SuiteCRM

[girish]

Currently, we are a bit tied with Cloudron 3.3. We will get this out immediately after.

[Benoit]

Thanks Girish. take your time.

[darkben]

hi, @girish do you think you can add SuiteCRM in Cloudron soon ? Thanks !

[marcusquinn]

Any more thoughts on this?

I'm looking at the Mautic integrations and this is the only reasonable FOSS options I can see (SugarCRM integrations should work as that's what it used to be).

Or any other CRM recommendations welcome. Maybe Odoo or ERPNext would cover this need?

EspoCRM seems to have a big leap in costs for some of the paid features, which might be a bit much for some users.

[girish]

Last we tried it, SugarCRM is a real pain to package The module system does not like symlinks and thus makes it tricky to upgrade. That said, we will do whatever is required on platform side to get popular apps...

[marcusquinn]

@girish Fair enough. Last time I tested it, it was SugarCRM and it was pretty flexible because the admin made almost everything customisable — but I haven't tested since, so couldn't say if it's "the best" FOSS CRM. I think it will work well enough for most though, and does have that long history so a few other apps do offer integration with it.

Although, every popular app you have is another community of users that are self-hosting that app that will then find the advantages of Cloudron consolidation and standardisation of dev-ops & sys admin.

[marcusquinn]

• https://suitecrm.com/sugarcrm-loses-and-open-source-wins/

[andreasdueren]

@girish I'm trying to set up LDAP with SuiteCRM in a LAMP stack here but can't get it to work somehow. Are you still using this setup?

[girish]

@andreasdueren I haven't tried this in ages (since I posted it). What error are you getting ?

[andreasdueren]

@girish Unfortunately it doesn’t have a test button and won’t show me log data so I’m just opening a new inkognito window to try out the login and I can’t really troubleshoot.

I’m probably entering some incorrect setup information but I don’t know which one…

[marcusquinn]

FWIW I gave SuiteCRM a thorough test, and recommend EspoCRM in every way for speed, customising and scaling.

[andreasdueren]

@marcusquinn Hmm Wasn't a fan so far, Guess I'll give it another try as well

[robw]

+1 / bump

It would be WONDERFUL to have SuiteCRM on Cloudron, particularly when integrated with automatic updates. It's an app worth coming to Cloudron to get, and would certainly solve some big hosting headaches for us.

FWIW I don't think EspoCRM and SuiteCRM are directly comparable...

EspoCRM is ~$850 - $1,100 USD per installation per year to match anything like SuiteCRM's built-in base feature set for company usage, and then SuiteCRM goes further. And SuiteCRM's features are generally more advanced and flexible - especially standard reporting and dashboards/panel configurations. The huge community and large marketplace of third party add-ons is also important for some companies, whereas EspoCRM doesn't seem to encourage third party apps at all (though I know there are some).

On the other hand, for light touch needs EspoCRM is fast (SuiteCRM's UI can be slow), simple (SuiteCRM feels like it needs an engineer to operate at times if you want to do more with it), easy to start with and keep going, and includes some nice modern UI components like kanbans and dynamic forms that prior SuiteCRM versions didn't have or are otherwise tricky to configure.

We started with EspoCRM on Cloudron and moved to (manually) self hosted SuiteCRM for ourselves and our clients when we ran into EspoCRM's rigid design, super light documentation, and feature pay walls.

(As a relevant side note, we trialled Univention Corporate Server as an alternative to Cloudron specifically so we could better automate SuiteCRM hosting right alongside other apps we use including Rocket.Chat, Open Project, Wekan, Phabricator, Jitsi. But for us, UCS wasn't quite right. The SuiteCRM updates were lagging a long way behind the current version, and although UCS is a great system for single-company-per-server use, we experienced extra management overhead to run it versus Cloudron, and couldn't see a natural way to run the same app more than once on a server. So bringing SuiteCRM to Cloudron would close that gap for our needs in particular, and settle the debate conclusively.)

I'm no SuiteCRM zealot, mind you. Personally I like the feeling of EspoCRM out of the box more. I'd be happiest if we could combine the best of these two apps into something in between.

So I certainly think SuiteCRM and EspoCRM offer different advantages to different audiences, and would complement rather than distract from each other on Cloudron.

[marcusquinn]

@robw My experience was the opposite. I don't think you need any of the paid Espo stuff - although it is certainly good to support developers. SuiteCRM still looks like a legacy interface, and slow. If you haven't got into Espo Entity Manager, then you're missing out on some rapid capability. Only thing I can see SuiteCRM doing is showing that Espo is faster and easier.

Rocket Chat I don't recommend any more, much prefer Nextcloud Talk.

Open Project is good, but Espo can do everything that OP can.

Phabricator is abandonware.

Jitsi is great, but I think their public service is just fine for most.

UCS is the only free Linux alternative to Active Directory I know of, so useful for that. Clunky though.

Going back to Espo, I paid for all their add-ons but don't really need or use any of them. Get into Entity Manager and you can do everything already with that.

DM me and I'll share a link to what we've done with it. I think you'll see why you couldn't get anywhere near the capability with SuiteCRM.