User Reviews Overview
About CiviCRM
CiviCRM is the leading open source constituent relationship management solution built exclusively for the nonprofit / civic sector and association-based organizations. Because CiviCRM is open-source, it’s highly customizable,...
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- Industry: Internet
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
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Review Source
Our go-to for Associations and others
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.
- Industry: Libraries
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
serves its purpose
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.
- Industry: Fund-Raising
- Company size: Self Employed
- Used Daily for 1+ year
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Review Source
Unusable product. Don't do it.
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.
Top CiviCRM Alternatives
- Industry: Religious Institutions
- Company size: 501–1,000 Employees
- Used Weekly for 2+ years
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Review Source
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.
Alternatives Considered
Rock RMSReasons for Switching to CiviCRM
Civicrm was compatible with our server, was free to use and more powerful with its portfolio of features and customisability.- Industry: Environmental Services
- Company size: Self Employed
- Used Weekly for 2+ years
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Review Source
High functionality at low costs
Very functional so long as you don't need something new
Pros
Cost -- our volunteer run organization could afford it (we pay for hosting which includes administrator and user coaching)
Highly functional and generally very easy to use
Very flexible with extensions that are much more advanced than found in cost-comparable products -- membership, events, etc.
Very good API
Ability to fully get all data out of it
Cons
Import of large quantities of data using supplied import procedures is painful at best. 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.
While existing reports are easy to use, creating truly new ones is nearly impossible (need to create a new extension)
Sadly lacking documentation on creating extensions
- Industry: Nonprofit Organization Management
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Weekly for 2+ years
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Review Source
A great option for a CRM if you have the staff to maintain the software
Overall, CiviCRM is a great choice for those organizations that have the qualified staff to maintain the backend intricacies along with those who can perform the customizations and those to enter the data.
Pros
I liked that it was open source and maintained by volunteers. It was fairly easy to add to our Wordpress website and very flexible as far as customizations and shaping it to match our processes.
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. Since that point, we had to just run with the last working version. Also, it doesn't integrate with QuickBooks Online, so there was double bookkeeping involved.
- Company size: Self Employed
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
We have continued to use more features over time
Good program
Pros
Flexibility. It can do almost anything for non computer people, that flexibility can also be a disability
Cons
It can be complicated. It has such flexibility that it can be daunting . Consultants can help but are costly.
- Industry: Environmental Services
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Review Source
A wonderful experience with CiviCRm
Pros
I work for a very small and relatively new non-profit organization and CiviCRM has been the perfect combination of intuitive/ user-friendly, as well as adaptive to our unique needs as we continue to define our direction, expand our scope, and grow to reach a larger audience. Civi has allowed us to track and maintain well-rounded profiles of our constituents, donors, participants, and volunteers -- many of whom fit into multiple of these categories. I have a lot left to learn about Civi and when I get stumped, I can almost always find the answer in the forums online or through our vendor.
Cons
I've had the most difficulty with CiviCRM integrating into our Mailchimp account and newsletter. Overall, it's worked quite well but there have been several glitches and several times where the solution or steps to take to fix a problem were not at all obvious (to me, at least!).
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Review Source
CiviCRM is a great tool for campaign management
Pros
CiviCRM is free and open source, meaning the development is driven by a community dedicated to it's success. The community is fairly responsive and keeps an active release cycle as well as an extension community which build meaningful extensions to functionality.
Cons
Specializing in political clients, CiviCRM is not the most documented to reach these markets. However, I am working with others to expand this as I have personally tested several competing products and found CiviCRM to be the most versatile in this space.
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 6-12 months
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Review Source
Great Value
Pros
Cost - our volunteer based organization is always looking for cheap solutions to complex problems. This coupled with ease of use makes a great software tool for non-profits.
Cons
Mass imports are painful to execute and time consuming. Existing reports are easy to replicate but custom reports are almost impossible without a consultant.
- Industry: Computer Software
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Very flexible, free, but unfortunately also buggy
It's a tradeoff between being free and customizable and stability & security. If you just need something simple to get up and running this is probably not the best tool for you. If you need something very customizable and you have the technological knowledge to customize and maintain it or you can pay somebody to do it for you it is a nice tool. For most small companies it is probably overkill.
