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fatfreecrm/fat_free_crm
Ruby on Rails CRM platform
Fat Free CRM is a self-hosted Rails CRM covering leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, and campaigns. It's aimed at small teams who want to own their CRM data and avoid SaaS lock-in, and can be run as a Rails engine inside an existing app if you need customization hooks.
The Rails engine deployment path is genuinely useful — you can mount it in your own app, override views, and add plugins without forking the core. Custom fields are first-class: you get field groups, typed fields (date pairs, checkboxes, radio), and admin UI for managing them without code changes. The plugin architecture covers practical gaps (webhooks, record merging, time tracking) rather than forcing you to hack the core. CI pipeline includes Brakeman and CodeQL, which is more security discipline than most self-hosted Rails apps bother with.
The frontend stack is aging badly — CoffeeScript, Haml, jQuery-era UJS responses, and an asset pipeline that predates Webpacker. Any significant UI work is going to feel like archaeology. The README copyright ends at 2018 despite recent commits, which hints at how much of the project's momentum relies on a small number of contributors keeping old infrastructure limping along. No API layer: if you need to integrate with anything beyond email dropbox, you're writing it yourself. The observer pattern for model callbacks (EntityObserver, LeadObserver) is a Rails antipattern that was deprecated for good reason — debugging side effects will surprise you.