Zurmo

I used self-hosted Zurmo to manage my list of clients for a music gig. Not wanting to pay for something as full-featured as SFDC, and wanting something a little nicer than the community version of SugarCRM I found this. It's actually really straightforward to use, the interface is quite nice, and there's a gamification element which I think is really cool, although not useful unless you have more than a few people working in your system.

To be honest for what it is I can't think of anything that I didn't like about Zurmo. I had some trouble initially with the setup but that was due to outdated software on my webserver and an update fixed that. I wish that their blog and content on the website was updated more frequently - if you don't look at the date of the latest version release you could easily be led to believe that the project had been abandoned.

Feature packed
Ease of use
Lots of options
Makes it easy to keep track of clients, projects, and opportunities

Installation and upgrades (at least of the free version) were difficult for someone with minimal linux experience

Zurmo provides a free, open source CRM platform. This was invaluable to us, as it allowed for us to customize it without paying high premiums. As a basic CRM, it functions well. I liked all the ways it could be customized to meet our business needs.

For any kind of decent support, you need to pay for it. This is par for the course, however. Also, the updates for the free version lagged behind the paid. On top of that, we heard that development is ceasing, which caused us to move to another product.

We tried using zurmo for many months and liked the price point ($0). Running on self hosted was relatively easy to setup on cpanel. Many customizations available

Ultimately for the configuration and upkeep required to get started, it wasn't worth it for our needs. We ended up going with zoho crm free level to reduce administration time and hosting load.