I’ve been building Interdatum CRM primarily for small service businesses, and figured [r/CRM](r/CRM) might have some useful feedback.
The idea is pretty simple: a lot of small businesses don’t need a $50–100/user/month CRM. They need somewhere to manage leads and customers, send estimates/invoices, schedule work, keep everything organized, and automate repetitive stuff.

So I built Interdatum with a pretty substantial free tier:
Contact and lead management
Estimates and invoicing
Scheduling / job management
Customer portal
Forms
Email campaigns
Documents and photos
Workflow automations
Basic reporting

There are also integrated payments and phone/SMS features that have usage-based costs, but the goal is to keep the actual CRM useful without requiring a monthly subscription.

I’ve been using it for service businesses myself, so a lot of development has basically come from “this is annoying, I’m going to automate it.”
It’s still relatively new and I’m actively building it. I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from people here who have used or administered a lot of CRMs—especially what you think is missing or what would prevent you from actually using it.

Happy to answer technical/product questions too.

Twenty is an open source CRM with about 55k stars on Github.
Their website mentions the features and how good it is.

I am also interested to know what it can't do and its shortcomings.
If you tried it and didn't like it, why and what turned you off from using it.

Curious how other small agencies handle this.

Once you have several leads and deals going at the same time, I feel like follow-ups are one of the easiest things to lose track of.

You might know a deal needs attention next week, but then a few other things happen and suddenly you're trying to remember who you were supposed to contact and when.

I've been working on a Notion CRM for small agencies specifically around this kind of workflow, and one thing I found useful was having follow-ups tied directly to the deal rather than keeping a separate to-do list.

I also added a simple deal health indicator so it's easier to spot things that are coming up, late, or still on track.

Curious what other agency owners are doing for this — dedicated CRM, Notion, spreadsheets, or just calendar reminders?

What actually works for you?

Hi I have been a Bigin user for a few months but I think I would better using the main ZOHO platform. I've asked ZOHO if the migration is simple and will preserve deals/pipelines and of course they say yes but just wanted to check in if anyone has done this and how painless it was.

Hi! Im looking for CRMs built for teachers. I have a group of teachers and im looking for some *newly built* CRMs (so that features can be modified/developed) I would like to know what are my options price wise. Please let me know how likely is it to have something like this.

I'm aware that maybe i'm asking too much so no worries it some features are not possible.

As a teacher i want to

- schedule online (and offline) calls,

- have a calendar,

- track progress for ech student (not a classic 3 step lead conversion)

- organize students by classroom

- tag students by level and goal

- track payments manually

I would like parents to be able to

- login and see the progress grades of the student(s)

- see the payments related to the student(s)

Useful features would also be:

- online signup forms for each teacher

- admin view of the progress for students and teachers

- email automation

- mobile first interface (pwa)

- social login (Google, facebook)

- automation pipelines (AI can write the pipeline code)

- SaaS-like platform

If you have suggestions what CRM should also suppport please let me know, i am all about optimizing and automating the process.

Please write me in my DM if you have a CRM to advertise.

At first, I wanted to move our company to our own CRM; after that, I had a naive idea to sell it. On my way, I understood it was unrealistic. After all, I decided just to make it free for everybody. Literally, no paid plan. + DEMO page for those who want to look around

I'm 7-years exp CRM professional, so it is well designed, structured, and secured.

Here is what's under the hood

The CRM part:

• UX and backend structure similar to Pipedrive
• Multiple pipelines + stages, drag-and-drop Kanban board, and a configurable table view
• Contacts, companies, deals with a unified activity timeline; multi-email/phone with labels; custom fields on any entity
• Tasks/calls/emails, notes you can pin and expand, labels, global search, quick-add from anywhere
• Analytics: pipeline summary, conversion funnels, velocity, avg deal size, rotting deals, win-over-time, source attribution
• Outlook thread sync, smart BCC, file attachments, CSV import/export, (No Google-native sync because they want 1500$ for that, maybe someday)

