Salesforce alternative
Stop hiring consultants to change your CRM.
Salesforce can model anything, once someone certified has built it. Every change after that is a ticket, a partner, or a week. The Open CRM takes a plain-English description and proposes the change.
Where Salesforce Sales Cloud costs you
- Implementation is a project. Enterprise is $175 a seat before the partner engagement that actually configures it. For a 20-person team the first year is frequently more implementation than licence.
- Changes need an admin. Adding a field, a stage, or a follow-up rule is real work in Setup. Teams stop asking, and the CRM slowly stops matching how they sell.
- Locked in by the effort you put in. The more you customize, the harder it is to leave. That is the design.
Salesforce Sales Cloud vs The Open CRM
| Salesforce Sales Cloud | The Open CRM | |
|---|---|---|
| Per-seat price (annual list) | Starter $25, Pro $100, Enterprise $175, Unlimited $350 | $15 Starter / $39 Pro per seat, or $0 self-hosted |
| Implementation | Usually a partner engagement, quoted separately | Describe how you sell; the builder proposes stages, fields, a rule and a view. You approve, it applies |
| Changing a field, stage or rule | Admin in Setup, or a partner | Ask Copilot; it proposes, you approve. Or edit in Settings |
| Custom objects and depth | Practically unlimited. Nothing here matches Salesforce for sheer modelling depth | Custom fields on companies, contacts and deals; pipelines per deal type; line items. Not custom objects |
| Automation | Flow. Extremely capable, and a skill to learn | Trigger rules (stage entry, inactivity, N days before or after any date field), plus sandboxed extensions |
| AI | Agentforce, priced per user or per conversation on top | Chat copilot with confirm-first actions. Every plan includes a monthly allowance of AI requests per user (50 / 500 / 5,000), then usage is metered, or bring your own Anthropic key at no markup. 14-day AI trial on every new workspace |
| Reporting | Deep, and the reason many teams stay | Dashboards, a custom report builder and weighted forecasting. Good for a sales team, not a BI tool |
| SSO and provisioning | Included on Enterprise | TOTP 2FA on every tier; OIDC SSO and SCIM exist but are enabled on request, not self-serve |
| Source code and self-hosting | Closed | Open source, AGPL-3.0. Fork it, self-host it, take your data with you |
| Switching in | Report export to CSV | CSV import with HubSpot and Salesforce column presets and stage translation |
Where this is not a fit
If you have a Salesforce admin, custom objects, and a team of hundreds, stay. This is for the 10-100 person team that is paying Salesforce prices for a pipeline nobody dares change.
Switching in: import your Salesforce export as CSV; the HubSpot and Pipedrive importers map the standard fields for you.
Compare
- HubSpot alternative for teams that just need the CRM
- Pipedrive alternative with more room to grow
- Zoho CRM alternative that is one tool, not fifty
- Turn your spreadsheet into a real CRM
- Custom CRM without building a custom CRM
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The Open CRM · Pricing · CRM decision checklist · Source on GitHub (AGPL-3.0) · Terms · Privacy