I run a site that measures which products AI assistants name when somebody asks them to recommend software. I published a small business CRMs board, and rather than publish it and say nothing, I am bringing the result to the people best placed to tell me it is wrong.
SuiteCRM does not appear once on a CRM board I publish. Given the install base, that surprised me enough to bring it to the people who would know whether it should have.
The method. Gemini and Perplexity were each asked 44 differently worded versions of âWhat is the best CRM software for a 10-person small business?â, and every product named across the 88 answers was counted. No product name appears in any of the questions â the engines are never shown a list to pick from.
Where SuiteCRM landed. The engines named 53 distinct products. SuiteCRM was named in 0 of the 44 phrasings. The ones closest to it that were: Vtiger 1, Bitrix24 2; HubSpot CRM, at the top, 79. A second, independent run of all of it named it 0 times as well.
Vtiger is the only open-source CRM the engines named at all, once â which reads less like a verdict on SuiteCRM than like the engines treating âCRMâ as a purely commercial question.
The board and both raw runs are published as files beside it, so every figure above can be recomputed rather than taken on trust:
There is nothing to sign up for and I am not selling anything. What I want is the method taken apart. If the phrasings are loaded, if the name-folding is wrong, or if this category is simply the wrong shape for this project, I would rather hear it here than keep publishing it.
Interesting. The phrasing of the questions canât be the problem, because it has quite some diversity. Some of them might be kind of biased against certain CRMâs, but globally it doesnât seem to be a biased set of questions.
I do think these search engines are getting it wrong. SuiteCRM should really be in there somewhere.
My suggestions (Iâm no AI specialist though) would be:
Add more breadth, more AI engines (Grok, ChatGPT, Claude)
Check if there is some memory effect working as a sort of âconfirmation biasâ for the AI. When it is answering question 33, is it saying to itself, âuser has asked this 32 times before, and I answered in this way, letâs dump the same thing againâ.
EDIT: I also have a question, I am finding this intriguing. If SuiteCRM does show up on old-school search engine queries like Google (we are well placed in some, not all, software reviews like this one), I would think that AIâs would be simply drawing from that information. How would thy miss SuiteCRM? Or why would they somehow attach a negative bias to the âopen-sourceâ label?
More engines. I can ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. We hold no Grok or Claude API key, so I cannot run those at all â a limit, not a choice.
I did run ChatGPT â but not on this board. The 44 questions I put to it came from our open source CRM board, not the small-business one. On that set ChatGPT named SuiteCRM in 44 of 44 answers, 0 failures. Gemini and Perplexity place SuiteCRM second there, 81 of 88, behind EspoCRM at 82. I have not yet asked ChatGPT the 44 questions behind the 0 above, so on this board the third engine is still untested.
Memory effect. No â I read the code rather than assume. Each phrasing is a separate API call carrying one question and a fixed system prompt: no conversation id, no thread, no history, no cookie jar. Eight run at once, so âquestion 33â has no position after 32. I cannot see inside the provider; I can only say we send no state and get no handle back.
Your edit. It looks less like a negative âopen-sourceâ bias than the opposite. The two boards differ mainly in whether the questions say open source or self-hosted. With those words, SuiteCRM is at the top. Without them, it is never named. A bare âCRMâ question seems to get read as a commercial one, and your review coverage does not appear to cross that line.
I said I had not yet asked ChatGPT the 44 questions behind the 0 above. I have now.
ChatGPT names SuiteCRM in 0 of those 44 answers. Counted two ways that agree: extracted vendor rows, and a case-insensitive search for âsuitecrmâ in the raw answer text. The model the API returned was gpt-5.5-2026-04-23.
That is the result that could have gone against me and did not. Had ChatGPT named SuiteCRM here, the 0 on that board would have been an artifact of which two engines I can afford to run, and I would have had to say so on the page.