The AI part (all on your own key and all can be turned off and hidden if you like old school):

• AI Overview — one click summarizes any record's situation + recommended next step, with sources, cached so it's instant next time
• AI Research agent — runs a live web search on a person/company and writes a cited research note straight onto the record
• Capture — paste an email, call transcript, chat or doc → AI pulls out the action items → tick them into tasks
• Lead scoring — editable weighted rubric + ICP keywords; the score is deterministic (same inputs = same number), the LLM only explains why
• Smart Filter — type "German SaaS deals over 10k closing this quarter" and it builds the actual filters
• Deal warmth tracked over time (see a deal heating up or cooling off, not just its stage), plus a Workspace Health audit
• You can edit the actual system prompts behind Overview and Research per workspace

Getting leads into it:

• Inbox triage — inbound emails ranked by urgency with stalled-thread detection
• Lead capture — a public web form + an email-to-lead address that both create new contacts from unknown senders
• Contact enrichment — bring your own FullEnrich key and hit "Find email / phone" on a contact

For the tinkerers:

• MCP server — point Claude (or any MCP client) at it and let the AI operate your CRM directly (~28 tools: search, update deals, move stages, create notes, score leads…)
• Outbound webhooks, scoped API keys, and a Pipedrive migration with a field-mapping wizard (resumable)
• White-label it: your own name, logo, even the browser-tab favicon. Accent colors + dark mode.

Security:

• Encryption everywhere- AES-256-GCM at rest for all keys and credentials, TLS/HTTPS in transit. - Passwords hashed with Argon2id (OWASP-recommended) — never recoverable.
• Strict multi-tenant isolation - one customer can never access another's data; role-based access (owner/admin/member).
• Session security -JWT with server-side revocation on logout plus brute-force rate limiting on login.
• API keys stored only as hashes (never plaintext), scoped, revocable, with per-workspace limits.
• All webhooks HMAC-signed and SSRF-protected.
• OWASP-aligned application security -SQL-injection-safe (parametrized ORM), schema-validated input, CSRF-safe (Bearer tokens, not cookies).
• EU data residency (GDPR-aligned) plus bring-your-own AI keys - your data and AI keys are never routed through us.

What's the catch?

The free is 5,000 contacts + 5,000 companies + 5,000 deals, unlimited team seats, 100 Mb storage per seat. So storage is the hamper.

But if you don't need to attach large files to deals, it doesn't matter.

It's also honestly a funnel for another product I make, so keeping this one free and good is the point. And if some company wants their own CRM, I can customise it and release the source code as you need (for $$$)

crm2crm - there is a DEMO w/o registration for those who want to look but don't want to register

P.S.

Would be great to get feedback about the Lead capture form from real businesses.

I've been thinking about a workflow state that seems simple but can hide two very different situations.

Suppose:

* customer submits an enquiry * business responds * customer answers qualification questions * customer seems ready to schedule * business asks for final confirmation * customer doesn't respond

The CRM now says:

**Waiting on customer**

But what happens operationally?

There seem to be two versions.

**Version 1: Active waiting**

We're waiting until a defined time.

If there's no response, a specific action happens.

Eventually there's also a defined stopping condition.

**Version 2: Passive waiting**

Nobody currently owns an action because technically the customer is supposed to respond.

The conversation stays there until someone remembers it—or doesn't.

I'm increasingly thinking every “waiting” state needs something like:

**Waiting for:** appointment confirmation
**Since:** Monday 2:15 PM
**Wake-up:** Tuesday 10 AM
**Next action:** SMS follow-up
**Owner:** front desk
**Stop condition:** defined by the business
**Closure reason:** recorded

Not because every lead needs endless follow-up.

Quite the opposite: an explicit stopping rule seems important so automation doesn't become annoying.

But there should be a deliberate difference between:

**“We decided to stop contacting this person.”**

and

**“Nobody remembered to contact them again.”**

For disclosure, I'm building Brrim in the customer communication/lead engagement space, so these workflow questions are directly influencing how I'm thinking about the product.

