A review of Espo from the CEO of SuiteCRM

[esforim]

I thought SuiteCRM came from vTiger fork as well. I didn't like to use EspoCRM because of paid extension and opt to stay with YetiForce. Only moved because YetiForce server requirement.

Totally agree with Marketing or public media support, EspoCRM is rarely mentioned in Blog post and the like.

That an interesting history note you have about Calendar code.

[item]

Hello,

first to know.. suitecrm is a fork of sugarcrm.
sugarcrm was opensource until 6.5 (+-) and then decide to stop opensource.

but what nobody or a little person know, Yuri give "Calendar" extension/code to opensource sugarcrm..
i think if remember in version before 6 or end of 5. Yuri have contribuate to sugarcrm and then his fork.

I know, i have try to contact him at this periode for make some extension for us .. but...
Then i retreive him with espoCRM.. and i see ..what's incredible crm fondation he do !

I can say too.. espoCRM in belgium is not know .. we have actually in ours entreprise a audit consultant with big reputation, he don't know espoCRM.. he say "SaleForce/Odoo/MicrosoftCrm.. and soo" .. incredible (or maybe because % comission !)

Regards

[danieldids]

I've been using EspoCRM since 2014 (at least) and I also tried all the other open source ones cited (Suite, Vtiger, even Odoo).

I was impressed from the very first moment. Ease of use, ease of customization, ease of fixing things (server side) when shit goes bad - this last feature is, in fact, the most important for me (system administrator). I've never had a single problem upgrading or migrating an installation.

Web interface is blazing fast.

I think what EspoCRM lacks is... marketing. :-) Very few people in Brazil (where I live) knows about it.

About documentation: yeah, it was not really comprehensive a while ago, but EspoCRM is somewhat so easy to work with that this is not an issue at all for me.

I've never tried any of the paid packs (but soon i will), so i can't comment on that.

[esforim]

Aren't all CRM boasting those few first point? Stable, Fast, Easy, etc.

For me, EspoCRM does something that doesn't do. One of the reason was the Phone Number and Email field, secondly it was server compatibility was my reason for using EspoCRM. Sure EspoCRM has it flaws but it something that can be slowly fixed.

Yes, Forum is one of the highlight of EspoCRM for me also. Other place don't really have a community to get back to get information, but the forum also an indication of how inactive the community is as well. Perhaps only a small amount of people use the forum but there may be countable numbers of Users and server and business that use EspoCRM. I see many guests on the forum Online section so that is a good sign that there are lurker out there who rely on information posted on the forum. Hopefully they are not just bunch of bots or crawler.

[sdesp]

During the search for CRM I did take a look, I think at all software mentioned. Now using EspoCRM for more then a year. I have to say, I'm impressed. Maybe for new users it could be nice to specific:

• It's stable & reliable
• It's fast.
• We find it easy to use.
• There are upgrades
• Forum is active

Challenges are:

• Installation (but you could use the hosted/cloud feature)
• Documentation

And if you run into a problem. Then the forum is of great help. And if that doesn't work, you can still rely on support directly from EspoCRM. We love the fact that we can run the software ourselves.

[roma]

Once you decide to switch over to using EspoCRM, you can face the challenges concerning transferring of your customer data. Here is the useful link for those that would like to learn the nuances of exporting data from SuiteCRM & importing data into Espo - https://www.espocrm.com/blog/export-...rt-to-espocrm/

[dangnhatminh]

i think espocrm is best choice. Thanks espocrm

[iddk]

I played a lot with SuiteCRM and now I love espoCRM -- Migration was no Problem

[bruce185]

Espo has it but it's 2 clicks away. You have to click the hamburger menu in the top right hand corner and then click 'last viewed'... In Suite, the last viewed records are always shown...

[bandtank]

SuiteCRM is great and it's definitely got the broadest feature set... the let down for me is that is doesn't integrate well with email, which is one of Espo's strengths... It also doesn't have the social chat/follow feature and I find Espo to run much faster...

I also think Espo looks great and the recent SuiteP theme isn't really my thing...

Espo's missing a 'last viewed' section for sure but otherwise I think the project is heading in a very positive direction...

FYI - Espo now has this feature.

[ortuo]

I made a comment to his review, but it was never publish. I guess we know why.

[Clintre]

Like many others, I have tried SuiteCRM and other similar solutions. None really did what I needed without a lot of modifications to fit our business needs. That is understandable and to be fair we needed to make plenty of changes to Espo to fit our process. The major difference with Espo and the others was that Espo was extremely easy to change to our needs, without any coding while the others were extremely difficult.

The power of Espo is the flexibility without coding capabilities. If one of my team needs something changed in fields, flow, forms, etc. it is a few clicks in a few minutes to accomplish.

Now at the same time there are things I agree with on the review.

1. Documentation is weak
2. Feature request generally go without much comments back from Espo, makes it feel like no one is listening.
3. The community is small and not extremely active. However I think that could change if we had more engagement from the devs or they had a blog about what is happening.

In any case, Espo has been the first CRM that I have been able to truly bend to our needs and process without having to get down to customizing a lot of code.

[greenstones]

I tested SuiteCRM and now I'm here

Exactly. I installed SuiteCRM and it had a runaway log process that ate my entire disk. SuiteCRM has now been deleted.

EspoCRM has been rock solid, and I received an answer to a support query within hours. 7 days later and I still have had no response to a support query on the SuiteCRM forum about a non-functioning calendar (which I note others have had problems with)....

The only thing I find a bit problematic with EspoCRM is getting IMAP to sync all folders in an account correctly, but on the other hand EspoCRM doesn't claim to be a fully-functional IMAP client. We're using it to fetch incoming email from the INBOX of a dedicated account and then process it, and that seems to work fine.

[jtttt]

I tested SuiteCRM and now I'm here

[rorosa]

I was testing Zurmo, Vtiger, SuiteCRM and EspoCRM at the same time for 2 weeks, also I try Odoo but I discard it soon, because it was too much than I wanted.

I'm using more than succesfully osTicket for Cases, and EspoCRM for Sales and Emailing. Both are the best for engineer bussinesmen with demostrable reputation.

EsporCRM team, good job and keep feeling big ones unconfortable!