I want to say that I LOVE the idea of what they're trying to accomplish with CiviCRM and the fact that it's free is a testimony to what the open source community can do. It has a TON of features and overall seems like it has the potential to be amazing.



That said, there are definitely some issues.



1. As others have said, the community leans more towards Drupal, and much of the official documentation references Drupal with not a peep about how to do something similar in Joomla.



2. The component is written in such a way as to generate a massive amount of php and js calls. Apparently drupal people have a way to aggregate such calls to not be such a server burden, but Joomla people don't (to my knowledge). In defense of the civicrm people they keep saying their software most likely won't perform great on shared hosting.



3. The mailing component is just ridiculous. It is so complicated to setup and is ridiculously buggy. You have to do cron jobs and all sorts of other things when there are other mailing components that do everything CiviCRM does (and more) and don't require any of this. I've setup ACY mailing in about 30 seconds. No cron jobs. No php. It just works.



One more pet peeve on the mailing. If you it the "send test email" button it sends every time. With no configuration. But I literally had to try 27 different configurations to try to interpret what in the world the documentation was talking about (again, it was written for Drupal) and even then, it is buggy. If you hit the test button and it works, the real thing should work. If it doesn't, delete the test button. It's useless.



4. The donation part of the software was useless too. Every upgrade seemed to break something obscure. Issues with php/js calls, fields disappearing, template conflicts. Joom Donation installs in 30 seconds. Configures in 30 seconds and just works. 3 freaking weeks trying to get their donation thing to work reliably only to find out that IE users were getting weird errors.



Unless you have someone whom installing and maintaining this stuff is their full time job, I would stay away for now. It was literally my full time job for 3 weeks. I would get sooo close to everything working and then I was constantly chasing down bugs. Over and over. You could do pretty much everything CiviCRM does with $100 worth of extensions and save yourself a lot of heartache.

Wanna know the problem with CiviCRM? Go try to use their demo. You'll see guest login info and a place to log in. Do it. Then count the minutes it takes for you to figure out what to do next. Keep looking. Found it yet?



Your customers will have the exact same experience. We've used CiviCRM for years, and it doesn't allow you to set up the same type of transactional experience customers look for now - yes, even customers of poor little nonprofits. They have to create a log-in account before registering for an event. Then they have to back out to start registering for the event itself. We've had people give up on trying to register for our events - a key source of revenue - because they can't click on an event, register, and pay like they can with almost any other online transaction. Sure CiviCRM has some great administrative and database management functions. But, what's the point if the system runs off your customers?

I've been running a non-profit using civiCRM for two years now and could never have accomplished what we have without it. I am so grateful.



Indeed, as noted below, version 3.0 and later is much, much improved. You should take reviews from before fall 2009 with a grain of salt.



civiCRM is an endless struggle or impossible on cheap shared hosting. But you really should not be running mission critical functions like your organizations web site on $5 a month hosting. Learned the hard way. (Moving up to $15 a month or so is sufficient at least for my organizations demands.)



Many of the features in civiCRM are really nicely implemented. It also makes some very complex things (sending a finely customized mailing or setting up registration for a paid event, for example) really easy and quick. It is not a simple program, but the complexity it has is complexity you really need to be employing if you are running a non-profit.



CiviCRM is not quite RaisersEdge, but it's definitely more in that direction than a simple database.



Lastly, while civiCRM has improved, this is indeed a big program (yes bigger than Joomla itself) and requires that much more technical attention. It's probably still true that it isn't for the faint of heart. But then, neither is making your non-profit successful! And yes, the support community is strong and pretty committed to helping you figure things out that you need.

Simply one of the best extensions available for anyone interested in a crm. Does everything it says it does in as straight-forward a way as possible given the incredible number of features it offers. Plus, it will save you a boatload compared to commercial services.

I wrote a negative review two years ago saying this was essentially a buggy Drupal app and to stay away.



With CiviCRM 3.X, it's become a stable, awesome application for Joomla. If there were a rating above "5", I would give it; it's that good.



Clearing up some myths:

The database is NOT messy - it's actually brilliant to anyone who knows databases. Clean design and essential to the incredible flexibility of CCRM. As a single example, the clear distinction and association between Contact and Member records is correct, and contrasts with the messy relationship between these with other Joomla extensions.



The conversion of the DB from MyISAM to InnoDB (required) is a small pain, but well worth the effort and straightforward. About half an hour with phpMyAdmin.



Lobo is tireless and passionate. His leadership is incredible, the guy must not sleep.



The forums are helpful and pleasant. Questions mostly get answered.



The user interface is wonderfully intuitive, so much so that it's almost training free. I needed to read up on only a couple functions to get my clients up and running in a useful fashion.



It only seems complex because the functions are numerous. But there's no fat in it. I give it an unqualified recommendation as of version 3.x.

I have used this tool and a developer for CiviCRM on several projects, including a major site for Yale University. All I can say is: the best.



There is no finer tool for events, membership and relationship/constituent management. They are committed to improvement, Civi has literally thousands of features, and the team is in this for the long haul.



If you create sites for member-driven enterprises and orgs, Civi is the tool of choice.