Customer relationship management platforms for tracking leads, managing sales pipelines, and nurturing client relationships. All available with one-click installation on 365i web hosting.
Dolibarr is a free, open-source software suite that combines enterprise resource planning (ERP) and...
SuiteCRM is a free, open-source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software designed to help bus...
Vtiger is a free, open-source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software that empowers business...
Self-hosted CRM means the contact records, the pipeline, the quotes and the email history live in a MySQL database you control, on a server you chose. The three open source CRM platforms here reach that in different ways. Dolibarr is an ERP and CRM in one, so invoicing, stock and purchase orders sit alongside contacts and opportunities. SuiteCRM is the long-running open source fork of SugarCRM and is the closest thing here to a traditional sales CRM, with workflows, campaigns and a module builder. Vtiger Open Source is the community edition of a product whose vendor also sells a hosted version, so the two should not be confused when you are reading feature comparisons.
What they compete against is a per-seat subscription. Salesforce Sales Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, HubSpot, Zoho CRM, Pipedrive and Freshsales all price per user per month, and most of them put the automation people actually wanted a tier or two above the entry plan. That model works for a four-person sales team. It gets awkward at twenty people, because the cheapest way to control the bill becomes restricting who can look at a customer record, which defeats the point of having a CRM.
Self-hosting removes the per-seat maths and hands you the maintenance in exchange. Whether that trade works out depends far more on whether somebody will keep the cron jobs running than on anything in the feature list.
Situations we see often. If one of these sounds like you, this category is worth a look.
A ten-person merchant or distributor tracking a few thousand customers and products usually wants quotes, orders, invoices and stock levels attached to the contact history, not in a separate accounts package. Dolibarr covers CRM and light ERP in one install, which is why it turns up in trade businesses far more often than in sales teams.
Firms with approval steps, bespoke opportunity fields or a bid process that does not map onto a standard pipeline hit the wall of what a hosted CRM will let them change. SuiteCRM makes sense here when there is a developer available and the organisation is honest with itself about ongoing maintenance.
Small charities and membership bodies handling renewal reminders, subscriptions and documents are often asked by trustees or funders exactly who holds the data and where. A self-hosted install in our UK data centre gives a short and checkable answer, with a data processing agreement to go with it.
Where a booking, case management or scheduling system already exists in-house, the CRM has to talk to it rather than replace it. Vtiger Open Source suits teams with PHP capability who need source-level access and custom modules more than they need a fast release cadence.
Dolibarr was designed to have the lowest learning curve as possible. This is a main difference with most ERP and CRM solutions.
The reason that matters to a buyer is adoption. The commonest way a self-hosted CRM fails is not a server problem, it is that three people out of twelve keep using a spreadsheet. Pick the tool your least enthusiastic colleague will open, and enable only the modules you need on day one.
SuiteCRM requires a cron job to execute scheduled tasks (workflows, email checks, report generation, etc.). Without it, these tasks will not run.
Treat that as the buying question, not a footnote. Ask any prospective host if you can run a scheduled task every minute against the correct PHP binary, because a CRM with broken cron looks perfectly healthy on screen while reminders never fire and inbound email never lands.
CRM hosting comes down to two things people underestimate: cron reliability and outbound email deliverability. Workflows fire on cron, email-to-case automations live or die by the same loop, and a CRM with broken cron is a CRM that quietly loses leads. We run a one-minute cron on every plan and we set up outbound SMTP properly with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC during install. PHP memory at 512MB by default because Studio customisations and report queries push it.
Cron decides whether a self-hosted CRM feels alive or haunted. Dolibarr wants its scheduled jobs module triggered every few minutes once reminders or recurring invoices are in use. SuiteCRM needs its scheduler every minute for workflows, inbound email, reports and campaign queues. Vtiger has vtigercron.php doing equivalent work. When cron is missing, or aimed at the wrong PHP binary, nothing errors: every screen works, and reminders never arrive. It stays invisible until somebody misses a renewal.
Memory and execution limits come second. Vtiger states 256 MB and 60 seconds as its minimum and calls its own migration script hungry on time and memory. SuiteCRM upgrades want far more headroom than an ordinary web request, and from SuiteCRM 8.10 there is a further requirement: a Symfony Messenger worker running continuously, which shared hosting is not designed to keep alive. If SuiteCRM 8 is the plan, start on a managed cloud server rather than moving to one after the first upgrade stalls. Dolibarr 24.0.0 and Vtiger 8.4.0 both sit comfortably on our standard web hosting for a small team, though Vtiger has had no new stable release since July 2025.
Look elsewhere if you need polished Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace sync, telephony, native mobile apps, or a certified environment with a contractual SLA for procurement.
Common questions we hear from people running CRM applications on 365i hosting.
Dolibarr if your business needs invoicing, stock or purchase orders next to the contact record, which covers most trades, wholesale and small manufacturing. SuiteCRM if you want a sales CRM proper, with workflows and campaign management, and you have a developer or a hosting partner who will maintain it. Vtiger if source-level control and custom modules matter more to you than release cadence, and you have noted that its last stable release, 8.4.0, was July 2025. If none of those descriptions fits, a hosted CRM is probably the right answer.
Everything that happens without a person clicking something. Workflows stop firing, reminders never send, inbound email is not collected, recurring invoices are not generated, scheduled reports never arrive and campaign queues sit still. The screens all work perfectly, which is what makes it dangerous, and the failure is usually discovered weeks later by a customer rather than by you. Set the scheduled task up in the My365i control panel on the day you install, then verify from inside the application that it has actually run.
You can, and you should route them through a proper sending service rather than the shared mail server. All three of these applications have campaign features that will happily queue several thousand messages, which is exactly the volume shared hosting mail limits exist to prevent. Configure the CRM to send through an authenticated relay such as Amazon SES, Mailgun, Postmark or Brevo, publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the domain, and keep campaign sending separate from the invoices and password resets that must always arrive.
On the hosting package you buy, in the data centre region you pick. Our data centres are in the UK, US and Asia, with the UK as the default, so a UK-hosted install keeps the database and its backups here. UK GDPR does not actually require data to stay in the UK, but plenty of trustees, funders and procurement teams ask the question anyway, and a self-hosted install gives you a clear answer. As your hosting provider we are a processor, and we can supply a data processing agreement covering that relationship.
Only past a certain size, and not if you count your own time at nothing. For three or four users a hosted CRM will very likely cost less overall than the hours you spend on upgrades, cron monitoring, backup checks and the occasional PHP compatibility surprise. Self-hosting wins on cost when the user count is high enough that per-seat pricing dominates, when you need everyone in the company able to look at a record, or when you need customisation the hosted tier will not allow. Work out the seat count where those lines cross before committing.
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All 3 crm applications available with one-click installation on our fast UK web hosting.
