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CiviCRM is the #1 open source constituent relationship management solution built exclusively for nonprofits and civic organizations. It is fully customizable and expandable and is supported by thousands of people all around the world to do more good. The strengths of open source mean you own your data and have no licensing fees. CiviCRM provides an affordable yet robust solution for managing contacts, donations, events, memberships, and campaigns. CiviCRM empowers organizations to be more effective and efficient in connecting with their constituents and drive positive change.
Provider
CiviCRM
Located In
United States
Foundation
2005
Open API
Yes
Deployment
Cloud, SaaS, Web-Based
Training
In Person, Documentation, Live Online, Videos, Webinars
Support
24/7 (Live rep), Chat, Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base
Nonprofits, NGOs, associations, civic sector organizations, mission-based organizations, event management, political and campaigning groups.
Content Source: CiviCRM
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CiviCRM Reviews
Pros
I loved how expansive the system was. I liked that I could use it as both a record of donors and donations etc. and as a way to process and track payments/money received.
Excellent event registration and membership management at a price that can't be equaled. Best of all, it works in and with our client's websites.
CiviCase brings case management into to application and CiviVolunteer helps you keep track of the eager beavers who want to help your cause.
The community is fairly responsive and keeps an active release cycle as well as an extension community which build meaningful extensions to functionality.
Cons
It was hard to upgrade if too many releases went by since you were supposed to do one at a time. I almost had a database disaster during one of the updates and lost a couple days to recover the data.
It's built on soon-to-be deprecated software, so investing in its deployment might be a little risky.
That said, a person who understands the database can bypass the worst of it -- however, we could do this, and the closest competing product priced itself out of our reach by an excessive import fee.
I have had some trouble using the scheduled mailings feature. Once the mailing didn't go out at all.
"Our go-to for Associations and others"
Overall: CiviCRM integrates CRM functions for associations, affiliation groups and others as an add-on for the top GPL content management systems WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. We have been installing and hosting CiviCRM for several years and it has become a standard part of our toolbox. It is especially strong on event registration and membership management. CiviMail does an excellent job with bounce and subscription management, but it's not as user friendly as a service like MailChimp or Constant Contact for HTML mail composition. CiviContribute handles payments for memberships, donations and events. CiviCase brings case management into to application and CiviVolunteer helps you keep track of the eager beavers who want to help your cause. We have used CiviCRM for projects ranging from an international arts group to our son's Boy Scout troop. We have used it for camping registrations and conference registrations for thousands of users. The real gem, as in any CRM tool are the reporting tools. You can pull membership, attendance or other reports in minutes. Think of a data related question and get an answer quickly and simply.
Pros: Excellent event registration and membership management at a price that can't be equaled. Best of all, it works in and with our client's websites.
Cons: It's not an intuitive tool. You need to learn the logic of CiviCRM to get things done. It's not hard, but I wouldn't give it to a client without a few explanations and probably training.
"serves its purpose"
Overall: Overall, it's done what we've needed it to do, reliably, for a long time.
Pros: We've used CiviCRM for years to handle all of our even registrations. While it may not be the slickest thing out there, it's been very capable of taking on this task.
Cons: This may or may not be a con for some, but it's been largely unchanged for years. The consistency makes it pretty easy to use, but it's probably aging a bit.
"Unusable product. Don't do it."
Overall: This is an absolutely awful product. Its not worth considering. If you're looking at it, I recommend looking at products former CiviCRM users have switched to!
Pros: This CRM has lots of capabilities, but honestly none I particularly like. No features are better than any other CRM I've used.
Cons: I genuinely dislike just about everything about this product--the UX and UI are awful. There is a completely unreasonable expectation that users will have time and expertise for extremely complicated customizations and processes. There are frequent errors that render the system unusable and are often unfixed for weeks. Do not choose this product.
"Great potential and features"
Pros: The flexibility of this platform is truly amazing. You can customise it to your exact needs and the range of features is unbeaten. Most powerful CRM I have come across.
Cons: The user interface is what lets this platform down. It is not responsive and although a developer has made a mobile app, it is too late to the game and does not properly give you the power of CiviCRM in your mobile. Considering most people now will want to access these platforms from phones, this is what makes CiviCRM unfortunately not really future proof.
"On-the-go solution to manage elections campaign and manage data responses."
Pros: CiviCRM allowed me to manage as many as possible thanks to the registration forms, follow up with the CRM and customize your preferences. With the Reports module I was able to obtain voting statistics and focus on undecided voters. An agile solution of multiple applications. Connected to my Joomla Portal.
Cons: I had problems connecting to my big data server to process the collected information together with other databases. Specifically Kafka.
