CiviCRM
| License | FOSS problems | Maintenance | SSO | Users | Tested |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AGPLv3Copyleft license. If you modify it and run it as a service, you must publish your changes. Surrounding linked code must also be open. | Copyleft License with CLA | Active | ❌ | Unlimited | ❌ |
Description
CiviCRM is open-source CRM software built specifically for nonprofits and membership organisations, not adapted from a sales-pipeline tool — contacts, memberships, donations, events, activities, and relationships as first-class concepts rather than "leads" and "deals" repurposed to fit. Since January 2025 it can run standalone; before that, and still commonly, it installs as a plugin/module inside an existing WordPress, Drupal, Backdrop, or Joomla site.
Features
- Constituent management — contacts, households, and organisations, with relationships tracked between them (a person's employer, a household's members), not just a flat list of records.
- Memberships & donations — membership types, renewal tracking, and contribution/donation processing as built-in concepts, not a bolted-on plugin.
- Event management — registration, payment, and participant tracking for anything from a small meetup to a paid conference.
- Campaigns & reporting — mass email, campaign tracking, and a reporting engine built around the same constituent data the rest of the system uses.
- CMS integration — as a plugin, it shares login and user management with its host CMS (WordPress/Drupal/etc.) rather than maintaining a fully separate account system; standalone mode drops that dependency entirely.
Usage patterns
- Plugin mode — installed inside an existing WordPress or Drupal site, sharing its database and user accounts by default (a separate database is also possible). The common path, and the better fit if a public-facing site already exists that membership/donation pages need to live alongside.
- Standalone mode — running without a host CMS at all, new as of January 2025. Closer to a dedicated admin tool than a website-integrated one; worth checking maturity against the CMS-plugin path before committing, given how recent it is.
- Resource-heavy self-hosting — genuinely demanding compared to most of this catalog: PHP, MySQL, and enough server headroom to run comfortably, not a lightweight container.
License and governance
AGPLv3, with the CiviCRM Licensing Exception layered on top — an additional permission (not a restriction) allowing it to be combined with PHP-licensed code. One real nuance: contributing a modified version back grants CiviCRM LLC the right to relicense that contribution under the Academic Free License 3.0, a CLA-style provision rather than pure copyleft. CiviCRM LLC itself is a California company founded in 2005, not a nonprofit foundation — the same single-entity governance shape flagged elsewhere in this catalog, though the AGPL's copyleft means a future licensing change wouldn't retroactively affect what's already released.
Conclusion
Why you would — purpose-built for exactly this domain: memberships, donations, and events as native concepts rather than a generic CRM stretched to fit a nonprofit's actual workflow, with a large, nonprofit-specific community behind it.
Why you wouldn't — genuinely resource-heavy to self-host, and plugin mode ties it to whichever CMS hosts it rather than standing alone; standalone mode fixes that but is new enough (January 2025) to want a closer look at its maturity before relying on it.