Vtiger Review 2024: Features, Pros & Cons (2024)

• Vtiger is an open-source customer relationship management (CRM) platform that is designed to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes.
• It offers both a free plan as well as some of the most competitively priced plans on the market.
• Vtiger is a feature-rich CRM offering contact management and engagement, internal collaboration, built-in marketing tools, lead management, sales pipelines complete with automations, a help desk, inventory management, reports and analytics, project management, a learning management system (LMS) portal and the list goes on.
• Overall, Vtiger is a popular and well-rated CRM with a 4-plus out of 5 star rating across numerous review platforms, including G2, Capterra and Gartner.

Pros

Vtiger has a long list of advantages. To start, its pricing is highly competitive with low-cost paid plans starting at $12 per user per month—and a free forever plan. It also has a free 15-day trial of its premium plans, giving users the ability to test-drive the CRM at no cost (and without a credit card). It stands out as being one of the most customizable CRMs on the market and for its breadth of features, including many unique features for a CRM. For example, it offers appointment scheduling, sales orders and invoicing, a learning management system (LMS), user management for teams, numerous automations, a drag-and-drop email campaign builder and more.

Cons

In terms of Vtiger’s cons, the biggest thing is that it involves a learning curve. It’s not that it’s necessarily difficult to use, but it is so comprehensive that it inherently involves a lot to learn. Another thing that’s worth mentioning is that while most features are very well-designed and modern, there are some that feel a bit dated and clunky. Even the fact that it often opens links in new tabs makes it a bit disjointed at times and often leads to windows cluttered with numerous open tabs.

Vtiger is an open-source CRM that gives users a centralized platform to unify sales, marketing and support. Together, it helps businesses optimize their operations, improve their sales, build customer relationships and maximize growth. What’s unique about Vtiger is not only that it is open source and therefore available to the public for free, but it is also very user-friendly and it is highly customizable, so it can easily be transformed into a CRM that meets the unique needs of many industries and business sizes.

While it offers a free plan, it also has premium plans for those who need more advanced features or need more users. What’s nice about it is that it has à la carte pricing, so businesses can build out the CRM with the features they need—without paying for features they don’t need.

As a feature-packed CRM, Vtiger boasts a lengthy list of features, many of which have features within features. Its core offering includes sales automation and enablement (encompassing contact and lead management, sales funnels, document management and more), pipeline management, marketing automations, communication tools (e.g., internal collaboration, calendar, unified inbox) and productivity tools (e.g., project management, work orders, inventory management). Together, users are able to more effectively manage their sales, marketing and customer support functions.

Sales Automation and Enablement

The Vtiger sales automation and enablement features are central to contact management. It offers a modern and intuitive interface where users can import existing contacts and automatically import contacts from third-party sources, such as online web forms and social media. Every lead is given a lead score, which is derived from factors such as engagement level and profile details. The lead score helps your team increase conversion rates by easily identifying and focusing on leads with the highest potential for conversion. Additionally, it also makes communication very easy with contacts, as it has a one-click option to call, email, text or WhatsApp contacts directly from their profile.

In terms of sales enablement, Vtiger offers a handful of features to help sales agents more effectively close sales. For example, it provides email templates to help make it easier for agents to set up email marketing campaigns, appointment pages so sales reps can easily schedule calls and meetings, sales quotes, and document management to help your team stay organized.

Pipeline Management

The sales pipeline management feature is designed to help users more efficiently prospect leads and close sales. It employs a drag-and-drop Kanban sales pipeline that is very flexible and customizable, so users can build out their sales pipelines as it suits them. It also includes deal management to help sales teams stay on top of deals and ensure no one drops the ball on a deal. Something that we find unique about Vtiger is that—despite that this should be commonplace—it uniquely enables users to set sales targets, measure performance, create sales forecasts and set up quotas.

