Why Are Users Migrating from SuiteCRM to HubSpot or Zoho?

[fynsis]

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a trend—many businesses that once adopted SuiteCRM are gradually moving toward platforms like HubSpot and Zoho CRM. While SuiteCRM remains a powerful open-source solution, this migration often highlights broader expectations around usability, performance, and automation.

Here are a few common reasons driving the shift:

• User Experience: HubSpot and Zoho offer more polished, intuitive UIs. SuiteCRM’s interface, while functional, often feels dated and less fluid for end users.

• Maintenance and Updates: Being open-source, SuiteCRM gives unmatched control but needs manual maintenance, server management, and updates. Cloud CRMs handle that automatically.

• Feature Ecosystem: Tools like HubSpot come with tightly integrated marketing automation, lead scoring, and reporting dashboards out of the box—features SuiteCRM usually needs plugins or custom development for.

• Integration Readiness: Businesses now rely on a range of connected apps—email, AI assistants, analytics, and more. HubSpot and Zoho provide plug-and-play connections, reducing API development effort.

• Scalability and Support: Managed CRMs offer better uptime assurance and ready support teams. SuiteCRM implementations often rely on partner expertise or internal teams for support.

That said, SuiteCRM’s flexibility, data ownership, and cost-efficiency still make it the right choice for organizations that want complete control and have the technical bandwidth to maintain it.

I’d love to hear other perspectives—
Do you believe open-source CRMs can still compete with fully-managed ecosystems like HubSpot or Zoho?
What features or improvements could help SuiteCRM regain user confidence?

Let’s open this up: what would you improve if you were redesigning SuiteCRM from the ground up?

[pstevens]

I started a whole thread about this a while back:

Why are people leaving SuiteCRM?

I’ve had a few (enough to worry) clients this year and just another one today who are making the decision to move to Hubspot and the like. Even to spend tens of thousands of dollars a year instead of stay with SuiteCRM. Many of them didn’t even start with a CRM. Once they became educated on how awesome a CRM is and all setup on SuiteCRM, they tend want something better. I’m not sure if this is the right place for this discussion, but is anyone else seeing this? What are some of the features…

Here’s some of my perspectives, because, yes I noticed the exact same thing. Mostly, bringing in SuiteCRM is an IT led adventure. Simple to install. They install it and go, “here you go CRM job done”. Then no one knows how to use it or how to get their data in. Then they hire someone like me. I take a company using spreadsheets to SuiteCRM. You show them what it can do, organize their data, import it and they love it and then they start using it. Then they start to extrapolate to all the things it could do now that their eyes are open about how great it is.

Immediatly, there are problems. They don’t get the data visibility they want. They demand calendar and email integration with O365 (most of them were used to using their inbox as a defacto CRM).

Then they start flooding IT with requests for changes, updates, reports and features that are not easy to implement. Then IT realizes they just bought themselves a full time job supporting an OpenSource CRM that is now a cornerstone of the company’s business. They don’t have the resources. The smart ones integrate someone like me more (I have clients like this where I’m essentially the IT department when it comes to CRM). Others, just want to wash their hands of it and “outsource” the entire thing to Zoho or Salesforce and then it’s no longer their problem. “I need a report of XYZ…. call Salesforce”.

There are two issues at play here as I see it:

1. Lack of visibility (that’s why I’m building Kanban and Sales stats dashlets like a madman!), Also O365 calendar and emai integration is a big one. They want to schedule calls an meetings right in O365 and it be reflected in CRM and visa versa.

2. IT/Sales tension. When IT installs CRM, they think it’s a one off job and did not realize they signed up for a lifetime of supporting a critical business system.

I’ve reviewed the key factors for switch of many of my past clients and it pretty much boils down to the above two factors that justify the change. They spend tens of thousands of dollars (sometimes up to $100,000 in inital startup costs) to relieve themselves of the responsibility for maintaining a day to day cornerstone business system.

[BastianHammer]

Hello,

I see almost exactly the same picture like Paul does.
However, over the years I had people moving from Zoho to SuiteCRM as well.

