SHSelfHostIndex

CRM & Business Apps

Run sales, invoicing, and operations with self-hosted alternatives to Salesforce and HubSpot.

49 self-hosted apps · 209 comparisons

All crm & business apps apps

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 449 words

This category spans a wider range than any other in the directory: at one end, Monica (25,109 stars) exists to remind you of your friends' birthdays; at the other, ERPNext wants 4 GB of RAM to run your accounting, inventory, manufacturing, and payroll. Both are labelled "CRM." Before comparing apps, decide how much of your business you intend to move inside one piece of software, because that number determines everything else.

How to choose between a CRM and a full ERP

The scope axis comes first. A sales team that needs contacts, pipelines, and deal tracking needs a CRM and nothing more — buying an ERP for that job means paying an ERP's operating costs to use 10% of it. A company that wants invoicing, stock, and accounts in one system is genuinely shopping for ERP, and should plan for the corresponding ops budget: Twenty needs 2 GB of RAM, Odoo 2 GB, ERPNext 4 GB, and the latter two are rated Hard to deploy for good reason. The second axis is the open-core question. Odoo Community (53,948 stars) is polished and modular, and its best features sit in the paid Enterprise edition — go in expecting that boundary. ERPNext is the fully open-source counterweight: everything under GPL-3.0, nothing held back, more assembly required.

Where to start

Twenty (55,542 stars) is the modern CRM pick — a clean, keyboard-driven, customizable alternative to Salesforce that a startup can deploy in a day, with the caveat that it's young and some features are still maturing. Dolibarr (7,535 stars, around since 2003) is the small-business workhorse: CRM plus invoicing plus inventory, modules you switch on as needed, easy to install, dated to look at, and utterly proven. ERPNext is where you go when you mean it — a genuine all-in-one ERP with an active community, best deployed with Docker and a maintenance window on the calendar.

The classic mistake here is buying scope you won't use

Self-hosters repeatedly deploy Odoo or ERPNext "to grow into," then abandon them because a two-person business can't feed an ERP. The data entry an ERP demands only pays off with volume and staff. Start with the smallest tool that covers today's need; every app here has an API and export paths, so trading up later is a migration, not a rewrite.

For a first deployment, pick Twenty if the job is sales, and Dolibarr if the job is running a small company end to end. Between the two defaults, Twenty — most people who think they need an ERP need a CRM and an invoicing app.

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CRM & Business Apps comparisons

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