Contact Management Systems are a need of every firm, organization, and business. The contact management systems allow users to keep track of and maintain contact information of employees, customers, suppliers, prospects, leads, etc. in a centralized hub. Contact Management Systems allow users to seamlessly manage sales and marketing records. The key element in any business is their contacts. Retaining the right contacts and correct leads can eventually either lift or collapse any business or any venture. With the right Contact Management System, the users along with managing and maintaining contacts and their details, can also track their sales, schedule meeting appointments, generate performance reports, manage leads, and do a lot more. Contact Management Systems allow enhancing the procedures of customer retention and acquisition. In this article, we provide a list of the contact management software that is free and open-source as well. Open-source software enhances the capabilities and functionalities of software with the help of an active community or software development or support team.
EspoCRM
Espo CRM was released in 2014 as an open-source and cross-platform compatible CRM web application. The tool allows users to view, enter, and evaluate all the user contacts associated with one’s business or organization. EspoCRM seamlessly takes care of information and details related to either people, projects, companies or opportunities, from a single, most handy, and user-friendly platform. Over 50,000 companies and organizations from 163 countries around the globe utilize the services of the amazing platform that offers its enhanced list of features and functionalities for free along with zero limitations on database size.
EspoCRM is completely customizable, includes enhanced workflow toolsets and provides BPM, offers extensive security features with commendable measures for securing customers’ data, ability to monitor sales and performance, efficient reporting and analytics capabilities, organized dashboard, manage meeting appointments, track and manage emails, activity stream functionality, enhanced customer support services available round the clock, etc.
Get it now from https://www.espocrm.com/download/
Zurmo
Zurmo is an open-source and cross-platform compatible CRM application by EspoCRM. Like EspoCRM, the tool also offers an enhanced set of features and capabilities. Zurmo provides an ideal combination of sales product, marketing automation, and project management platform. The tool is also called and known as the most user-friendly and gamified solution that attracts users and makes them get hooked to the software in no time. Offering an easy platform with an attractive interface requires absolutely no training and thus improves user performance and overall improves business and teams’ productivity along with boosting motivations.
Zurmo offers a view detailing complete contact details of user’s customers, clientele, or leads, seamlessly takes care of appointments, meetings, tasks, notes, etc., all from one platform, keep track of sales pipeline and manage potential leads and opportunities, incorporates a drag and drop tool to manage workflows, a feature that efficiently creates, schedules, sends and manages email marketing campaigns, handle and manage product catalogs, fully customizable fields, dashboards, labels, layouts, etc., seamless integration with different Restful APIs, etc.
Get it now from https://sourceforge.net/projects/zurmo/files/latest/download
SuiteCRM
SuiteCRM is known and acclaimed as one of the most efficient contacts management software that is free, open-source, and cross-platform compatible all at the same time. Suite CRM is a highly powerful, customizable, and user-friendly platform that is used by hundreds across the globe. Suite CRM offers hundreds of plugins, integrations, and extensions, thereby making the already feature-packed and functionalities enhanced platform more extensible in terms of adding advanced capabilities. Suite CRM is also termed as the closest replacement of the Salesforce tool as is free, open-source, and offers much-required flexibility, freedom, and yet a user-friendly experience.
Suite CRM helps a business or an organization grow substantially with the help of an extensive list of features offered by the platform, such as providing users a central vault for safekeeping all customer data, offering a fully customizable platform capable to coincide with user’s business or any organization’s unique set of requirements, capable of forming integrations with REST APIs, enhanced and most active community and the list goes on.
Get it now from https://suitecrm.com/download/
OwnCloud
One of the most sophisticated and efficient platforms that are widely used for managing, creating, uploading, safekeeping, and maintaining documents, also offers its users an extensive and elaborated platform for managing contacts. The open-source platform, ownCloud offers its CardDav that seamlessly manages and maintains user’s contacts along with their details and also takes care of scheduling appointments and meetings, etc. The platform also provides CalDav for calendars Ampache for streaming media all within one platform.
OwnCloud offers different packages for teams and enterprises where each package comes equipped with a list of enhanced and advanced features against a price. However, the basic version that serves one user account only comes feature-equipped too and is absolutely free of cost.
Get the basic version now from https://owncloud.com/download-server/
GNOME Contacts
Developers at the GNOME Project have made sure to provide every facility and utility to its users, all free and open-source at the same time. From clocks to calendars and contact management tools, GNOME come equipped with a solution for almost every problem.
The GNOME contacts assure organized and easily managed and maintained list of user’s contacts and related information. It allows users to create, modify, delete, and connect pieces of information about user’s contacts. Contacts allow a centralized platform that seamlessly combines the details from all sources added and linked by a user in the GNOME which is then managed and maintained as a list of contacts. It also allows users to integrate different address books of users from different online sources and automatically form contacts linkages from various online sources.
Get it now from https://pkgs.org/download/gnome-contacts
Kontact
Kontact is one of the easiest and most straightforward contact management services providers. Launched under KDE, the platform is free and open-source. The application does not come equipped with a list of enhanced project management features. Rather, the platform offers a straightforward approach is mainly targeting the aspects solely related to managing, emailing, and keeping track of user’s contacts along with their contacts’ details.
Kontact incorporates a list of features required for managing user contacts and other related leads. The features include imports and exports cards allowing transferring contacts to and from different devices in vCard format, DBUS to interface with other applications, ability to communicate with KMail and Kopete, fully customize categories and fields, computerized formatting of names, filtering and search features, functionality to query an LDAP database containing personal information and the list goes on.
Get it now from https://kontact.kde.org/download.html
Closing Remarks
Managing and maintaining different contacts along with their details can become a hassle if done manually. Contact Management Systems and tools seamlessly automate this process for users who then do not have to worry about any important leads, contacts that they might have written on some paper or a sticky note and stored them somewhere in their briefcases. Contact Management tools take care of that for you. In this article, we have provided a list of such contact managing tools that are most acclaimed and provide optimal performance in terms of storing, maintaining, and managing user’s contacts and address books. EspoCRM, Zurmo, SuiteCRM, and ownCloud all offer an extensive platform that along with providing a platform for managing contacts also provides other different project management features as well. Whereas, if a user requires a rather simple and straightforward tool for only managing contacts, then GNOME contacts and Kontact are the best choices.
Karim Buzdar holds a degree in telecommunication engineering and holds several sysadmin certifications including CCNA RS, SCP, and ACE. As an IT engineer and technical author, he writes for various websites.