Marketing Automation

In the world of CRMs, Vtiger has one of the most complete lists of built-in marketing tools and automations out there. It offers email marketing complete with email templates to help users get started, SMS texting campaigns, the ability to create custom web forms for lead capture where the leads automatically import to your Vtiger dashboard, a landing page builder, a URL shortener and its Social Module.

Within its marketing feature set, one of the most unique aspects of it is its Social Module. Here, users can monitor and interact with customers from external sources, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google Business Profile—all from within your Vtiger dashboard.

Productivity Tools

To further improve efficiency, Vtiger has a number of productivity tools. These include a comprehensive project management platform that makes it easy to monitor the process of projects with a Gantt chart view, milestones, notifications to ensure you never miss a task or deadline, collaboration tools and document management. It also has inventory management and task management, and uniquely offers the ability to create work orders that can be sent to customers using a live link or downloaded as a PDF. Additionally, Vtiger has a mobile app, so users can all have full access to Vtiger while they are on the go.

Communication and Collaboration

Sales teams rarely operate in silos and team communication is key for the success of most businesses, so Vtiger offers a variety of built-in communication and team collaboration tools. For example, it has calendar management that integrates with major email service providers such as Google and Outlook, a unified inbox where users can see all incoming messages and emails in one centralized location, assign emails to users, and automatic email linking. It also integrates with major document storage providers such as Dropbox and Google Drive as a means to help teams share (and locate) documents with ease. Last but not least, it has internal collaboration tools, giving users the ability to post comments and reactions, tag users and highlight text. Users can also run reports on comments and get real-time notifications for mentions.

In our experience, Vtiger is one of the best CRMs for team collaboration. It’s not often that you see so many well-thought-out communication features and though many of these may sound small in theory, they can make a big difference in practice for many teams.

One Pilot

Vtiger’s One Pilot plan is its free forever plan. It’s available for up to 10 users and up to 3,000 “records” or contacts with the caveat that it only includes one sales pipeline. It includes access to all core features, such as contact management, email and SMS marketing, project management and help desk. It does not offer more advanced features, such as automations, lead routing and scoring, sales orders and invoicing, LMS or vendor management. It’s a good entry-level CRM for very small teams that want a centralized platform to manage contacts and foster leads.

One Growth

The One Growth plan is available for $12 per user per month with annual billing or $15 per user per month for up to 15 users, but with a record limit of 100,000. It does not limit sales pipelines, and it offers extra features that the free One Pilot plan does not have such as automations, lead routing, sales orders and invoicing and more. It’s better suited for businesses that offer varying products or services and therefore need various pipelines. It’s also ideal for businesses that want more time-saving features with its inclusion of automations and lead routing.

One Professional

The One Professional plan costs $30 per user per month when billed annually or $42 per month with monthly billing. Similar to the mid-tier, One Growth plan, it also has a 15-user and 100,000-record limit. It comes with everything from the mid-tier plan, plus numerous additional features such as lead scoring to help sales reps prioritize leads that are most likely to convert, vendor management, a learning management system (LMS) for those that sell online courses, the ability to process subscriptions, track payments, manage purchase orders and more. While it’s very similar to the One Growth plan in terms of users and record limits, it does offer a lot more features for those who need more advanced tools.

App-Only

Additionally, Vtiger also gives users a “single-app” option, which allows full access to one of its five core “apps” (marketing, sales, help desk, projects or inventory). The single-app option is available with the One Professional plan or higher, and it costs $20 per user per month with annual billing for the One Professional plan.

Booster Packs

Vtiger uniquely offers “boosters,” which function as add-ons. For example, you can add one custom module for $15 per month, add one live chat agent for $7 per month, add one grid field for $5 per month and so on. These can be a good way to build out a highly custom CRM with affordable à la carte pricing.

It’s easy to register for a new Vtiger account—especially thanks to its free 15-day trial that does not require a credit card. The registration process is quick with just a couple of prompts until you are redirected to your new user dashboard. We found the account setup process to be pretty easy (e.g., import contacts, configure workflows, customize modules); however, due to Vtiger’s breadth of features, expect it to take a bit of time to set up. One thing we’ll note is that while some features are very modern, such as its contact import interface, others feel a bit dated, such as its module customization interface. So, we found some aspects of it are much easier and faster to set up than others.