For people running sales or service teams:

**How does “waiting on customer” actually work in your system?**

Does it always have a follow-up date?

Does someone own it?

Or is it basically a parking lot that gets reviewed periodically?

Right now we are mid market moving up into true enterprise but lately we have been dealing with some issues. Every large deal turns into a mini project and there isn't a certain way to see this.

In crm, sales is tracking stages and commercials then cs is tracking onboarding, risk, and adoption somewhere else.

When the customer asks a simple question like where are we on everything we agreed it becomes a 3 person project, so i want to hear from you.. what are the best tools you ended up using to manage enterprise deals across sales cs and product without everything turning upside down?

Something that has actually held up once you have a few seven figure deals in flight at the same time.

I promise I did look in post history, but I'm new enough to all this that I don't even understand what a lot of the abbreviations people bring up mean.

I started recently for a company that has changed names and been acquired as a subsidiary of a larger company. We've been around for 30 years but been slowly modifying. So far we have

-Changed from a wordpress website to shopify

-Switched from Quickbooks Desktop to QBO

Our new overlords are really open to us growing and putting money towards it, but I want to do my research before I get too far down the line with what turns out to be not the right platform.

Right now we have 2022 Goldmine as our CRM (if you can call it that - it feels like a glorified email hub to me, and doesn't integrate with anything online)

We sell B2B mainly. 5,000-$25,000 equipment and the supplies for it along with tech support and installation. We only have 6 employees but hope to grow. Our main lead paths have been trade shows, and trade magazines, and drowning people with emails to the point everything probably goes to spam.

What I'd like to see in a CRM:

-Integration with QBO and Shopify (pretty sure most if not all offer this)

-Ability to gather leads from multiple online advertising sources in one place and (somehow) rank their value (Meta Business ads, LinkdIn, etc.) so we can figure out what is working and what isn't.

-It would be great if marketing campaigns for multiple platforms could also be generated from the same place.

-We have an email campaign running now via a marketing firm but I don't think it will be very successful, if only because we have absolutely no idea on how to rank and follow up on anything. We see that a percentage of people out of thousands clicked on our ad, but when we try to follow up with emails or phone calls it seems to go nowhere. It may not be the right marketing for our business model, but we are just getting started down this road.

-Ability to send out e-mail campaigns of our own.

-Easy to use interface (our salesmen are older people who may not be eager to embrace a new platform if it's not user friendly).

-Ideally it would be amazing to have a platform where eventually we can bring over contact and conversation history from Goldmine - but I know that might be a tall order.

I've done a discovery call only with ZOHO so far, and an initial one with Pipedrive with a followup tomorrow. I've seen a lot of Pipedrive advocates here, but I did ask someone who used it and they didn't like the interface but said they heard it changed recently. They can't directly migrate from goldmine, and exporting a .csv file of years of contacts with no help sounds like a nightmare. Zoho seems like a good contender, and I saw something about the Zoho One plan, that might be cheaper than paying for 5 separate seats. But something tells me to keep looking.

I think because of our large existing contact base (2000+), we would need a bigger platform than the Starter version of Hubspot can offer - and $7/user to $800 a month is just a huge jump and we can't afford. So I don't even want to look too much at Hubspot.

I saw some videos recommending OnePageCRM, but more and more recommendations keep cropping up. Too many to really look thoroughly into.

I promise I've been trying to do my due diligence, but I'm new to this job. I am not an expert but I can see we definitely need to choose a direction and start heading that way. If someone could point us in the right one that would be grand.

I spend a lot of time moving LinkedIn data into CRMs while building a tool that logs LinkedIn people and companies into these CRMs and takes info from CRM to deliver it into the Chrome sidebar for convenience of outreach, so I finally compared how the four big ones take information in and give it back out. Corrections welcome

One small thing first that still surprises me: HubSpot is the only one of the four that ships a native LinkedIn field out of the box, and even then only the LinkedIn Company Page on company records. Pipedrive, Zoho and Salesforce all expect you to create a custom field before you can store a profile URL at all. In 2026, with how much prospecting starts on LinkedIn, it is a little strange that storing the one link everyone works from is still a manual setup step in most CRMs.

