Many people think that free systems are not offering enough to work with. Today we are looking at one of the accessible open CRM sources, the Vtiger. Vtiger started in the year 2004 and since then it has had over 5 million downloads. This review will show you if it is the right CRM system for you or if you should switch to a different one.

Is Vtiger any good?

Vtiger is a leading Cloud CRM solution architected on an industry-leading Open Source Core. Trusted by over 300,000 companies to drive their core sales, marketing, and support functions. Vtiger has been consistently recognized as a leader in the CRM space by top review sites.

Vtiger pricing plans

The paid plans offer 15 days free trial, the free plan promises to be free forever. The Vtiger website also provides a calculator, where you can calculate the final price by adding the number of members, type of billing, and type of plan. You can put up to 999 members.

What is Vtiger and what can you use it for?

Vtiger is best for small or medium small businesses. It can help you get closer to your customers and help you grow your business more. Overall It helps to organize and store information on your sales and marketing efforts and successes, automates tasks to help eliminate your to-do list, and can work with customer support in the same platform where client data is stored. Basically, you have everything you need to have for your business all in one place.

Free Vtiger versus paid Vtiger: The differences

As we said before, Vtiger offers 3 pricing plans, and one of them is free. Now it`s time for us to compare them.

As it usually is, the free version of everything offers the least amount of features and useful widgets. The free version of Vtiger called One Pilot is promised to be free forever without any kind of payment in the future. It is an ideal plan for a starting business because there are two limits. The limit of maximum users using the Vtiger which is 10 and the number of records is 3000. Regarding customer support, you are allowed to only use emails. The paid plans do not have any limits when it comes to the number of users or the number of records.

The contact management section has 6 out of 9 features in the free plan, which is pretty good. The only features you have to pay for are the Engagement Score, Contact Enrichment, and the Best Time to Contact. The feature Best Time to Contact is available only in the most expensive plan, the Enterprise plan.

The actions centre offers only 3 out of 8 features, the rest is for the paid plans. All the plans have access to one personal inbox per user, there is a difference in the team and shared inboxes, while the free plan only has one, the Professional plan has 3 and the Enterprise plan has 10 available.

The free Pilot plan has access only to a personal calendar, so if you want a calendar shared with your teammates you have to go for one of the paid plans.

The free Pilot plan does not offer many features in the Sales process management section. You can do basic activities like making deals, leads, and tax configuration. If you want to go deeper into your sales by making campaigns, having multiple currencies, or forecasting your sales, you have to pay for either the Professional plan or the Enterprise plan.

Regarding inventory, the free Pilot plan only has access to products and services. Both of the paid plans have access to many more features, for example to vendors, price books, subscriptions, or payment tracking.

The free Pilot plan also does not include user groups for tasks, and sales insight and limits document sharing to only 5 per month. The professional plan includes 100 shares of documents and the Enterprise plan has an unlimited amount.

All three plans have access to group inboxes, phone calls, SMS, and direct messages with an attached file. If you`re looking to secure your business online,  you should get the Enterprise plan, it offers SAML Based Single Sign-on, Allowed IPs, and Encryption at Rest.

What interesting features Vtiger has?

Besides general features like calendar, inventory, project management, or appointments reminder, Vtiger offers you many excellent features every business will be glad to have. We picked some of the features and we are going to get deeper into their functionality.

Dashboard

A dashboard tracks productivity and sales progression. It monitors your team’s performance easily and empowers you with flexibility and different views for sales reps and managers.

You can monitor your team’s performance and evaluate every member’s performance to take corrective measures if needed. Vtigers dashboard is fully customizable, so you can put the important information to your liking. There are 12 main widgets for your dashboard you can use, for example, average sales cycle, which shows the average time taken to close all the deals in the selected period, or deals created, which shows how many deals were created in the selected period.

The dashboard also provides a Sales Leaderboard, which also has many widgets you can use for finding out how is your team doing in sales and making deals. The widgets can show what product is the best selling, what deals were lost, or which of your team members is the most active in making sales and deals.

Contacts manager

Contact Management is the process of collating and organizing contact information. Tracking customer interactions, increasing conversions, and driving up your sales.

You can capture contacts by using web forms for website visitors. Contacts can also be imported from third-party apps such as Google contacts or email.

Vtiger offers lead scores which are calculated from profiles and engagements. Lead scores are used to gain higher conversions.

Whenever you have to find a contact you have already saved in records, any information will be used for searching through the contact. It includes data on the customer, organization, deals, quotes, interactions, or notes. Vtiger also informs you if the contact is online, idle, etc.

When it comes to communicating with your chosen contact, you can do it directly from the contact record. You can choose from communication via email, SMS, WhatsApp, or phone call. You can also make your colleagues participate in a particular interaction by mentioning them.

Sales forecast

With this feature, you can determine peak and lean periods and manage the sales pipeline better. You can set monthly or quarterly forecasts. You can also specify sales goals for every team member.

Forecast Categories can be used to represent forecast scenarios. You can add new sales stages to categories and customize forecast scenarios as per your needs. You can export deals, forecast information, or forecast summaries.

Sales analytics

It is very important to see how well are your sales doing. Sales insights track and coach your sales teams to achieve goals, gain leads, and convert more deals by generating reports in the pipeline, sales team activities, and performances.

Viger focuses on visualization. You can make many charts showing your sales, customize them and trace their source to a salesperson. Beneath each chart sits tabular data that breaks down what you see in charts in different ways, painting a clearer picture of how your team, pipeline, and deals contribute to the trends that you see. A range of pre-built charts and tables visualize your sales organization’s health and help you spot opportunities for improvements across all of your inputs and processes.

Help desk

When it comes to help desk, case management is very important. Case management is the process that assists support executives in resolving customer issues as specified in the SLAs. It combines automation with the resolution process for efficiency. Vtiger offers to create cases directly from the customers’ email or through a web form. You can also set up a reminder for a deadline of an issue.

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is an agreement between a business and its customer. It outlines the services to be delivered within agreed-upon conditions and deadlines. Vtiger allows you to create any number of SLA policies that dictate how you should respond to cases under various scenarios of urgency. You can create separate SLA policies for customers and internal teams based on their priority.

Vtiger also provides a customer portal, where customers can find answers to their questions. Customers can also share documents directly through the customer portal, it is made to eliminate the need for email threads and manual attachments to contact records.

Vtiger Pros and Cons

Pros

It is a very easy software for your business, easy to learn, easy to use. The free version has many important features and if you don’t shoot for the stars immediately, the free version will be enough for you for a very long time. Vtiger has very clean and clear aesthetics, nothing crazy to look at, you can find everything you need very fast. The prices of the paid versions are very good.

Cons

Although Vtiger does pretty much everything you need it to do, it does not do everything very well. Some people might like, that the system is simple, but we think that it is too simple, there is a lot of room for improvement. A very big con for us was, that Vtiger assumes you have one and only mail system and it does not work properly when you have two or more.

Complaints and praises by some real Vtiger users

On the page, www.getapp.com has VTiger a rating of 4.3/5 by a total of 314 users, which is quite a good rating. We do not know what pricing the users have chosen. Let`s see what people using this CRM have to say about this.

Praises

We can see that people like how easy it is to use and it has everything you need on your daily business day.

Complaints

There are not many complaints about using Vtiger, only some features require a bit of patience and some features do not work exactly the way they should.

Is Vtiger really worth it?

We would say yes, it is worth it. No matter if you`re a starting business with a little budget or a well-working business that just wants more for its customers, Vtiger could be your right hand. You get the most out of it by paying for a paid plan however the free plan offers a very long list of features. It is a solid and affordable system for businesses.