If the IT is driving the CRM system, its a purely technical mindset. The company will end up with better spreadsheets, but the adoption will be lacking. CEOs need to understand this, drive change management and make sales or marketing the CRM owner.
IT is allowed to help, but in general CRM is not an IT project.
Real value comes from process alignment for the end users.

Why anybody would prefer Hubspot over SuiteCRM:
Integration and amazing (performance) marketing focus.
Especially for B2C companies, with demand for traffic and details in the processes there + excellent integration into marketing automation, landing pages etc. is solved nicely in Hubspot.

Why anybody would prefer Zoho over SuiteCRM:
I mostly work on Zoho and Suite projects and have a very good understand of both systems. Few customers are using Zoho CRM ONLY with so many features that SuiteCRM cannot compete. If we only look into the CRMs, Zoho CRM can do way more and looks really amazing (joy of use) compared to SuiteCRM.
But the real value in Zoho comes from Zoho One and the integrations in Marketing Automation, customer service, landing pages + funnels, E-Mails, Analytics etc.

So it all comes down to either:

1. Wrong culture / perception of a CRM system (it’s not an IT project, but a strategic asset)
2. Requirements are not met by SuiteCRM

All other customers are very happy with SuiteCRM and what it can do.
B2B, traditional sales, solid data management, data sovereignty, cost, etc.

[tapio]

This is an important thread, and also a bit worrying. This is what you get when people ask LLM:s an advice or compare CRM systems. LLM:s give big value for forum discussions.

Paul and Bastian here have a lot experience with many type of customers.

I am talking about version 8 in mind, because this is the only version we use. My thinking is hands-on straightforward, and thus find it hard to imagine how I’d do things from ground up, I prefer thinking what to do next.

This is not a complete list, but these are some of the problems and possible solutions I would suggest:

Smooth installation

• In many cases installation requires manual correction of directory rights etc.
• Clear, intuitive and guiding installer would get more people to try SuiteCRM

Return language support

• Language support has been abandoned by SuiteCRM to Crowdin
• Installing languages is relatively easy, the system is there
• Up to date packages and download possibility needs to be returned

From classic navigation to Multi-context state stacking

• Current Angular UI is based on single page view
• This is a tech-first approach
• Competitor shows how workflow oriented UI can help and make your life easier → you just lost a customer
• Full workspace-based UX is not realism, but Slide-over Quick View or Stackable Overlay Service are completely doable for SuiteCRM
• My suggestion: Slide-over Quickview would be quite easy to develop, and would help user experience quite a bit
• I may explain this more in detail later, but for example clicking a Contact on list would open a Slide in modal to see communication with this contact, etc. without need to move to contact page.

Integration with Email / Calendar in Outlook

• Many companies use Microsoft 365 as their email and calendar
• Adding data manually from email to CRM is not acceptable anymore
• Data from CRM should come as much as possible automatically to email / calendar.
• I am offering my partial, incomplete solution for this challenge as SuiteSidecar
• I am willing to donate SuiteSidecar code to SuiteCRM, if SuiteCRM wants to give one-click -support for Microsoft 365 email and calendar

Overall bugfixing and modern UI completion

• I suppose this is on top of the development efforts right now
• This will fix a lot small annoying bugs when complete

Emails

• New UI for email reading
• Bug fixies in email

Campaigns

• This I think is improving slowly
• Providing a working campaings module is a huge advance for SuiteCRM
• Opt-in is coming back to v8
• Custom, stylish Opt-out -page with ‘No, I do not want to unsubscribe’ + reason collection needed
• Conversion automation workflow needs development efforts

Lead scoring

• We need fluent lead scoring

I hope SuiteCRM would find a way to have better communication with CRM consultants, and better marketing towards companies using their own installations. Instead of losing customers to Hubspot or Salesforce we should be able to revert them customers for SuiteCRM hosted, iGo Sales and Marketing or Bastian Hammer. Maybe we could have support options available in SuiteCRM community version somehow. Any ideas?

I urge everybody to offer small fixes upstream in Git. I know, it is not easy to get Pull Requests trough, but at least PR:s are there when main developers get time to check them.

As for our own situation, we have a very good CRM solution by SuiteCRM. It needed customization, and will need from this point on, but I try to provide fixes and development effort to SuiteCRM upstream development where possible.

