I “discovered” ERPNext by pure mistake. I was searching for a SuiteCRM alternative, and basically alternativeto.net matched you with my search.
Why isn’t this software more prominent? I spent like … weeks … searching for a modern CRM/ERP FOSS solution but the only results I could find were “the usual suspects” (Suite, vTiger etc).
Can’t we do something about this? I’m located in Europe and I could give a hand with this.
Maybe because ERPNext is not really a strong contender in the CRM space ?
ERP yes, but not CRM.
I can find it on Google’s first page when searching for “free erp” and “open source erp”.
Maybe we can optimize it for “CRM” as well? Because it has most features that competitive CRMs have.
No it does not.
The CRM is one of the weakest modules in ERPNext. Compared to the serious CRM products in the market it is a non starter.
I guess that is why ERPNext search is not optimised for CRM as a search word.
Most of us here don’t have much information of CRM. We are experts in other areas. If you have good knowledge maybe you can do a comparison of ERPNext vs others. It would be good starting point.
I am going to be exploring integration with Mautic
There is a rest api Mautic Developer Documentation
and some older python examples that either could be used as a guide, or maybe still work
In this scenario, you can make Mautic the main database of contact info, and import contacts that are full customers into erpnext CRM.
I personally use https://zato.io to manage these integrations, but still use python libraries like GitHub - frappe/frappe-client: Python library to use Frappe API and pymautic or whatever, imported as python libraries, to talk to the respective tool.
I guess eventually erpnext could emulate the more advanced campaign management etc of Mautic. But for now this is the direction I am going in. Mautic really works well.
We use Mautic and ERPNext together at my organization. It’s a nice fit, but even together you’re still a long way from a good CRM experience. Mautic is phenomenal at automated campaigns, but it doesn’t provide much support for individuated interactions.
In theory, this is really where ERPNext could come in, but there’s still a lot of work to do. If I could wish for one major feature overhaul in ERPNext, it’d be to see email become a proper first-class citizen. Right now, it’s pretty clunky. We’re slowly investigating how to direct some work this direction, but it’s a big job requiring a lot of low level work.
We were using Mautic since more than 4 years, though new to ERPNext. There is an integration app of Mautic with ERPNext is available at GitHub - Monogramm/erpnext-mautic: Mautic integration with ERPNext.
Unfortunately it does not work but we could install it. If someone take the initiation to take up it from there and make it workable , then it can enhance combined value delivery for marketing and crm . We have one client who is interested in this integration and we can convince them to contribute some money towards this work of integration. We believe that any developers who have exposure to Mautic and ERPnext can complete this quickly as most of the base work is ready in this app.
Can you please explain more on this? Also, what other CRM features are missing in ERPNext? @olamide_shodunke
I’m using Mautic but it’s far from being a CRM. It’s more marketing automation rather than CRM, as it lacks basic tools like Leads, Offers etc.
@ChillarAnand we’re testing out ERPNext this week and I’ll get back with some feedback if you want.
Hello @ChillarAnand
We can start with the relationship between Lead and Customer.
When a lead is converted in ERPNext, a customer is created and the lead still remains as a separate entity
This should not be. The nature of the lead should change when he places an order and becomes a customer. Not creating another entity.
In my opinion this is a serious flaw in the process.
I will update this post as I have time later in the day
The Frappe metadata model is remarkably sophisticated, which makes it adaptable to just about any use case.
That breadth of possibility has a downside: pretty much everything looks and feels exactly the same. The UX for enrolling students is very similar to the UX for writing Sales Invoices, which is very similar to the UX for evaluating leads, which is very similar to the UX for managing emails, which is very similar to the UX for designing print formats.
Dedicated CRMs spend huge amount of energy refining a very small number of workflows. That gives them an inherent advantage in some ways, but it’s a limitation as well. ERPNext can have extremely tailored workflows too with Custom Pages, but strangely it seems that Custom Pages seem to be very poorly understood in the developer community. This would, however, be a great place for people to explore.
All the way with you on this. Clients complain that they don’t know which document they are working. A simple background colour coding of the doctype will help user know which document is being used. Have seen this in some ERP where headers are color coded example sales invoice is red but quotation is green.
If your clients are complaining, why not fix it for them? A single line in a client script will allow you to set any background color you want for any doctype. If you’d prefer doing it globally, an app with a few lines of CSS should do the trick too.
What makes Frappe powerful is not its UX design. Rather, what makes Frappe powerful is the power it gives to system administrators to implement highly customized user experiences.
I disagree.
When working with larger organizations, having multiple projects at the same time you may work with a lead on the future project while still being busy with the customer on the previous one.
The several projects should be categorised as an opportunity not a lead.
Fair enough…
What’s the downside of having both lead and customer in the system in parallel?
Do you have a use case for this? We can get it feature on Mautic for others to learn how that can use both ERPNext and Mautic.
@Sam_Rose, @CA_B.C_Chechani, @peterg and @Razva. Would you mind if we can all work together on the Mautic ERPNext integration? We can form a Mautic Tiger Team. It’s a new small group base team in Mautic Community to work on new features or fix bugs.