The Driving Force and Motivation

Our goal with SpiceCRM is to deliver the next level of Open Source CRM. We believe that with SugarCRM the Open Source part of the project has a great base but needs to be taken to the next level. Development of SpiceCRM is driven by a set of market forces and believes that are the base for the project and the successful collaboration in delivering a superior product.

We want to keep up the commitment to Open Source continuing where SugarCRM is leaving CE at this Stage. The core of SpiceCRM will remain Open Source and be available to the community driving and developing it further. The source code also remains public available on GitHub. Also the new developed components like the SpiceCRM UI or the SpiceCRM Realtime Server are released under a GPL License.

A core idea is to keep up a community that jointly drives the products core. Development should be driven by technology and Innovation but also by the customers and communities needs. The idea is to share what can be shared and allow cross utilization of new standards and ideas with the goal to make CRM more effective and affordable for everyone. We collaborate on GitHub in our community Site and on channels like Rocketchat and others.

We want to keep Control on the product and the strategy and be able to drive it and influence the direction where the product is going. The power remains in the hands of the team and community driving the product and not in the hands of single companies. We do understand that this process also costs time and effort but see this working in so many other products that we believe this will also work for CRM.

While we embrace Open Source as a driving pattern we are also focusing on developing strong business driving the Open Source Platform. SpiceCRM is also clearly intended to enable contributing partners to generate Revenue with extensions, services and support. The business Opportunity should be there for contributors as well as for companies using the provided technology.

The Guiding Principles

SpiceCRM is driven by a set of guiding principles which we believe are a solid base for developing and delivering a proven CRM solution that is flexible, extendible and future proof.

The most important key to success of CRM and user adoption is usability and a great user experience. We embrace lightning design as we believe it is a great design framework for an enterprise application. We utilize Angular as we believe this is the current best in class HTML5 Development framework. And we have a key focus on building usability and easy of use in all components and processes.

Over the years CRM has grown into a mission critical product. Companies are modeling processes that are key to their success in their CRM Systems. Thus a CRM system needs to be of enterprise grade. This means standards, quality, operability and scalability. So one of our guiding principal is to have enterprise readiness in mind while ensuring that the product can be used in all types and sizes of companies. From Small to Medium to Large.

Enterprise Readiness also means to adhere to the latest standards and the latest releases of the underlying technology. Staying up to date in terms of features like PHP or Angular is an imperative for operational security of a system in a fast changing world like the web space currently is.

Keeping the level of required coding should be kept to a minimum. The web world is moving towards a no code strategy and so do we with SpiceCRM. SpiceCRM is built as a webcomponent framework that allows flexible design of the user interface as well as processes. So wherever possible it is our goal to keep the option to configure without writing a single line of code to the max.

While we of course aim to keep the configuration option as open as possible and embrace the no code principles we also understand that there needs to be the flexibility to extend and enrich. SpiceCRM is also designed to be a platform that allows flexible development of additional processes, features, functions and further backendservices and webcomponents. A clear separation of core and custom features is defined that will also ensure that systems remain upgradeable.

We aim to support large as well as small customers. We will continue to drive a strategy that allows cloud and on premise deployments. And we clearly build and support and architecture that allows scalability to also support tens of thousands of users and millions of records.

SpiceCRM build on open source and on open tools. The backend is built of SugarCRM CE coded in PHP, the frontend is built using Angular, the design is based on lightning design. The search engine is powered by Elastic Search, the Sockets are powered by NodeJS. Our project is hosted on GitHub. And we also aim to stay always on the latest releases and support the actual technology.