I posted here last week that SuiteCRM did not appear once on a small-business CRM board I publish. This is the other half of that measurement, which I did not have at the time, and it is a different question so it is a new topic rather than another reply on the old one.
What I measure. I ask AI answer engines 44 different phrasings of one buying question, count every product named across every answer, and publish the raw answers. No vendor pays. There is no candidate list written in advance — the board is simply everyone the engines named.
Board one — “which small business CRM should we buy?” 44 phrasings, ChatGPT + Gemini + Perplexity, 132 answers, 63 distinct products named. SuiteCRM: not once. HubSpot 92.4%, Pipedrive 87.9%, Zoho 61.4%. The only open-source names anywhere on it are Odoo at 2 mentions (rank 35) and Vtiger at 1 (rank 62). That board has been re-run with a third engine since I first posted about it and now stands at 132 answers; SuiteCRM is still not on it.
Board two — “which open source self-hosted CRM should we deploy?” 44 phrasings, Gemini + Perplexity, 88 answers, 29 distinct products named.
| rank | product | mentions | of 88 | named in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | EspoCRM | 82 | 93.2% | 43 of 44 phrasings |
| 2 | SuiteCRM | 81 | 92.0% | 44 of 44 phrasings |
| 3 | Odoo Community | 43 | 48.9% | 31 of 44 phrasings |
| 6 | Vtiger | 16 | 18.2% | 11 of 44 phrasings |
SuiteCRM’s 81 by engine: Gemini 41, Perplexity 40.
So SuiteCRM is not unknown to the engines. It is the most consistently named product on the open-source board — the only one of the 29 that came back in all 44 phrasings — and it is invisible the moment the buyer has not already said “open source” first.
Four things wrong with this, before anyone quotes it at me.
- The two boards do not use the same engines. The open-source one is Gemini and Perplexity only; ChatGPT is not in it. That alone means 0-of-132 and 81-of-88 are not a clean before-and-after, and it is the biggest hole in this post.
- They are also not the same 44 questions with a clause added. They are two separately written question families.
- Rank 1 against rank 2 is one mention out of 88. That is inside run-to-run noise and I would not defend “second” as a fact. What the data supports is “EspoCRM and SuiteCRM are the two the engines name, at roughly the same rate”.
- Different dates — 3–6 August and 6 August.
Both boards are published with every question and every verbatim answer behind them, so any line above is checkable rather than something you have to take from me:
There is nothing to buy in this post and no link to anything I sell. What I would like from this forum is the part I cannot measure: does it match what you see? When a new SuiteCRM deployment turns up, had the person already decided they wanted open source before they asked anyone anything — or does anybody ever arrive because an assistant suggested it cold?