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.