Arguably, some companies have already tried to build an open source CRM and take on Salesforce, such as SugarCRM. While SugarCRM has been quite successful, SugarCRM never reached the success of Salesforce or HubSpot. The company also stopped releasing its Community Edition in 2018.
“They didn’t see the point of open source at the time, it was more of a constraint. I think that’s because there was no GitHub, there was no community,” Malfait said.
The world of open source has changed, and CRMs, too. These platforms are no longer designed for sales teams exclusively. Many companies use their CRM as the main repository for customer data and build products on top of that data.