Happy CRM:ing and Success in Sales!

Tapio

[BastianHammer]

Hello Tapio,

@tapio

Clear, intuitive and guiding installer would get more people to try SuiteCRM

Most of the discussions around installation here on the forums would not exists in the first place, if people would take the “traditional way” and learn LAMP + CLI and Linux.
I know, it’s not fancy in 2026 and there are so many other shiny click and forget solutions - they just don’t really work for SuiteCRM.
I usually have 0 problems and a few minutes install on my standard and controlled environments.
What I read here is usually sth. like:

• I’m on shared hosting
• I ignored the compatibility matrix
• I’ve got a special admin UI panel
• I’ve never used Linux and try to install a very important asset for my company for the next 5 - 10 years by myself

It’s all very difficult. Some installations for customers fail as well due to hosters / shared webhosting etc. and always take me much longer than a standard LAMP VPS.
I guess, this can only be solved by make huge changes on the whole infrastructure.
The trend of software is the other way round - things are always getting more secure, more complex, require more libraries and dependencies with more features.
The easy solution here is to go SaaS or find some SuiteCRM hosting service or similar.

I’m with you: If the CRM would be a one click installation beside my wordpress on any shared hoster, that would benefit the growth.
I just see the opposite trend for other ‘big’ software as well (Mautic, Drupal, …)

@tapio

Current Angular UI is based on single page view

In general with the UI: It would be great to have an initiative.
I’m working with other CRM / ERP and in general more systems and there are a lot of great UX examples out there and Suite could benefit from it greatly!

@tapio

Integration with Email

That is usually a critical point in SuiteCRM projects. A lot room for improvement here.
For campaigns and marketing automation, I usually use Mautic and for standard communication sometimes ActivePieces / n8n so users can keep on using their mail clients.

@tapio

Campaigns

Similar to emails above. If there are some advanced requirements (forms, tracking, automation, time triggers, journey builder - marketing in general) it usually becomes clear quickly to integrate SuiteCRM + Mautic.
That’s after all, what the other vendors are doing as well (Zoho, etc.): Best of breed with a great integration, rather than one platform with weaknesses in all areas.
Here, I’d opt for better sales processes in the CRM and marketing automation in an external tool.

[pgr]

@BastianHammer

What I read here is usually sth. like:

• I’m on shared hosting
• I ignored the compatibility matrix
• I’ve got a special admin UI panel
• I’ve never used Linux and try to install a very important asset for my company for the next 5 - 10 years by myself

…

[tapio]

@BastianHammer

In general with the UI: It would be great to have an initiative.
I’m working with other CRM / ERP and in general more systems and there are a lot of great UX examples out there and Suite could benefit from it greatly!

Mockup number 1 shows an possible direction:

Lovable App

Tapio

[suitecrm_team]

Thank you all for your comments, thoughts, and suggestions. We follow this forum closely and pay a great deal of attention to the discussions here; your feedback is instrumental in determining the future direction of our development efforts for SuiteCRM 8.

Thankfully, as the maintainers, we aren’t seeing a ‘mass exodus’ to other platforms, though there is always a natural ebb and flow in the CRM market. We fully recognise the areas where we need to improve in comparison to the competition. The reality is that while we strive to achieve incredible things, we do so with finite resources.

We already have plans in place to resolve the majority of the issues highlighted in this thread. Specifically, the UI, Marketing tools, Kanban views, Outlook integration, and general email functionality are all either currently being planned for or are slated for massive improvement. Furthermore, the translations are now more automated and updated more regularly.

We are investing more heavily in SuiteCRM 8 than ever before. In fact, our core product team has never had more focus or resources at its disposal. As SuiteCRM Ltd grows, we will continue to reinvest our profits into expanding our team and accelerating the delivery of the core features required to remain competitive.

As is often the case with Open Source, our velocity is tied to our resources. If you would like to see us reach these heights at a faster rate, there are several ways you can directly fund the maintenance and evolution of the project:

• Adopt our official SuiteCRM Hosted service as your primary provider.
• Invest in our official support services for your business.
• Consider SuiteASSURED for larger-scale, mission-critical implementations.
• Direct Donations: If you make your living using our Open Source application, please consider ‘paying it forward’ with a donation. This is a vital practice for the health of the entire Open Source ecosystem.

