Which open source self-hosted CRMs do AI answer engines actually recommend?

When an SMB buyer asks an AI assistant which open source CRM to deploy, a shortlist comes back. We asked 44 different phrasings of that question across 2 engines, 88 answers in total, and counted every product named. This is the result. Nobody paid to be on it, and no vendor list was written in advance — the 29 vendors below are simply everyone the engines named.

Run 6 Aug 2026 Questions 44 Answers 88 Vendors named 29 Top-10 repeatability 9/10

Free to read, raw data included.

Is one of these open source self-hosted CRMs yours?

The board is re-measured every month. For $9.99 a month you get one email when your own row moves — your rank and answer count, who took the mentions you were absent from, and which of the 44 questions started or stopped naming you. Leave your address and I reply by hand with what your row reads today. What is in it, and the $199 one-off report →

Nothing is charged and nothing starts — I reply by email. Your address is used to answer you and to set up billing; it does not go on a list.

The leaderboard

“Answers” is how many of the 88 answers named that product. Share is the same number as a percentage. The two right-hand columns split it by engine. Every row has its own link — the # beside a vendor name gives you something like connexion.me/c/oscrm/#espocrm. Click a vendor's name to see which of the 44 questions named them, and click one of those to read the answer it was counted from, word for word.

#VendorAnswers ShareGeminiPerplexity
1EspoCRM#8293.2%4339
2SuiteCRM#8192.0%4140
3Odoo (Community Edition)#4348.9%2716
4Twenty#4146.6%1130
5SugarCRM#1618.2%160
6Vtiger#1618.2%88
7ERPNext#1112.5%83
8Krayin#910.2%18
9Dolibarr#44.5%13
10YetiForce#44.5%04
11CiviCRM#33.4%21
12OroCRM#33.4%03
13Frappe CRM#22.3%02
14Bitrix24 On-Premise#11.1%01
15BottleCRM#11.1%01
16CRMX#11.1%01
17Crust CRM/Corteza CRM#11.1%01
18Django CRM#11.1%01
19Erxes#11.1%01
20Fat Free CRM#11.1%10
21Grow CRM#11.1%01
22Horilla CRM#11.1%01
23InsulaCRM#11.1%01
24LeadHub#11.1%01
25openCRX#11.1%01
26OpenEMR#11.1%01
27PHP CRM#11.1%01
28Relaticle#11.1%01
29X2CRM#11.1%01

What is free, and what is for sale

Everything above is free and stays free — the leaderboard, the method, all 88 raw answers and the machine-readable ranking, published in full at the bottom of this page. No vendor paid to be listed, no vendor can pay to move, and nothing here goes behind a login later.

What is for sale is one vendor's row, watched: $9.99 a month to be told when your rank moves, who took your mentions, and which phrasings started or stopped naming you — the board is re-run monthly and you get what changed. A one-off $199 deep report on a single row is the other option. What is in each →

Method

Every claim on this page is reproducible from the files linked at the bottom.

The engines

Gemini (gemini-flash-latest), Perplexity (sonar). Each was called through its public API with a near-empty system prompt — “answer the user's question directly and concisely” — and nothing else. The engines were not asked to produce a list, rank anything, or name vendors. Steering them toward a list would have manufactured the thing being measured.

The questions

44 distinct phrasings of one purchase decision, written before any measurement was run. No vendor name appears in any of them.