For the most part, we find Vtiger to be among the most user-friendly CRMs—especially in comparison to its feature-rich, all-in-one counterparts. Granted, due to its sheer number of features, it’s not without a learning curve. For example, while its dashboard has a modern, minimalist feel, this initially makes it a bit of a challenge to find features as they are not all overly apparent. This is in part because it’s not inherently obvious that it has an additional menu that you click on from the top left-hand menu.

Granted, once you get accustomed to its navigation, we find that features are fairly easy to learn and most are well-designed. For example, its email marketing campaign builder walks you through the process of building a campaign and its email designer utilizes a drag-and-drop interface complete with pre-built content blocks, which we found made it easy to use. Additionally, it offers two free hours of onboarding to help new users get set up.

One thing we don’t like about it is that some links in the dashboard redirect you to a new window. There are some instances where this can be helpful, but in our experience, it often means that after using the CRM, we end up with a handful of tabs open and it begins to get cumbersome to keep track of which tab was for what.

Users can rest assured that Vtiger has all key security measures in place to help safeguard their data. On top of that, Vtiger has one of the wider ranges of user-controlled security features. Not only does it offer the basics such as two-factor authentication, it also has some very rare options such as login hours and login IP addresses. Additionally, it offers one of the most advanced user roles and permissions settings with full customization capabilities over roles and what they are able to access.

Vtiger customer support is available 24/7 by email, phone and live chat for all plans. Its live chat has a turnaround time of two minutes, making it quick to get connected to a live agent. In our experience, its support is indeed quick to get in touch with and it is very helpful and its help center is comprehensive with dozens of user guides and troubleshooting information. Granted, we have yet to run into any major issues, though user reviews tend to say the same.

It also offers premium support for those with 50-plus users who are interested in having a dedicated account manager. This comes at the added cost of 25% of your subscription fee.

Vtiger is packed with features, many of which are geared toward fairly unique needs. For example, it offers a help desk automation, print marketing templates, performance insights and reporting, AI-based tools (i.e., Calculus and GPT), stock visibility with Stockroom, user management for admin control, QR codes, a learning management system (LMS) for those with online courses and over 500 integrations for further flexibility.

Vtiger vs. Bitrix24

Bitrix24 and Vtiger are two head-to-head competitors with very similar feature sets. However, while they both offer a free version, Bitrix24’s premium plans cost over three times as much as Vtiger’s, making Vtiger the more affordable option. Granted, all of Bitrix24’s plans include unlimited deals, whereas Vtiger has a record limit. Both are very customizable, though Vtiger tends to be better suited for businesses large and small, whereas Bitrix24 tends to be better for midsized companies.

Vtiger vs. Zoho CRM

In a battle between Zoho CRM and Vtiger, the winner depends on what you’re looking for. Both boast nearly identical features—at similar price points with free plans and paid plans starting at $12 per user per month for Vtiger and $14 per user per month with Zoho CRM. However, the main difference is that while Zoho CRM is very intuitive and therefore very easy to use, making it a good choice for beginners and large teams that want to reduce onboarding time, Vtiger is highly customizable, making it the better choice for businesses with unique CRM needs.

Vtiger vs. HubSpot

When comparing Vtiger to HubSpot, it goes without saying that HubSpot is the far more well-known option, and for that reason, it is more popular. However, they largely offer similar features as direct all-in-one CRM competitors. Where they differ most is that HubSpot offers a greater depth of features, it doesn’t quite feel as much like a CRM as it does a sales and marketing machine. That said, Vtiger may be more suitable for the CRM user seeking a very versatile way to manage contacts, projects, inventory and orders, whereas HubSpot is more geared towards those looking for a CRM with a heavy focus on marketing.