Krayin

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 807 words

Pick Krayin when the deciding factor is "we are a PHP shop and want a CRM we can read and extend in Laravel". Pick something else when the deciding factor is feature depth. That is the whole verdict. Krayin is a clean, MIT-licensed, 23,712-star CRM from Webkul, the company behind the Bagisto e-commerce platform, and it covers leads, pipelines, contacts, quotes and email well enough for a small sales team on 1 GB of RAM. It will not out-feature EspoCRM, and it is not trying to.

What Webkul built and why the Laravel part matters

Krayin has been public since 2020 and follows the same pattern Webkul used for Bagisto: a modular Laravel application where each feature is a package you can override, plus a marketplace of paid extensions from the vendor. If your team already ships Laravel, that architecture is a gift. Adding a custom field type, a new pipeline stage rule, or an integration with an internal system is ordinary Laravel work with Eloquent models and Blade or Vue views, not reverse-engineering a proprietary plugin API. If your team does not write PHP, the same architecture is neutral at best; the stock features are what you get.

The feature set in one paragraph

Leads with a kanban pipeline you can rename and reorder. Persons and organisations as contact records, with activities (calls, meetings, notes, files) attached to each. Products and quotes, so a lead can carry line items and generate a PDF. Email integration over IMAP and SMTP so replies land on the lead record rather than in someone's inbox. Web forms you embed on a site to create leads directly. Workflow automations of the "when lead stage changes, send this email" kind. A REST API and role-based permissions for a multi-user team. Recent releases also bundle AI-assisted features for summarising leads and drafting mail, which need an external model key and are optional. It is a real CRM, not a contact list with ambitions.

Installation is a Laravel deployment, not a docker pull

The Medium difficulty rating is earned by the install path, not the day-to-day use. Krayin is a standard Laravel application: PHP 8.x, Composer, a MySQL or MariaDB database, and the usual php artisan steps to migrate and seed. The repository ships a Docker setup that wraps that, but you are still configuring .env, a database container, and a web server, and you should read the compose file rather than trust it blindly. Two points that catch people. First, the seeded admin account uses a documented default login (at last check [email protected] with password admin123), and the very first thing you do after the dashboard loads is change it, before you even look at a pipeline. Second, the queue and scheduler matter: email fetching and workflow automations run through Laravel's scheduler and queue workers, so a deployment with no cron entry and no worker looks fine and silently does nothing for automations. Add the scheduler cron and a queue worker process, and put the whole thing behind Caddy for TLS.

Budget 1 GB of RAM for the app and database together; a 2-vCPU VPS handles a 10-person sales team without noticing.

Where it loses to EspoCRM and Twenty

The listed cons are "smaller community" and "fewer features than big CRMs", and both are accurate. EspoCRM has a decade more polish, a much larger extension ecosystem, and a layout and entity manager that lets non-developers reshape the data model from the UI. For a team that will never open the code, EspoCRM is simply the safer default in the CRM and ERP category. Twenty is the pick if what you actually want is a Notion-flavoured, keyboard-driven, modern-looking CRM and you are happy with a younger, faster-moving project. Krayin sits between them: more conventional than Twenty, less deep than EspoCRM, and the only one of the three where extending it feels like normal Laravel work.

If you are coming off HubSpot, be honest about what you used there. Krayin replaces the CRM. It does not replace HubSpot's marketing automation, landing pages, or reporting suite, and pretending otherwise is how these migrations stall.

What I'd do

If your developers write Laravel, deploy Krayin: MySQL and the app in Docker, scheduler cron and a queue worker configured before anyone logs in, default admin password changed in the first minute, nightly database dump to off-box storage. Expect to customise it within a month, and enjoy that the customisation is plain PHP. If nobody on the team writes PHP, skip it and deploy EspoCRM instead; you will get more out of the box and never miss the extensibility you would not have used.