How each one takes information in

1. HubSpot: properties have readable internal names and the API is friendly. Native dedupe is strong: contacts on email, companies on domain. LinkedIn URL is not a dedupe key unless you build it.
2. Salesforce: the most powerful ingest story. SOQL and SOSL for lookups, Bulk API for volume, and configurable Matching Rules plus Duplicate Rules. Great control, steeper setup.
3. Zoho CRM: API v2 and up, searchable by field API name with equals, starts with and contains operators. You can define your own duplicate check fields and upsert against them, which is handy.
4. Pipedrive: clean REST API, but custom fields are addressed by a 40 character hashed key rather than a readable name, which trips people up. Dedupe is lighter and leans on manual merge.

How each one gives information back out

1. Salesforce: richest read and event model. REST, streaming and platform events.
2. HubSpot: solid API, webhooks, and an associations model that makes contact to company to deal links easy to read.
3. Zoho: full read API, and outbound webhooks driven through workflow rules and functions.
4. Pipedrive: straightforward REST reads and webhooks. Easiest to get started, least opinionated. Need to mention, it's the only among 4 provides both API and OAuth connectors. So an individual user can connect tools independently (if allowed by org), while others have strict superadmin permission only to connect 3rd party software

Connections and ecosystem

1. Salesforce: AppExchange is the largest. Sales Navigator has an official widget, though the rivalry means it feels bolted on.
2. HubSpot: big marketplace, native LinkedIn Ads, and a Sales Navigator integration on some tiers.
3. Zoho: Zoho Marketplace plus everything inside Zoho One.
4. Pipedrive: Marketplace, LeadBooster, and heavy reliance on Zapier or Make for glue.

Full disclosure, I'm associated with Ln2crm.com (extension to run your CRM inside Li page), so I have stared at these APIs more than is healthy.

Many teams keep their CRM and call recordings in separate worlds. The CRM shows the stage, owner, and next task, while the recording contains the reasons a customer agreed, declined, or stopped replying. This creates a blind spot: a manager can see the outcome, but not where the conversation went off track.

Instead of trying to listen to every call, start with specific business losses. For example, a sales rep sends a proposal but does not schedule the next contact. Or an agent answers the customer correctly but never records the outcome. These problems become much easier to fix when they are connected to a CRM stage.

A practical starting framework has five groups of criteria.

1. Opening the conversation. Did the employee introduce themselves, confirm the purpose of the call, and create a clear context?

2. Understanding the need. Did they ask about the customer situation, timing, volume, and reason for the request?

3. Presenting the solution. Did they connect the proposal to the customer problem instead of listing features?

4. Agreeing on the next step. Is there a clear date, owner, and way to continue the conversation?

5. Closing and recording. Does the customer understand what happens next, and are the important CRM fields completed?

Each criterion should be observable, not based on a general impression. Instead of saying that a rep handled the call poorly, record the specific issue: the rep did not ask about the decision timeline, or did not agree on a date for the next contact. If a recording is available, the score should be supported by the exact moment in the conversation. Otherwise the review feels subjective.

You do not need to review every call. Five calls per employee per week can be enough to start. Add targeted reviews after a complaint, a lost deal, a sudden drop in conversion, or a long gap without a next step. This saves time and focuses attention on situations with the highest risk.

The review result should connect back to the CRM. If a proposal has no next step, that should appear not only in a quality report but also in the manager workflow as a task or an exception. Quality control is most useful when it changes the process rather than only producing a score.

The feedback loop matters too. Instead of saying that someone needs to handle objections better, show the relevant part of the call, explain what was missing, suggest an alternative phrasing, and review the next similar call. Feedback given several weeks later rarely changes behaviour.

