How Are You Extending EspoCRM Beyond Standard Use Cases?

[Difusleas]

I'm curious how others in the community are using EspoCRM in ways that go beyond traditional CRM functions. Have you built any custom entities, integrated with unusual platforms, or repurposed it for non-sales workflows (e.g., project management, HR, support systems)?

Would love to hear about your creative or unexpected implementations—especially if they’ve helped your team or business in unique ways.

[shalmaxb]

If you want, you could call espoCRM also a (nearly) non coding software platform. You can use it for many apps, which come to your mind, mostly when you need a database.
I am not a developer, but with espoCRM I already have built:

App for webdesign freelancer to administrate customers and projects, as well including the whole bookkeeping part (Invoice etc.)
App for inventary of a client, who deals with antique design furniture and objects
App to administrate a music workshop including participants, teachers and all the necessary stuff
Database to compare softwares of a certain niche
My main app is a catalogue raisonée (a database for artwork) for artists, active or not

Some of these are connected to Wordpress and I can populate Wordpress pages directly from espoCRM.
In some I have integrated the possibility to generate Newsletters.

espoCRM is a great software and has an active community as well as some very dedicated third party developer.

[yuri]

We use for project management internally (the paid extension). And are happier than it was when we used Asana. More due to much quicker page loading and having anything in one place.

[macistda]

You can extend functions of EspoCRM already with some (paid) extensions very widely.
Workflows and BPM is high flexible configurable - nearly without programing skills.

We use EspoCRM for the following things. We are a software company with round about 25 employees:
- Managing Customer Orders / Projects with Meetings (we developed / extended the Outlook Office365 interface for "real" Calendar integration with invitations and more)
- Fill in the required Informations for Outlook Meeting automaticaly
- Auto-Sync with Outlook / Office365 (also the own development) via Exchange Online API and EspoAPI (Meetings, Tasks, Contacts)
- Vacation with a view new fields and reports.
- Calls and Callbacks for employees / phone
- E-Mail communication with customers for our projects
- Offers and Opportunities
- Managing Marketing indicators for mailing preparation for events and webinars
- Documents (e.g. Maintenance contracts, specifications, requirements, templates and more)
- Interface via n8n (something like Node-Red) for automations for Workreports/PDF documents created at the iPad that are saved via WebDAV in Nextcloud then transferred to EspoCRM with with assignment read from the pdf
- Interface via n8n to Jira for development department managing the tasks
- Added Gantt - but now there is a real Espo Extension meanwhile.
- Organization for Software Versions, ammount and more the customers have

ToDos:
- Integration / Interface from Gitlab to better inform customers if the reported error has been resolved.
- Integration / Interface with ERP via API to transfer the customer orders from offers and opportunities.
- Integration / Interface with Ticketsystem (Zammad).
- Maybe the new Extensions 3CX could be interesting, as same as project management (those did not exist when we started with EspoCRM)

Extensions we currently use:
- Advanced Pack
- Sales Pack
- Outlook Integration (needed for OAuth2 for Office365)
- TCPDF engine because Dompdf has destroyed all our templates when installed.

Contras:
- Pricing model for smaller companies that still want to use multiple extensions is disadvantageous.
- The official Outlook extension was not enough features for our purposes
- On large screens, the number of columns could be expanded to provide more information. Currently, everything is just getting bigger.
- The headings in tables and reports should be multi-line, because it is often not possible to recognize the name of the column
- The space, for example in documents with the navigation tree, is not well used
- There's far too little space for tables in the half-dialogs. For example, when sending emails and wanting to search documents, if the file name is a bit longer, you won't be able to see the difference.
- No Layout Editor for E-Mail Entity. We have changed directly within JSON Files but that's not Update-Safe.
- Design of additional Relations for E-Mail Entity is missing (Layout-Editor). Designed also within JSON Files, same as above, not Update-Safe.

Maybe some of the contra things already work, but if, I don't know :-)

In conclusion, I consider EspoCRM to be a very good software, especially for small and medium-sized companies.

Disclaimer: I am not an employee of EspoCRM. I do not receive any compensation from EspoCRM.