Relaticle

Open-source CRM, honestly reviewed. Built on Laravel and Filament, owned by you.

TL;DR

• What it is: Open-source (AGPL-3.0) CRM platform built on Laravel 12 and Filament 4 — contact management, sales pipeline, tasks, notes, and AI summaries, all self-hosted on your own server [1].
• Who it’s for: Small teams, agencies, and Laravel developers who need more than a spreadsheet but find HubSpot or Salesforce expensive and over-engineered [1][4].
• Cost savings: HubSpot Starter runs $15–20/seat/month; Salesforce Essentials starts around $25/seat/month. Relaticle’s self-hosted version is free software — you pay only for the server [1].
• Key strength: Modern, clean UI built on Filament with no-code custom fields, multi-workspace support, and AI-powered record summaries out of the box [1].
• Key weakness: Very early-stage project — 1,209 GitHub stars, no independent third-party reviews as of this writing, REST API documentation listed as “coming soon,” and the AGPL-3.0 license has commercial implications that MIT does not [1][README][documentation page].

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What is Relaticle

Relaticle is a self-hosted CRM built with Laravel 12, PHP 8.4, and Filament 4. The stack is a deliberate choice: Filament is a Laravel admin framework with a strong open-source plugin ecosystem, and the combination gives Relaticle a polished admin interface without a custom frontend build. You get contacts, companies, sales pipelines with custom stages, task management, notes, and AI-generated summaries of any record — all on infrastructure you control [1][README].

The project was started by a developer who spent years on SaaS CRMs and got tired of data ownership concerns and per-seat billing. He shipped Relaticle and posted it to r/selfhosted in late 2025. The description from the README is straightforward: “Perfect for: Laravel developers, agencies, and SMBs who need a modern CRM they can customize and self-host” [1][README].

What distinguishes it from older self-hosted CRMs like SuiteCRM or vTiger is the stack. Those projects were built on legacy PHP codebases. Relaticle is Laravel 12 with Livewire 4 and Filament 4 — meaning it follows current Laravel conventions, is maintainable by any PHP developer without archaeology, and benefits directly from the Filament plugin ecosystem [1][3].

The project also ships its own Filament plugins — including Flowforge (Kanban boards), Comments (threaded replies with @mentions and reactions), and a Custom Fields plugin that lets you add field types to any entity without writing migrations. These plugins are sold separately on the Filament marketplace, which is how the team generates revenue while keeping the CRM itself free [3].

At 1,209 GitHub stars, Relaticle is a newer entrant. It’s not yet the established alternative that something like Monica, Twenty, or SuiteCRM is. That’s relevant context for anyone making a long-term infrastructure bet.

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Why people choose it

The sourcing here is thinner than a mature project would have — there are no Trustpilot reviews, no G2 ratings, and no independent head-to-head comparisons yet. What exists is the creator’s original r/selfhosted post [1], a brief mention in Self-Host Weekly’s December 2025 issue [2], and a Techbible listing [4]. That absence of external signal is itself a data point.

From the Reddit thread, the creator’s framing of the motivation maps to three complaints that appear repeatedly in self-hosted CRM discussions: data leaving your servers, per-seat pricing that compounds as teams grow, and legacy codebases that are painful to extend [1]. These aren’t Relaticle-specific insights — they’re the same complaints that pushed people toward Monica for personal contacts and Twenty for B2B pipeline. Relaticle’s bet is that the Filament ecosystem gives it a faster development velocity than projects building custom UIs from scratch.

The Self-Host Weekly mention [2] in December 2025 is a newsletter that covers new and growing self-hosted projects; being included there signals the project has enough momentum to appear in the community’s peripheral vision, but it’s not a review — it’s a listing.

Versus HubSpot. HubSpot has a genuinely useful free tier, but the moment you need sequences, custom reporting, or more than two users with meaningful permissions, you’re looking at $800–$3,200/year for Starter or Professional. Relaticle’s pitch is that a one-time setup on a $10/month VPS replaces that recurring cost entirely [1][README].

Versus Salesforce. Relaticle’s README calls Salesforce “overkill” for its target audience. For most teams under 50 people who aren’t running enterprise sales motions, that’s accurate. Salesforce’s minimum meaningful tier starts around $25/seat/month and scales steeply from there.

