We feel there are too many obstacles facing not-for-profits (NFPs) considering commercial CRM offerings, including many of those that are charity oriented. From licensing models which restrict the fluid expansion of an organisation's user base (why should you be punished with higher costs for being successful?), to support from commercial companies being inherently tied to one supplier; a NFP would benefit from the option to 'shop around' for those most appropriate, e.g. based on: proximity and availability on-site, cost, experience, value added services... They also often lack the capacity for charity relevant workflows, necessitating either customisations, complicated and inefficient workarounds or an en-masse call for new functionality, as individual charities do not appear to carry the weight required to influence subtle NFP-only changes to market leading software, without large expense.

On the flip side, CiviCRM is completely free and open-source, carrying with it a friendly, hard-working and enthusiastic community of developers and implementers, constantly listening to the users' needs and sculpting future releases to the requirements of NFP organisations. This is exciting!

The community around CiviCRM is both welcoming and vibrant. CiviCRM as a software solution is a powerful and flexible data management solution for a vast array of nonprofit organizations ranging from the startup NGO to the established multi-million dollar foundation. In our daily work we are seeing more and more NPOs moving away from proprietary systems and single vendor SaaS solutions and embracing the open source community around CiviCRM. Organizations using CiviCRM love the extensibility and the freedoms that come with open source, freedom to choose hosting, freedom to choose project partners, and the freedom to re-use, re-purpose and re-deploy without paying extra.

CiviCRM provides a vital tool whereby nonprofits and other social projects can implement strong contact-relationship management capabilities without high monthly fees. It also provides the integration and customization capabilities necessary to make such software useful in the complex, lived reality of doing social engagement work. Plus it continues to build the open source toolset made available to the Commons and grow the common good.

Civi has been an amazing tool for CMJ (and for other organizations I work with) to keep our most important data all in one place in a user friendly way.

Worked with CiviCRM as core team developer for more than 2 years. Now we are working as a team and providing service with CiviCRM installation, customization and training. One thing about CiviCRM community is that it's very healthy and really helpful. It's really great that i am part of this community and we want to grow this more and more . Also whatever the problems we are facing there is a solution on forums, or we will get the proper guidelines to solve the issues. Big salute to the CiviCRMcommunity :)