Pros
It's very flexible and integrates well with CMS systems (which is also a security issue). We've created multiple extensions for CiviCRM and made a lot of custom adjustments which is relatively easy to do. It's free and OpenSource and offers a lot of features. The CiviCRM volunteers/engineers I had contact with were very friendly and helpful, but given you don't pay for it you also can't expect and will not get enterprise support. It has a good API to retrieve and update data.
Cons
It's buggy. After every update there are things that break. We have a customer that has a lot of data (~1 million contacts) stored in CiviCRM and updates are always a nightmare which is why we only do it once per year. It takes me a couple of days to actually update the system and fix all of the bugs that occur during the upgrade and after the upgrade. The update takes a couple of hours and it never runs through without issues. With smaller instances the update usually works better and is done in a couple of minutes. You will need to to be a software engineer to maintain CiviCRM because you will need to be able to go into the code and analyze and fix issues yourself. I've also contributed back a fix to the CiviCRM core. There are few automated tests that catch bugs so old features get broken with updates on a regular basis without anybody noticing.
That it integrates with CMSes is a nice feature but it is also a major concern. If you run it behind your website it means your customer data stored in CiviCRM can get stolen if your website is hacked. This is not an uncommon thing to happen to Wordpress and Drupal sites. Also because of the bugs as I said we avoid updating more often than once a year so we also don't get security fixes. This is why we moved our CiviCRM away from the website to a separate server that is not accessible to the internet.
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Daily for 1+ year
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Review Source
Decent open sourced CRM
This is a free software program that can for the most part, make it do what you want it to do as long as you are experienced enough. If you have database experience with a limited budget, this would be a good route to go.
Pros
CiviCRM is an open sourced database, so there are no fees or contracts associated with it, which is nice. If you have previous database experience, it can be pretty intuitive on how to use for donor management. Although there is no customer service as it is open sourced, there are several forums that are helpful.
Cons
The open source can be a double edged sword. While it is nice that you can build yourself, unless you have a developer/script writer on hand things can get complicated and messy quick. The reporting is alright, but does not do anything extravagant (unless again you have a developer on hand that can help you write more canned reports). The import feature works okay, but often times still creates duplicates.
- Industry: Public Relations & Communications
- Company size: 501–1,000 Employees
- Used for 2+ years
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Review Source
Pretty fantastic for doing the essentials
It's not a terrible software to have and allows you to carry out ticketing and patron service management at a fundamental level. Wouldn't recommend it at the higher tiered levels of with theatres/spaces that are more complex and demand more.
Pros
While it is not the most integrated system, Civi's platform allows for the essential patron ticketing needs. The following being the strongest aspects:
-Easily accessible patron accounts
- Format is very fundamental in account management and ticketing management
- Allows for seamless EOD reporting and comp lists
Cons
Here are the biggest drawbacks that I have seen with this ticketing software:
-It cannot retrieve events/reservations once deleted. The recovery process of anything really is very difficult with regards to patron and account management.
- Very difficult to change seating arrangements once reservation is secured.
- Can be cumbersome with the website interface and do not allow for intuitive browsing.
- Industry: Computer Software
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 6-12 months
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Review Source
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.
- Industry: Nonprofit Organization Management
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used for 2+ years
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Review Source
Moved away from this for a simpler option
It was brief that I actively used it, and it holds a lot and has a lot of capacity, but the flip side of that, like Salesforce, is that you have to have the resources to invest in doing it well and there are just easier options.
Pros
This was chosen before I got here and was universally recognized as very complicated and buggy. In going back into it for old records, I do like the theoretical capacity if you had the time to figure it out.
Cons
Complicated and open source is great if you're a programmer, but less helpful when you just need a program to do a specific thing.
- Industry: Religious Institutions
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Review Source
A versatile but clunky CRM software
Pros
CiviCRM is extremely versatile and customizable. We use it to produce letters to donors and large mailing lists for various functions. If you have a fair amount of technical web knowledge, you can integrate your database with other online software like MailChimp. It is also FREE!