Versus SuiteCRM. This is the most direct comparison in the self-hosted CRM space. SuiteCRM is also AGPL-3.0, also free, also self-hostable. The difference is the stack: SuiteCRM is a fork of SugarCRM from 2013, carries significant legacy complexity, and is harder to extend. Relaticle’s modern Laravel stack is the main argument against SuiteCRM if developer experience matters [1][README].

Versus Twenty. Twenty is a newer open-source CRM with a React/TypeScript frontend and a GraphQL API. It has more GitHub traction (20K+ stars) and a more developer-focused architecture. Relaticle’s advantage is the Filament ecosystem and the no-code custom fields system — Twenty requires more engineering to extend. The choice between them maps roughly to “do you want to extend this in PHP or TypeScript?”

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Features

Based on the README and website content — no hands-on testing was conducted for this review:

Core CRM entities:

• Contact (People) management with detailed profiles, interaction history, and advanced search [README][homepage]
• Company management with contact linking and opportunity tracking [README][homepage]
• Sales pipeline with custom stages, lifecycle tracking, and outcome analysis [README][homepage]
• Notes linked to any entity (person, company, task) [README][homepage]
• Task management with assignments, notifications, and team tracking [README][homepage]

Customization:

• No-code custom fields — add any field type to any entity without database migrations [README][homepage]
• Dynamic forms with validation rules [homepage]
• Multi-workspace support with isolated team environments [README][homepage]
• Role-based permissions [README][1]

AI features:

• One-click AI summaries for contacts and deals [homepage]
• AI analyzes notes, tasks, and interactions to generate the summary [homepage]
• No specifics on which LLM provider is used or whether this requires an external API key — the documentation is listed as incomplete [documentation page]

Data portability:

• CSV import and export for contacts, companies, and opportunities [README][homepage]
• No mention of API-based import from HubSpot, Salesforce, or other CRMs

Integrations:

• REST API: listed as “coming soon” in the documentation [documentation page]
• No native integrations listed beyond CSV; you’d wire third-party tools via webhook or wait for the API

Technical stack:

• Laravel 12, PHP 8.4, Filament 4, Livewire 4, Alpine.js, TailwindCSS [1][README]
• PostgreSQL (recommended) or MySQL [1][README]
• Redis for queues (optional for development) [README]
• Meilisearch for search (optional) [1]
• Docker deployment via compose.yml [README]

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Pricing: SaaS vs self-hosted math

Relaticle cloud (app.relaticle.com):

• The website says “Start for free” and “Free Forever” prominently [homepage]
• No pricing page was accessible during research — the cloud tier’s limits (seats, records, features) are not publicly documented
• The team generates revenue through paid Filament plugins: Flowforge (Kanban) is free, Custom Fields is $79, Tapix (CSV import wizard) is $99 [3]

Self-hosted:

• Software license: $0 (AGPL-3.0) [README]
• VPS cost: $5–15/month on Hetzner or Contabo
• Requires PHP 8.4+, PostgreSQL 17+, Composer 2, Node.js 20+, Redis

HubSpot for comparison:

• Free: 2 users, limited pipelines, HubSpot branding
• Starter: ~$15/seat/month (minimum 2 seats = $30/month)
• Professional: ~$90/seat/month — this is where sequences and custom reporting live
• For a 5-person team on Professional: $450/month, $5,400/year

Concrete math for a 5-person team:

If you’re paying HubSpot Starter for 5 seats: $75/month, $900/year. Self-hosted Relaticle on a $10/month Hetzner VPS: $120/year plus one afternoon of setup. Difference: ~$780/year. If you’re on HubSpot Professional at 5 seats: $2,700/year saved. The math is clear — the question is whether Relaticle is a functional replacement for your specific use case, which depends heavily on which HubSpot features you’re actually using.

AGPL-3.0 note: Unlike MIT, AGPL-3.0 requires that if you modify Relaticle and run it as a networked service (which self-hosting is), you must release your modifications under the same license. For most small teams self-hosting for internal use, this is a non-issue. If you’re planning to embed Relaticle into a SaaS product you sell to customers, talk to a lawyer before deploying [README].

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Deployment reality check

The README install path is:

git clone https://github.com/Relaticle/relaticle.git
cd relaticle && composer app-install

For Docker production deployment, a compose.yml is included but isn’t detailed in publicly available documentation [README]. The requirements are more demanding than a typical self-hosted PHP app: PHP 8.4+ (not yet default on most hosting), PostgreSQL 17+ (not MySQL by default), Node.js 20+ for the build step, and optionally Redis and Meilisearch [1][README].