It also separates the two things post 4 could not. Engine held at ChatGPT, wording changed from small-business to open-source: top-10 overlap 0 of 10, and SuiteCRM goes 0 of 44 to 44 of 44. Wording held, engine changed: 7 of 10 hold, including all five head vendors. So it is the wording, not the engine.
One correction against my own figure. In that ChatGPT run âSalesforceâ sits at rank 5 and âSalesforce Starterâ at rank 10 â one vendor counted twice, my name-folding missing an edition. Fold it and the ten is nine, so the overlap I just quoted is 7 of 9.
This run is a control, not a third column: the board still says Gemini and Perplexity, because those are the answers published under it.
The small-business board and its raw runs â not clickable, this forum does not allow me links:
So letâs first clarify where results in AI answers come from.
Basically itâs SEO, GEO, AEO - so traditionally itâs easy to figure out which companies are landing the top rankings: The one with the highest budget for the âbestâ content.
The questions:
These are very generic, extremely popular on reddit and a very wrong approach.
If AI is/was being fed by reddit replies to those questions, the most frequent mentioned systems are those with good affiliate programs that the user would format in a standard answer template.
So again - more budget required.
Additionally, your questions contain way too little context for a real business scenario.
What are your specific requirements? Do you have any particular needs in a specific industry? What are your existing system? How do your processes look like?
The comparison:
There are very few open source CRM systems out there. If you (as a human) investigate and spend some time, youâll quickly find out, that the alternatives to SuiteCRM are
either open source in the core and one needs to buy licenses for features that are out of the box available in SuiteCRM
or are fairly new, maybe stable, quite untested and in the worst case to a large amount vibe coded
If you ask AI about open source systems, it doesnât really understand the fine grained differences with the real project need for features in CRMs. It just discovers that vTiger has some sort of open source offering / keyword online.
The use case:
Most companies are looking into SuiteCRM either because of regulations / governance / data sovereignty or license costs.
Building a a business on âI canât afford Zohoâ or similar is a questionable approach. So the more valid and mid term reliable USP would be the data privacy side.
If you ask AI with this context and some more specific requirements (highly sensitive customer data, canât be stored in a cloud or SaaS) youâll find way more answers containing SuiteCRM.
Another use case is heavy integration for larger teams and quite some data movement. Using SaaS in a retail grocery chain or similar will hit API limits really quickly. AI âdoesnât have this experience as wellâ.
And eventually:
Best, userfriendly, micro business, small business owner etc.
Most of, my projects at least, with SuiteCRM involve company with some momentum, with some experience, with some processes and revenue.
Of course, it is possible for a founder with a team of 2 or so to invest time to build up a beautiful (Suite)CRM. But for those leads / calls, I usually recommend to start selling first, before building up a system (before they have to pivot 3 times and change all processes and rebuild the CRM soon).
Addtionally, what over 20 years of CRM project experience taught me:
Often, when founders / small teams / smbs ask for the best CRM, the best ERP, the best ecom system etc., they did not look into their processes, did not look into their requirements and just want to buy something quickly what the content marketing of the CRM vendor suggested is best.
And still very often, after just a year or so, the project was a failure. Then the next fancy vendor had a bigger budget and better content, so thatâs the next best system.
A CRM system shouldnât be looked at as an IT system that needs to be installed.
A CRM system has the potential to grow and transform your business and culture.
It takes many months and even years.
Iâve seen it in a few long running projects and itâs fantastic to watch the digital transformation of rev ops supported by integrated system build on create customer data architecture.
Itâs really very little about which CRM is actually the best on earth (for a few months before the next is taking over again) and mostly about where a company stands and towards what it wants to evolve.
That all being said, of course, Iâd love to see SuiteCRM popping up in SEO, GEO, AEO way more often and become more popular in general
Thanks for your trigger / idea.
Iâm very happy about a non technical topic here
My understanding is AI relies heavly on Reddit for recommendations and answers. There arenât alot of Reddit posts recommending SuiteCRM. Iâve looked! Tried to find some customers! Itâs pretty sparse in terms of conversations wise about SuiteCRM.
