What is fat_free_crm?

Fat Free CRM is an open-source customer relationship management platform, the kind of software businesses use to track their interactions with leads and customers. It is built with Ruby on Rails, a popular web framework, and you self-host it on your own server rather than paying for a subscription to a commercial CRM service like Salesforce or HubSpot. Out of the box it handles the things a small sales or marketing team would need: managing contacts, tracking business accounts, following potential deals through a pipeline, running campaigns, and assigning tasks. Teams can work together in groups, and records can be tagged and organized with custom fields if the default data structure does not match how your organization thinks about customers. The README includes dashboard screenshots showing contact creation, opportunity management, account editing, and task creation as core parts of the interface. The platform can be extended with plugins that add features like webhook notifications, record merging, and time tracking. Developers can also embed it as a module inside a separate Rails application if they want to customize it more deeply or combine it with other software. Installation requires Ruby 3.1 or later and a database, with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite all supported. Guides are available for setting it up on Linux, Mac, and through Heroku. The project is released under the MIT license, meaning anyone can use, modify, or redistribute it without cost. It has been maintained since 2008 by an open-source contributor community, which also runs a Discord server for people who want to ask questions or get involved.