For the iCON project, I have recently researched 4 popular Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms available on the market today. We want to use a CRM system to help us keep track of iCON event attendance and generate reports related to iCON events. An ideal CRM for our needs would be able to provide membership management, event management, online registration and send out event information emails to iCON members.
Below are brief profiles of the platforms we are considering:
1. Tribalhut
Tribalhut CRM is a DotNetNuke module that is mainly for developers, sales reps/teams, small business, marketing professionals, designers and service companies to help them manage their contacts, track deals, collaborate on projects, send out email notifications, organize tasks, keep detailed notes and manage documents. Tribalhut CRM also provides a dashboard to display the latest activity and upcoming tasks.
2. Civicrm
CiviCrm is a web-based CRM which can be integrated with WordPress, Drupal or Joomla. It is specifically designed for the needs of non-profit and other civic-sector organizations. It provides contact management, fundraising, event management, member management, mass e-mail marketing, peer-to-peer campaigns and case management.
3. SplendidCRM
SplendidCRM is an open source CRM developed using Microsoft .Net framework and is available in both free and commercial versions. It has three editions (Community, Professional and Enterprise). All editions allow social media import, iCloud synchronization and HTML5 offline Client (which allows CRM users to selectively cache records for offline use). Professional and Enterprise editions contain more reports, browser extensions, Google apps synchronization, HTML5 charts and mail-merge with Word plug-in. Enterprise edition allows Intuit QuickBooks synchronization.
4. SugarCRM
SugarCRM is open source CRM developed using PHP that is available in both free and commercial versions. It has five editions (Community, Professional, Corporate, Enterprise and Ultimate). All editions allow for sales force automation, marketing automation, support automation and customer service automation. Except community edition, all editions contain team security, workflow, products and reports.
See the chart below for a more detailed look at the features of these four CRMs
*Note: REST API use HTTP requests to post data (create and/or update), read data (make queries) and delete data.