These 44 questions are one phrasing family, not every way this market gets asked about. The family is open source self-hosted CRM software — that is the wording they were written from, and it is counted back against them here: 37 of them contain “open”; 37 of them contain “source”; 20 of them contain “self-hosted”; 44 of them contain “crm”; 9 of them contain “software”, and all 44 of them contain at least one. A different family about the same products — a different size of buyer, a different budget, a different constraint, different words — is a different measurement, and it can come back naming a different set of vendors. This board is this family, measured. It is not the whole market.
  1. What is the best open source CRM software for a small sales team?
  2. Best self-hosted CRM for a 20-person company
  3. We want to host our own CRM on-premise to control customer data privacy. What open source options should we evaluate?
  4. Recommend a self-hosted open source CRM for a B2B sales pipeline.
  5. affordable open source CRM for SMB
  6. What self-hosted open source CRMs do small companies actually use?
  7. We are a privacy-focused healthcare company that needs a self-hostable open source CRM. What should we choose?
  8. What open source CRM is best for managing leads and deal stages on our own servers?
  9. We need a self-hosted CRM that integrates with Docker and runs on Linux. Any recommendations?
  10. Best free and open source CRM software for lead management
  11. What is the most active open source CRM project for enterprise sales teams?
  12. We're a 15 person consultancy tired of paying monthly SaaS CRM fees. What open source self-hosted CRM should we switch to?
  13. Top open source CRM tools with custom fields and pipeline management
  14. What self-hosted CRM software is best for GDPR compliance and strict data ownership?
  15. Recommend an open source self-hosted CRM for a non-profit organization.
  16. We need a self-hostable CRM software with email integration and contact management for 50 users.
  17. best self hosted open source sales crm software
  18. What self-hosted open source CRM has the best mobile app and REST API?
  19. We want an open source CRM that we can self-host on AWS via Kubernetes.
  20. Which open source CRM is best for a real estate agency wanting full data ownership?
  21. What open source self-hosted CRM is easiest to customize with Python or PHP?
  22. open source self hosted crm with email marketing and lead tracking
  23. We are migrating away from cloud subscription CRMs to an open source self-hosted alternative. What are the top choices?
  24. What is the best open source CRM software for managing client relationships in a financial services firm?
  25. best self-hosted CRM for tech startups with developer resources
  26. Recommend an open-source CRM platform that can be installed on a local server.
  27. We need a self-hosted CRM tool to manage sales opportunities and quotes. What should we deploy?
  28. Which open source CRM is best for a B2B agency with 30 staff?
  29. What open source self-hosted CRM provides automated sales workflows and lead scoring?
  30. self-hosted open source CRM for digital marketing agency
  31. We need a self-hosted CRM that handles lead capture, contact history, and sales analytics.
  32. What are the most stable open source CRM solutions for small to medium businesses?
  33. Which self-hosted open source CRM has the lowest system resource requirements for a VPS?
  34. open source CRM for high security air-gapped network deployment
  35. We are a manufacturing company looking for a self-hosted open source CRM to track sales leads and customer accounts.
  36. What open source sales CRM is easiest for non-technical users once deployed?
  37. Best open source CRM for software development agencies
  38. We need an open source CRM we can self-host that supports multi-currency and custom sales pipelines.
  39. What open-source self-hosted CRM should a 10-person e-commerce company buy or deploy?
  40. lightweight self hosted open source crm software
  41. What open source CRM is best for a law firm needing strict on-premises data isolation?
  42. Which open source self-hosted CRM offers the best email sync and calendar integration?
  43. We want to replace proprietary sales software with a self-hosted open source CRM. What are our top options?
  44. What open source CRM platform is best for managing B2B account hierarchies and contact contacts on-premise?

How the vendor list was built

Each of the 88 answers was read back and every named product extracted. The vendor list is discovered: a product appears here if and only if an engine named it. Counted are open source and self-hostable customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and broader open source suites whose CRM module was named. Excluded, even when named: proprietary SaaS-only CRMs with no self-hosted edition, standalone marketing automation tools, help desk ticketing systems, ERP platforms with no CRM module named, content management systems, generic low-code backend/database tools with no pre-built CRM logic, project management tools, personal contact managers, and companies named only as an example user.

Spelling variants of one product are folded together — “SuiteCRM”, “Suite CRM” and “suitecrm.com” are one row, and a trailing “by company” is dropped. An edition name is folded into its product when the plain name is at least three times as common, so “EspoCRM Community Edition” counts as EspoCRM and “vTiger CRM Open Source” counts as vTiger. No pair was merged by hand in this category: every fold above is the rule applied mechanically, with no human judgement about who is who.

A product is counted once per answer, however many times that answer mentions it.

Is this stable, or is it noise?

The entire run was repeated a second time, same 44 questions, same engines, independent calls. The top ten came back 9/10 identical. What moved: YetiForce (10 in run A) dropped out of run B's ten and OroCRM (10 in run B) took that place. by position, SugarCRM was 5 in run A and 6 in run B; Vtiger was 6 in run A and 5 in run B; ERPNext was 7 in run A and 9 in run B; Krayin was 8 in run A and 7 in run B; Dolibarr was 9 in run A and 8 in run B. Run B named 24 vendors over 88 answers against run A's 29. The tail moves; the head does not.

A leaderboard whose top ten reshuffles between runs would not be worth publishing, so this check was run before the page was, and the page ships only because it passed.

What this is not

This measures what two answer engines said on 6 Aug 2026, in response to these questions, through their APIs. It is not a quality ranking, not a review, and not advice on which open source self-hosted CRM to choose. A product can be excellent and rank low here — that gap is the point.

The raw data

All 88 answers, verbatim, one JSON object per line: run A · run B. The per-answer extracted product names: run A · run B. Machine-readable ranking: ranking.json.

The answer a vendor panel shows you is read straight out of the run A file linked above — the page fetches the one line it needs and displays it unaltered, so what you read there and what you get by downloading the file are the same bytes.