Open-source / Inexpensive CRM?

Question

I'm looking for something lightweight, I don't mind if it's using something like Joomla/Drupal with extensions/plugins but it needs to have a few key features:

• Front facing website, ability to create pages etc... A simple CMS will do.
• An area for customers, ability to view things like invoices, create support tickets and download files.

That's really it, to be honest I don't even know of paid solutions and I'm struggling to find any solution out there.

Answer 1

Look at SugarCRM and vTiger. Both of these are:

• free and open source
• very popular
• coming with lots of plugins (both free and commercial)
• written in PHP and able to integrate with Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress etc.
• easy and cheap to setup
• easy to extend with own plugins

Answer 2

Drupal is for sure something worth considering. If you'd add a 'module' (= a plugin) like the (fairly popular) Support Ticketing System module, you'd already be pretty close to what you're looking for.

Maybe you also want to check if any of the 'Drupal Distributions' could fit your needs. These distributions are like a set of pre-packaged modules to address specific needs (and typically require less Drupal experience to get you going). Just to mention a few (popular) ones (checkout the links for more details):

• Open Atrium.
• Drupal Commons.
• Open Enterprise.

Answer 3

You might want to have a look at Rubedo:

• it is scalable, which means that you can start small (and then easily grow if needed),
• it has a back office that is designed to be used by any kind of contributor (because not all of them are developers),
• it has a "front facing website" (because it is a website manager).
• it is Open-source.

The best thing about it is that there is a demo: you don't have to install it to try it and see whether it fits your needs or not.