I would also avoid making the average score the main goal. More useful measures are the share of calls with a scheduled next step, follow up after a proposal, conversion from inquiry to meeting, lost conversation reasons, and repeated complaints.

Finally, call reviews should improve the process and help people learn, not create constant pressure. The team should understand the criteria, recording access rules, and retention period in advance.

How do you connect call review findings with CRM stages and tasks? Which part of the process still stays manual in your team?

I’ve spent a lot of time around customer service and contact-center operations, and one problem kept coming up:

The CRM knows the customer.

The ticketing system knows the issue.

The contact-center platform knows the conversation.

QA listens to a small sample of interactions.

And management often discovers recurring customer problems only after they become big enough to appear in reports.

That was the thinking behind Quantara Flow AI, which I’m currently bringing to market.

Instead of treating CRM, customer service and AI as separate tools, the idea is to connect them into one operational layer:

• Customer and case management
• Voice & Chat AI
• AI-assisted agent replies
• 100% interaction QA instead of sampled QA
• Live issue/trend detection
• Automated Root Cause Analysis
• SOP-to-workflow automation
• Customer history and interaction context
• Automated escalation and operational workflows

The part I find most interesting isn't actually the chatbot.

It's what happens after the conversation.

For example:

Customer contacts you → AI understands the intent → case is created/updated → interaction is QA'd automatically → recurring issue is detected across other customers → probable root cause is identified → the relevant team can be alerted or a workflow triggered.

Essentially:

Detect → Understand → Act.

I'm curious what people here think.

When you're choosing a CRM/customer-service platform today, do you still prefer separate best-of-breed tools connected through integrations, or would you rather have CRM + service operations + AI orchestration in one platform?

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Quantara Flow AI, so obviously I have a point of view here. But I'm genuinely interested in how CRM users see this evolving.

Happy to offer free perks in exchange of building case studies, connect with me!

Hi,

How do I find contracts for integration development between Ceasar and ERP. Integration already exists need add additional features.

Looking for resources who can help.

Reading through the Jobber, Salesforce, and Odoo/Zoho threads that have been posted here recently, there's a pattern that keeps showing up and almost nobody names it directly: the CRM swap rarely fixes the actual leak.

The leak is usually one of two things, and neither shows up on a feature comparison chart.

1. Ownership, not speed. Most businesses think their problem is "we're too slow to respond." It's actually "nobody is specifically responsible for making sure nothing sits unanswered." Speed only breaks under load, when the person who usually handles it is busy. A CRM can automate a reminder, but it can't assign ownership if the business never assigned it in the first place. Swapping platforms without fixing that just moves the same gap into a nicer UI.

2. Quotes that go quiet. Almost every field-service and B2B CRM will track a quote once it's sent. Very few of them force a follow-up if the customer goes silent. That silence is where the money actually disappears, not in the CRM you picked. I've seen businesses discover they were losing 15-20% of sent quotes purely to "we sent it and moved on," and no platform swap fixed that until someone made follow-up a required step instead of an optional one.

The businesses in these threads spending months evaluating Salesforce vs HubSpot vs Zoho vs Odoo are usually optimizing the wrong variable. The real question before any of that: what's your workflow when a lead goes quiet, and whose job is it to notice? If you can't answer that in one sentence, the new platform will just make the same gap look more expensive.

Curious if others here have seen the same thing, does a platform migration actually fix this, or does the underlying process problem just follow you to the new tool?

Does anyone have experience with both dynamics 365 CRM and salesforce CRM?

I’m still a novice when it comes to customizing and updating the CRM but I’m finding dynamics not the most intuitive system. And I struggle to make small changes in what we have at the moment. So I wonder if Salesforce is a bit more intuitive or will have the same hurdles. Or is it a skill issue?

Good evening from PA! I’m looking for a CRM that is relatively inexpensive as the one others on my team use is over $100 a month and as a newer agent I’m not quite yet in a position to be able to put that out due to other life circumstances. I understand you get what you pay for- and I do intend as I build my sales and acquire more states to use the same software they do. But at least something for now. I work captive, and with policy holder leads. Thanks!

