio module builder
Custom modules, fields and relationships created through the interface
Workflow engine
Condition and action automation across records without code
Opportunity and quote management
Pipeline, quotes, contracts and invoices in the core product
Case management
Support ticketing with a customer self-service portal
Campaign module
Email campaigns, target lists and response tracking built in
Reporting engine
Custom reports and scheduled report delivery
Security groups
Role and group based record access for large user populations
REST API
Version 8 API for integration with external systems
Self-hosting
Full control of data location, which matters for public sector procurement
SuiteASSURED
Commercial warranty and legal indemnity layered over the open source code
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 SuiteCRM really free?
The software is, at any user count. SalesAgility charges for managed hosting from about 50 GBP per month, support from about 1,200 GBP per year and SuiteASSURED from about 3,350 GBP per year.
How does it relate to SugarCRM?
It is a fork of SugarCRM Community Edition, created after SugarCRM discontinued its open source release.
Are there per user fees?
No. This is the central commercial argument for it, particularly for organisations with many occasional users.
What is SuiteASSURED?
A paid subscription that adds warranty, indemnification and legal protections on top of the open source licence, for buyers whose procurement rules block unwarranted software.
Keep looking
Where to go from SuiteCRM
- SuiteCRM alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- SuiteCRM pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- SuiteCRM badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All CRM softwareThe full category
- Best CRM softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best CRM software for
Compare SuiteCRM with
- SugarCRM
- Vtiger
- Zoho CRM
- Krayin
- EspoCRM
- Twenty
- Kylas
- Solid Performers
- HubSpot
- Pipedrive
- Freshsales
- Salesforce
- Apptivo
- Cloze
- Corefactors AI CRM
- Daylite
- Bigin
- EspoCRM
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for SuiteCRM, 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 SuiteCRM
SuiteCRM alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
SuiteCRM pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare SuiteCRM
Put it head to head with anything we hold
SuiteCRM badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
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