Cons
CiviCRM is pretty clunky and not pleasing to the eye. While you can segment your database in almost any way with the search features, it's often nearly impossible to know which version of the search interface you should use: Advanced Search? Search Builder? Full-text Search???????
- Industry: Nonprofit Organization Management
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Review Source
The best CRM for nonprofits, and it's free!
Pros
The depth and breadth of functionality is staggering, and the community provides extensions that enrich the product even more. The software is highly configurable and can be adapted to almost any nonprofit organization's needs. And if a feature is not there, you can always add it as the full source code is available.
Cons
Setup and administration is quite technical, documentation is extensive but could still be improved. Users will feel lost at first due to the richness of the software, but with a little hand holding will get the gist of it and start exploring.
- Industry: Civic & Social Organization
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Daily for 1+ year
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Review Source
Long user, secure software, lots of features
I really like to feel that CiviCRM is a successful free/open source software.
Pros
I like the fact the CiviCRM works nicely, have a lot of features I need and are integrated to my CMS.
Cons
Some translation to languages around still need, help everybody could help. Same to new payment methods to places different from Major markets.
- Industry: Nonprofit Organization Management
- Company size: 501–1,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 6-12 months
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Review Source
Not a product that I could recommend.
The problem I had with CiviCRM was more due to the organisation I was working in trying to adapt it for their own sector, rather than using something that was appropriate to their requirements and location. CiviCRM reminded me of a ball of thread that could tangle and loop back on itself very easily, and was almost impossible to unpick.
Pros
It is adaptable to the requirements of the organisation.
Cons
This product isn't designed to be used in the sector that I was working in.
- Industry: Nonprofit Organization Management
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Review Source
Powerful Contact Management for Nonprofits
Pros
CiviCRM is open source. There is no cost in getting started if you have the expertise yourself. There is also an excellent Eco-system of vendors that install, upgrade, migrate, extend and support CiviCRM.
Cons
Because the product is open source is lacking some of the features that other CRMs have. That said there is a large library of extensions and material on the Internet to help you make CiviCRM do everything you want it to.
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Review Source
CiviCRM: Big help for accomplishing our goals
Pros
- Very broad feature set
- Open source: makes us independent from a single provider
- large community: Several professional service providers, and many voluntary helpers made us solve any problem quickly
Cons
- learning curve: Due to the broad features and complexity we needed quite some time to fully understand the capabilities
- Industry: Primary/Secondary Education
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Review Source
Excellent package targeted for the Non Profit Sector
Pros
The software is free, libre and open source. it is customizable and extensible and works seamlessly with the most popular content management systems. It has public support forums, chat rooms and issue tracker.
Cons
The software is free and open, you need to have the expertise (or pay someone) to install and customize it for you.
- Industry: Marketing & Advertising
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 1-5 months
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Review Source
Exceptional value
We have had a wonderful experience with installing/implementing CiviCRM for a nonprofit client. We're very thankful for the community's help when we needed help with an issue, which was quickly resolved.
Pros
Other than the fact it's open source, which is extremely beneficial to nonprofits, the community is vibrant and quick to offer sound advice.
Cons
It's truly an excellent CRM for nonprofits. What could be a huge step forward would be a templating system for front-end design.
- Industry: Architecture & Planning
- Company size: 51–200 Employees
- Used Weekly for 1+ year
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Review Source
Great general use database
Still learning it, but it is a great tool for managing our volunteer and client database
Pros
Super flexible, can be used with nearly any type of data
Cons
it is not very user friendly / self explanatory
- Used Weekly for 1-5 months
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Review Source
Specifically designed for a variety of Non Profits
The flexibility of working with a strong team that understands the business requirements gets the non-profit up to speed faster.
Pros
Great Business Rules, Forms and Integrations. The setup is complicated as the Non-Profit needs to understand its business processes. Being forced to understand what works and best practices is a significant benefit.
Cons
Be prepared to spend time on setting CiviCRM on the right path. The user interface is old fashioned compared to Program Management tools I'm used to for software development. Search is in the fashion of a database query rather than as a blob search. You have to know what you are looking for in a number of different areas rather than have the search self-develop,