Supporting our services or donating directly ensures the stability of SuiteCRM Ltd, allowing us to hire the specialist talent needed to drive the core application forward for the benefit of the entire community.

We have further ideas and plans to assist this journey which we look forward to sharing, but otherwise, we want to thank everyone in the community who continues to contribute in so many ways

[BastianHammer]

It sounds very promising!
The recent releases look like things are on a solid track and I’m really looking forward for the UI improvements

[sagarjaydeep]

Thank you for the update and for the continued transparency.

We are particularly encouraged by the planned UI improvements and are looking forward to these enhancements. A more refined and modern interface will greatly enhance the overall user experience.

We appreciate the team’s ongoing efforts and commitment to the future of SuiteCRM 8.

[tapio]

Thank you for the clarification and for engaging in the discussion.

I’d like to add a perspective from someone running SuiteCRM 8.9.x in production and actively contributing improvements locally.

For many of us, the question is not whether commercial support has value — it absolutely does. The question is how open-source contributors can best collaborate with SuiteCRM Ltd in a way that meaningfully improves the core product.

Some of us are ready to:
• Submit well-documented GitHub Issues
• Provide reproducible bug reports
• Open Pull Requests for fixes or improvements
• Help test and validate upcoming releases

It would be very helpful to better understand:
1. What kind of PRs are most welcome right now?
2. Are there architectural or roadmap priorities the community should align with?
3. Is there a preferred contribution workflow for core-level enhancements?

Clear guidance here would likely strengthen the open-source side of the project and reduce the perception that improvement is only available via paid services.

I believe SuiteCRM has a strong future if commercial sustainability and community-driven engineering work together — not as alternatives, but as complementary forces.

Looking forward to contributing constructively.

[pstevens]

Thanks so much for your reply. Hope you recognize (even though it seems we’re complaining) everyone posting in this thread really cares about the future of SuiteCRM and we’re on the front lines where SuiteCRM meets the end user. We probably hear alot of things you don’t necessarily hear in the forum or from your longterm customers.

We care and we really want to be useful in helping where we can drive things forward.

Thanks again, I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels so much better when the suitecrm_team chimes in, we feel like your listening!

[rsp]

Thank you so much for your detailed response and for all the hard work you’re putting into improving SuiteCRM. It’s great to see your continued commitment to the community and the platform’s growth. I truly appreciate the transparency and dedication to delivering a better experience for everyone.

I’m really excited about the upcoming enhancements and can’t wait to see SuiteCRM continue to grow and shine even brighter in the future!

[Sacrilegious]

Hi, I’ll share my two cents.

I’m coming at this from a developer’s perspective, focusing more on where things can improve rather than pointing out faults, especially since the CRM seems to be in the middle of a big codebase transition.

Overall, the product is very solid and has a lot of features that are on par with competitors. But there are a few key things that should be addressed. For context, I’m on version 8.8.0 working with both parts of the CRM, legacy and Symfony/Angular. I’ve only worked with this version.

1. No clear documentation for the latest version

A lot of the documentation on the website is outdated or just wrong. Older versions should be clearly marked as outdated, or the docs should be separated by version. Many times it’s not clear whether the documentation actually applies to my setup or not.

2. You have to dig deep and already know a lot to customize anything

On the legacy side, it’s a lot of digging to understand how things work beyond the simple examples you can find online. Most functions don’t have proper comments explaining parameters, just types, so you end up reverse engineering a lot of it.

The symfony part is not really documented either, but it follows the framework guidelines well, so it’s easier to navigate if you know Symfony (kudos for that). The problem is that in many core areas, symfony still reaches into the old legacy system, probably for compatibility reasons. So if you want to extend the system in a future proof way, you need solid symfony knowledge and at the same time you have to understand legacy code.

3. The two codebases

Using symfony and angular for some modules and legacy for others is something that should be phased out as soon as possible. I’ve spent a lot of hours just realizing that I’m basically dealing with two different frontends. Some functionality works in one but isn’t implemented in the other, while some legacy backend logic is fully implemented in legacy frontend but not the angular frontend.

