CRM you rent versus a CRM you run

A CRM is the record of who the customer is and what was promised. Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Pipedrive and Zoho CRM rent that record back to you by the seat. The owned equivalents we will actually deploy are SuiteCRM and EspoCRM, both AGPL-3.0, and the CRM inside ERPNext, which is GPL-3.0.

What is rented, and what is owned?

The rented products differ in packaging. The thing you do not own is the same: the database, the workflow, and the right to keep running when the contract ends. SuiteCRM and EspoCRM are one licence across the application. Twenty's main application is AGPL-3.0, and some files in that repository are under a commercial licence, so we do not use it when the client needs the whole tree under one grant.

What does the open-source CRM not replace?

It does not replace a marketplace of prebuilt industry apps, and it does not replace a vendor's success team. A process that only exists as a Salesforce managed package has to be rebuilt or dropped. That rebuild is the work, and it is quoted as a build, not waved through as a migration checkbox.

When should the subscription stay?

Keep the subscription when a regulated integration only exists as a vendor app, or when nobody will own the server. A CRM without an operator becomes a second, worse, copy of the spreadsheet it replaced.

What do we hand over?

We select the system, deploy it on infrastructure you control, connect it to the tools you keep, and write the runbook so your own team can operate it. Support after handover is optional. The rest of the map is in software you can stop renting; the engagement behind it is open-source business systems.