What you actually need:

• A VPS with at least 2GB RAM (PHP + PostgreSQL + Redis + Meilisearch adds up)
• PHP 8.4 installed (Ondřej Surý PPA on Ubuntu, or Docker)
• PostgreSQL 17+
• Composer 2 and Node.js 20+ for the initial build
• A reverse proxy (Caddy or nginx) for HTTPS
• An SMTP provider for email notifications

What can go sideways:

• The REST API is documented as “coming soon” [documentation page] — if you’re planning to integrate Relaticle with other tools via API on day one, you can’t. You’re limited to CSV import/export and whatever you can wire via webhooks manually.
• The AI summaries feature almost certainly requires an external API key (OpenAI or similar), but the documentation doesn’t currently explain the configuration — you’d need to dig through the source to know [documentation page].
• Meilisearch is listed as optional, but without it, search over large contact databases will be limited to database queries [1].
• As a project under a year old with 1,209 stars, the upgrade path between versions hasn’t been battle-tested by a large user base. Migrations that break production exist in every early-stage project — evaluate your tolerance for that.

Realistic time estimate for a technical user who’s deployed Laravel apps before: 1–2 hours to a working instance. For a developer new to Laravel/PHP deployment: half a day including debugging. For a non-technical founder: this requires either a technical co-founder or a paid deployment service.

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Pros and Cons

Pros

• Modern, maintainable stack. Laravel 12 + Filament 4 + PHP 8.4 is not a liability. Any PHP developer can read and extend it without reverse-engineering a legacy codebase [1][README].
• No-code custom fields. Adding fields to any CRM entity without writing migrations is a genuine time saver and a feature that paid CRMs gate behind higher tiers [README][homepage][3].
• Clean UI out of the box. Filament produces polished admin interfaces without custom design work. The screenshot in the README confirms it’s not embarrassing to show clients [README].
• Multi-workspace support. Multiple isolated business units on one instance is not trivial to build — it’s included here [README][homepage].
• AI summaries. One-click record summaries from notes and interactions is useful and would cost extra on most paid CRMs [homepage].
• Growing Filament plugin ecosystem. The team is actively shipping plugins (Flowforge, Custom Fields, Comments, Tapix) that extend the CRM, and these same plugins benefit from the wider Filament community [3].
• Complete data ownership. Your customer data, on your server, under your control. Not a philosophical point — a practical one when a vendor raises prices or gets acquired [1].

Cons

• REST API is not yet available. “Coming soon” in the docs [documentation page]. If you need to sync Relaticle with external tools programmatically on day one, you can’t — you’re limited to CSV and manual webhooks.
• No independent reviews exist yet. The only third-party coverage is a newsletter mention [2] and directory listings [4]. There’s no Trustpilot, G2, or detailed user report to sanity-check the creator’s claims [1]. You’re essentially trusting the README.
• AGPL-3.0 has commercial implications MIT doesn’t. For agencies planning to white-label or embed the CRM, this license requires legal review [README].
• PHP 8.4 + PostgreSQL 17 requirements are specific. Most shared hosting won’t cut it. You need a VPS with manual PHP 8.4 installation unless you go Docker [1][README].
• AI features are underdocumented. The documentation is explicitly incomplete [documentation page]. The AI summary feature almost certainly requires external API configuration that isn’t spelled out publicly.
• Small project risk. 1,209 stars and one main maintainer is not a stability guarantee. If the maintainer’s priorities shift, the project could stagnate. No evidence of a backing company with sustainable revenue beyond plugin sales [1][3].
• No native integrations. No Gmail sync, no Outlook, no LinkedIn scraping, no Zapier connector. You get CSV in/out and whatever you build yourself [README][homepage].

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Who should use this / who shouldn’t

Use Relaticle if:

• You’re a small team or agency paying $50–$200/month for HubSpot and using 20% of its features.
• You or someone on your team is comfortable deploying a Laravel app on a VPS — or willing to pay for a one-time deployment.
• You value a modern PHP stack you can extend without hiring a specialist.
• Data sovereignty is a real requirement — you can’t have customer data in a third-party cloud.
• You’re evaluating self-hosted CRMs and want the most modern UI in the PHP category.