In practice, if you need to add a global feature, you might end up implementing it twice in two completely different environments.

4. No theming support in 8.8.0

Every boss or CEO wants their own branding and color scheme. I had a request to move the Relationship section above the basic data section in the open record view, and it took me almost a full day of research just to apply a simple css change (disregarding of no proper css selectors).

If not for the open source community then for possible white label clients of suite crm hosted partners.

5. Focus on features over extensibility

The beauty of open source is that anyone can contribute, whether it’s features, bug fixes, ideas, or plugins. But that only works if the system is reasonably easy to extend. If it’s not straightforward to modify or add new functionality, developers are much less likely to contribute under an open source license because it’s simply taking too much effort to learn it or do anything proper with it.

This could be one reason why most suite crm plugins are commercial and targeted at companies. On paper, the crm is open source and attractive to companies looking for a free solution with offered paid benefits, but in reality, meaningful customizations can easily end up costing more than some of the paid crm solutions mentioned in this topic.

6. Community support and forums

From what I see, a lot of people are simply confused because of the dual codebase. Someone asks a question and gets an answer for either the legacy or the new stack, while the person asking mostly isn’t even aware of the differences. Many answers assume you already understand the version changes and how the entire system is structured, which just adds to the confusion.

This is observation after 8 months of development on one project on a specific version (8.8.0).

[fynsis]

@pstevens

365

Very nice piece of information and I am completely with you on this. Lack of basic features are one of the most common issue which are pushing people away from SuiteCRM.

I have also known people who are true fan of suiteCRM but due to insufficient functionalities they are migrating (Because they have no choice).

[fynsis]

Thank you so much for understanding the problem and giving us assurance for upcoming releases and features (Most important once). But my suggestion is that everyone who uses SuiteCRM should make some basic free add-ons which other contributors can use and make advancements on that.

For example, if I create an add-on which is very common in other CRMs and has very basic use, I can put it as a free add-on which others can take advantage of.

I think this approach will help others grow as well and will improve our community.

[suitecrm_team]

It’s great to see the community engaging so deeply with the future of the platform. Thank you for the further comments and suggestions.

The project and SuiteCRM Ltd are both in an excellent position; however, we have significant aspirations and many challenges to overcome.

Every donation and official service subscription directly funds the project’s future. If you cannot contribute financially, you can still support us by advocating for our official services. This investment allows us to accelerate the development of the features the community needs most.

Beyond financial support, there are numerous ways to stay involved, many of which have been highlighted in this thread:

• GitHub Issues: Please continue to report bugs with detailed descriptions and reproducible steps.
• Feature Requests: The forum remains the best place for these; we assess each one to help steer our future development efforts.
• Documentation: We recognise there are gaps we are working to address, and community contributions are a fantastic way to help the project scale.
• Community Collaboration: Giving up your time to help newcomers or those struggling with specific concepts remains immensely valuable.

Code Contributions

Pull Requests for bug fixes are very welcome. To ensure they can be adopted easily, please keep them clear, concise, and focused on a single issue.

While new feature contributions are also welcome, they can be more challenging to incorporate if they conflict with our current architectural ambitions. We also advise against purely AI-generated submissions; we are seeing an increase in ‘noise’ that lacks the technical diligence required for the core application.

As SuiteCRM 8 matures and we move beyond our ‘Levelling Up’ and ‘The Big Move’ phases, feature contributions will become significantly easier for everyone involved.

Looking Ahead

We intend to publish more detailed, long-term roadmaps and improve our overall documentation with important Developer and Plug-in additions. This includes plans to provide version-specific documentation to improve clarity.

While this will take some time, it is fantastic to see the community excelling at peer-to-peer education in the interim. We deeply appreciate the contributions that share knowledge and steer users in the right direction.

Please keep sharing your thoughts, feedback, and even constructive criticisms; each one brings value. While we cannot always be active on every post, please don’t think we aren’t listening. We recognise this community as one of our strongest assets and look forward to devoting even more specific resources to community engagement as we grow as an organisation.