Organisation & background
CiviCRM was founded in 2004 and first released in March 2005 by Dave Greenberg, Donald Lobo and Michal Mach, building on earlier work at Groundspring.org. It’s stewarded by CiviCRM LLC on a not-for-profit basis and governed as an open community project.
Functionality
CiviCRM is free, open-source CRM software for nonprofits that runs inside a website content-management system, Drupal, WordPress, Joomla or Backdrop, rather than as a standalone product. Organisations switch on the components they need, such as CiviContribute for fundraising, CiviMember for membership, CiviEvent for events, CiviMail for email, CiviCase for case management and CiviGrant for grants. Custom fields extend its records, and a large ecosystem of community extensions adds further features and new entities. It is developed as a community project, with contributions from many independent agencies.
Localised features
A community-built UK Gift Aid extension, Gift Aid lets UK charities reclaim tax on donations, with custom fields and scheme-specific code, plus a UK postcode-lookup extension. A substantial regional partner ecosystem spans the UK, Germany/DACH, Spain, Italy, Netherlands/Belgium, North America and Australia/New Zealand.
Implementation model
Organisations can self-host the free software, but most work with one of a global network of independent implementation agencies, such as Compucorp and Veda Consulting in the UK, SYSTOPIA in Germany, CiviCoop in the Netherlands, JMA Consulting in North America and Fuzion in Australia and New Zealand.
Hosting
You can self-host it, or use a specialist hosting/SaaS partner. Hosting options follow whatever the underlying CMS (Drupal, WordPress, etc.) supports: self-hosted, a general web host, or a CiviCRM-specialist managed-hosting provider.
Links
Last full research
August 2026