Skip it if you need an API on day one. The REST API isn’t there yet [documentation page]. If your workflow involves syncing contacts from other tools programmatically, wait for that feature or pick Twenty (GraphQL API) or a mature option.

Skip it if you’re non-technical with no technical support. The deployment requires PHP 8.4, PostgreSQL 17, and Composer. This isn’t a one-click Coolify install for most people — it will require troubleshooting. If you don’t have a developer available, the time cost will exceed the SaaS subscription savings quickly.

Skip it if you need enterprise features now. No SSO/SAML in the current version, no audit logs, no compliance certifications. If your organization requires SOC 2 or HIPAA, this isn’t ready [README].

Skip it if you need 300+ integrations. Relaticle doesn’t have native connectors to Mailchimp, Stripe, Calendly, or most SaaS tools non-technical teams use daily. HubSpot’s integration catalog is genuinely hard to match [homepage].

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Alternatives worth considering

• Twenty — Open-source (MIT-ish) CRM with a React frontend, GraphQL API, and 20K+ GitHub stars. Better for developer teams who want to extend via TypeScript. More integrations in roadmap. Steeper setup than Relaticle.
• Monica — Open-source personal CRM (AGPL-3.0). Not a sales pipeline tool — focused on personal relationships. If you’re a solo operator tracking conversations rather than a sales team tracking deals, Monica is a better fit.
• SuiteCRM — The legacy standard for self-hosted sales CRM. Full-featured, more integrations, but the codebase is old and the UI shows its age. Good choice if you need maximum feature completeness over modern aesthetics.
• HubSpot (free tier) — If your team is under 2 people and your pipeline is simple, HubSpot’s free tier covers a surprising amount. The lock-in risk is real, but so is the zero setup cost.
• Attio — Modern SaaS CRM with a flexible data model and strong integrations. Not self-hosted, but if your team doesn’t have the patience for VPS management, Attio’s free tier is worth evaluating.
• ERPNext CRM module — If you’re already running ERPNext for accounting or inventory, its CRM module is included. More complexity than most teams need for pure CRM, but no additional cost if you’re already on the stack.

For a non-technical team escaping HubSpot costs and willing to self-host, the realistic shortlist is Relaticle vs Twenty vs SuiteCRM. Pick Relaticle for the cleanest modern UI and PHP/Laravel extensibility. Pick Twenty if your developers prefer TypeScript and you need an API now. Pick SuiteCRM if you need the most complete feature set and can live with the older interface.

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Bottom line

Relaticle is a technically solid, early-stage CRM that solves a real problem: modern teams paying SaaS CRM prices for features they don’t use, while their customer data lives in someone else’s cloud. The Laravel + Filament stack is a sensible choice — maintainable, well-documented upstream, and actively developed. The UI is genuinely clean for a project at this stage. The no-code custom fields system is the standout feature and the main reason to choose Relaticle over cobbling together a generic Laravel admin panel yourself.

The honest caveat is that this is a project with 1,209 GitHub stars, incomplete documentation, no REST API yet, and no independent user reviews to validate the creator’s claims. That’s not a reason to avoid it — every mature tool was once in this position — but it is a reason to pilot it on non-critical data before migrating your entire customer database. If you have a Laravel developer who can extend it when needed and a $10/month VPS sitting around, the downside is low. If you need rock-solid reliability and an established support ecosystem today, give it another year.

If the deployment is the blocker, that’s exactly what unsubbed.co’s parent studio upready.dev handles for clients — one-time setup, you own the infrastructure, no recurring SaaS bill.

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Sources

1. Local-Comparison-One, r/selfhosted — “I built an open-source CRM that you can self-host - Relaticle”. https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1pbbg0j/i_built_an_opensource_crm_that_you_can_selfhost/
2. Ethan Sholly, selfh.st — “Self-Host Weekly (19 December 2025)”. https://selfh.st/weekly/2025-12-19/
3. Filament PHP Plugin Directory — “Flowforge by Relaticle”. https://filamentphp.com/plugins/relaticle-flowforge
4. Techbible — “Customer Relationship Management — Relaticle listing”. https://www.techbible.ai/category/customer-relationship-management

Primary sources:

• GitHub repository and README: https://github.com/relaticle/relaticle (1,209 stars, AGPL-3.0 license)
• Official website: https://relaticle.com
• Documentation hub: https://relaticle.com/documentation