I recently started my home service business with my partner (5-6 months), we are just 2, and we’re at the point of needing a platform, and was on the lookout for one. Every time I would search online for a platform it seems like Jobber is always insane with the amount of ads, so I made a trial and a demo and I’m just not happy at all with that price. And the sales rep we did the demo with was quite arrogant when we had a few questions.

Do you guys have any alternatives?

A few alternatives I landed on were Housecallpro, but the Trustpilot reviews seem a bit scary.

We’re also looking into CIientility and are happy with the price and the features for the price, and Workiz, however their price seems to be hidden.

Thank you for any suggestions.

We're a healthcare booking platform in Vancouver, about to roll out appointment reminders and two‑factor auth via SMS (plan to release in 2 weeks). Never done this before, and I'm drowning in provider options – Twilio, Vonage etc, you name it without me.

I don't want to pick something that's cheap at sign stage but becomes a nightmare later with deliverability issues or terrible support when something breaks.

For ppl who've been sending SMS at scale – what's been rock‑solid for you? Anything you wish you'd known before signing up? Hidden fees, integration headaches, regional quirks with phone codes? I'd rather learn from your scars than make my own haha. Cheers!

I've worked with enterprise CRM systems for years and keep seeing the same trade-off: simple systems eventually become limiting, while powerful systems become expensive and complicated to configure.

I'm exploring a different architecture.

Instead of building another fixed CRM, the underlying platform consists of configurable objects, fields, relationships, pages, permissions, automations and reports.

Sales would just be the first module. Support, Projects, Planning, etc. can extend the same underlying customer and business data.

The AI doesn't generate software or arbitrary code. It can only configure capabilities that already exist in the platform.

So you could say:

"Add contract value to companies, put it next to ARR, and create a follow-up when an opportunity stays in Proposal for 7 days."

The system creates a plan → shows exactly what will change → validates it → you approve it.

The part I'm most interested in is migration. Rather than asking a company to make a big-bang switch, the idea is to analyze the existing CRM, map its objects/fields/processes, preview the new setup and eventually allow teams/modules to migrate progressively.

I've attached a visual explaining the concept.

I'm specifically NOT looking for "cool idea" feedback. I'd like to know: what would make you refuse to switch to something like this? What would I have to prove before you'd trust it with your real business data? And which part of this sounds less useful than I think it is?

Something small businesses transitioning to CRM often struggle with is the timing of the implementation process. Getting the timing right is probably just as important as choosing the right CRM for your team, but it’s often overlooked.

Most small businesses follow one of two approaches here: There’s the deliberate approach, where warning signs are identified, a stable implementation window is established, and a plan is deployed to ensure team members actually use the system after implementation. Then, there’s the reactive approach, where things chug along regardless until something breaks completely, and they are forced to carry out the implementation during the chaos.

Going the reactive route has teams importing data into a live pipeline and undergoing training when they already have too much on their plates. These teams also often end up configuring the system for their current emergency situation, instead of setting it up for long-term growth, all of which typically leads to terrible adoption rates.

The trick is to know when a window of opportunity is coming so that you can employ the deliberate approach. There are some common signals to look out for here, which include:

• You need to ask two to three people to determine the status of a single deal
• It’s taking longer than usual for new hires to get up to speed
• Your sales cycles are getting long, even though your team is growing
• You’re gathering more data than ever, but forecasting still feels like a guessing game

If these signals start surfacing regularly, you have an opening to plan and implement your migration from your existing system (spreadsheets or data organization tool) to a fully fledged CRM.

It may not feel like the ideal time to take on a significant system switch, because teams are likely at their most stretched at this point, but it’s the perfect time. The important thing is to see it as a strategic change and not just a reaction to the chaos. It’s a crucial moment of growth marked by an upgrade in your organization’s processes, and it requires careful planning and deliberate implementation.

What has your experience been? Did your business wait too long, or was the timing right for CRM implementation?