CiviCRM/Comparisons

CiviCRM is squarely focused on the needs of the non-profit organization managing relationships with their constituents. As a Free Software system, the development model of the system aligns just as well with non-profits' mission as the system functionality. When choosing CiviCRM initially, oftentimes people want to compare it to Salesforce.com which reportedly offers some level of product to non-profits. This forum discussion touches on that comparison. Meanwhile, SocialRaise's Kevin LaManna gives some perspective on choices he's familiar with.

There are sources like "IdealWare" which purport to help non-profits select and implement the ideal solutions for their needs. There is at least one glaring caveat: they themselves use proprietary services for their own delivery. So, if they were preaching what they are practicing, then they would just be marketing Salsa's services.

Competing Products

SugarCRM

SugarCRM is a popular CRM system that started out as free software, but is now proprietary.

SalesForce

SalesForce is another proprietary offering which is only offered as a service. They have a plethora of products (segmentation), and pricing/licensing strategies according to the size of your wallet so you can't even begin to compare it generally to CiviCRM which is free and comprehensive.

Salsa Labs

https://www.salsalabs.com/ offers cloud-based subscription services. Started out as a non-profit. Later grew, received venture capital, and merged with DonorPro

Integrations

CiviCRM integrates with several free software website platforms: Drupal, WordPress, Joomla. And, it also integrates with other applications in your complete application stack: Payment processors, Accounting systems, Messaging platforms, etc. Accounting integration was something that came with CiviCRM 4.3 (2013)

Through 'webhooks', you can have external systems reach back into your CiviCRM system to effect a desired outcome even when functionality is being offloaded to a vendor-supplied system. Take the example of an external Mail Delivery engine. You might use it to send newsletters for your organization. If the external system supports web hooks, then for every bounced email, it could reach back into your CiviCRM to flag a particular email address as 'bounced', preventing future (bad) deliveries, and eliminating the need to reconcile these things by some other (manual) means.

In order to do integrations, you either have the skills internally; or more likely you will need the services of consultants and designers to design the look/feel, do the coding needed, and train staff on using the feature.

Reference

• https://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Quickbooks+Integration is an old reference in the confluence system
• https://book.civicrm.org/user/current/contributions/accounting-integration/ is the (former) manual for the CiviContribute module