Why We Built an Open-Source Alternative to HubSpot
Most businesses we work with reach the same fork in the road: they need a real CRM, HubSpot is the obvious answer, and then the bill arrives. Here's why we built an open-source alternative our clients actually own.
Most of the businesses we work with at Venture Drake reach the same fork in the road. They've outgrown spreadsheets, they need a real CRM, and the obvious answer is HubSpot. It's polished, it's everywhere, and it's "free to start."
Then the bill arrives.
The free tier runs out fast — a thousand contacts, two users — and the next step up is per-seat pricing that grows exactly as fast as the team does. Add the onboarding fees and the contact-tier upgrades, and a "free CRM" quietly becomes one of the larger lines in a small business's software budget. Worse, the data and the workflows all live inside someone else's platform. Leaving later is a project in itself.
We saw this pattern enough times that we decided to do something about it.
What we wanted instead
Three things, really:
- Own the data. The CRM should run on the client's own infrastructure, against their own database — not be rented from a vendor.
- No per-seat tax on growth. Adding a salesperson shouldn't trigger a bigger invoice every month.
- Built to extend. Most of our clients already run Laravel apps. The CRM should be part of that app, not a silo bolted on beside it.
So we built Laravel CRM: a full-featured, open-source CRM that installs as a Laravel package under the MIT license. Leads, deals, quotes, invoices, contacts, pipelines, email and SMS marketing, live chat — the things teams actually use day to day — with unlimited users and no licensing cost.
For teams that don't want to manage servers, there's an optional managed cloud plan starting at $49/month flat. For everyone else, it's composer require and you own the whole thing.
How it compares to HubSpot
We wrote up the full breakdown — pricing, features, data ownership, and where HubSpot genuinely still makes more sense — over on the product blog:
The short version: HubSpot is still the right call if you have no technical resources and marketing automation is the centre of your business. But if you want to own your data, avoid lock-in, and stop paying per seat as you grow, an open-source CRM is increasingly the smarter long-term bet.
Want help setting it up?
This is what we do. If you'd like a CRM that fits your business instead of the other way around, get in touch — we can build, integrate, and host it for you. We also offer a website + integrated Laravel CRM package if you're starting from scratch.